John Borrows: “Finding Life’s Patterns: Storytelling’s Role in Anishinaabe Law”

The School for Advanced Studies in the Arts & Humanities at Western and the Words Festival are pleased to present an evening visit with John Borrows, the inaugural Loveland Chair in Indigenous Law at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law.

Anishinaabe law draws from stories. These stories contain standards, principles, processes, criteria, indicia, benchmarks, guides, and precedents to make decisions and facilitate order. In other words, law (in part) measures conduct in relation to patterns found in stories. In this event, I will tell Anishinaabe stories drawn from my own experience to illustrate this point.