My practice is grounded in a recognition that our lives as human beings are constituted through relationships, including our relationships to each other, to place, and to the ways of governing we inherit and create. I built my practice to focus my work on matters where authority and jurisdiction are live questions, where governance and institutional structures shape what is possible, and where careful strategy and disciplined drafting can change the conditions under which people live.

Legal experience

My past legal experience includes work in Aboriginal law and in general service firms, giving me a broad base of knowledge and skills across diverse practice areas. As a graduate of the University of Victoria’s Juris Doctor and Juris Indigenarum Doctor program, a dual degree in Canadian common law and Indigenous legal orders, in which I later taught, participating in this unique program considerably deepened the understanding of Indigenous law and governance I had begun to develop in my work before law school.

In Indigenous rights contexts, my experience includes inherent Indigenous law and governance work; Indigenous knowledge protection measures and work with Indigenous knowledge holders in the preparation of affidavits; drafting pleadings, including in Aboriginal rights and title contexts and in judicial review work, including in relation to environmental impact assessment and other decision-making processes; land rights and historical claims research; consultation and accommodation; negotiation and drafting of agreements; interpreting and implementing trust agreements resulting out of litigation and other processes; drafting of laws, policies, and governance documents; and First Nation election processes.

I have considerable experience in administrative law and regulatory regimes, including environmental impact assessment, immigration, property assessment, professional regulation, residential tenancy, human rights, municipal governance, and social security. I bring a strong working command of administrative law principles in practice across diverse regulatory and decision-making contexts, including the legal standards that apply to decision-making processes and to decisions themselves in judicial review by the courts.

My experience also includes civil litigation, including estate litigation and personal injury; and organizational and business law matters, including charity and non-profit law, privacy and information matters, incorporations and sole proprietorship issues, contract negotiation, review, and drafting, and governance-related legal advice. I also have experience in wills and estates and family law.

Governance, intergovernmental relations, and negotiations

Before I became a lawyer, I spent more than a decade working in governance and intergovernmental relations and negotiations, often in settings where politics, institutions, and strategy are intertwined. During this time, my primary work was as a governance and negotiations consultant. I provided project management and coordination, research, writing, strategic advising, organizational process evaluation and development, negotiation, relationship management, meeting facilitation, community engagement, and communications services, primarily for Indigenous clients, as well as non-profit societies and political representatives and organizations at municipal, provincial, and federal levels. My work ranged across the substantive areas any government must govern: health, social services, culture, education, economic development, environment, data and information governance, and the internal constitutional work of institutions deciding how authority is held and exercised.

This work included projects such as nationhood rebuilding and governance innovation initiatives connected to implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; Indigenous data governance work on data sovereignty and indicators for nation-to-nation relationships; strategic planning work with First Nation economic development agencies, heritage and cultural centres, and educational institutions; health governance case studies, evaluation, and planning with respect to First Nations health governance; facilitation with Elders and communities drawing principles from ancestral legal traditions to inform modern governance processes; convening and engagement work to coordinate community responses to major development proposals; and research and interview support to advance Indigenous filmmakers’ recommendations for equity in Canadian film and screen-based media institutions and to support curriculum and institution-building work in that sector. I also led and contributed to major proposal work connected to expansion of First Nations Guardians programs and the development of a national network.

I also worked as an Indigenous governance researcher for a distinguished national governance think tank that provides governance advice internationally. In this work, I provided research and other support to Indigenous nations in British Columbia and across the country on a range of governance and intergovernmental relations matters, including relationship building between hereditary and elected leadership, health governance, and environmental legislation. I also organized symposia bringing Indigenous and federal, provincial, and territorial leaders, as well as other knowledgeable people, together to discuss paths forward in the constitutional relationships between Indigenous peoples and Canada.

I worked inside Crown government, serving as an analyst and then in senior management, advising and working directly with decision-makers on non-renewable resource development and sustainable economic development. This included preparing briefing materials and strategic advice for meetings with major international resource companies and other key actors, supporting negotiation and implementation of mutual benefit agreements with those resource companies, and participating in high-level engagement with resource companies where the territory’s interests and negotiating position had to be advanced with knowledge and discipline. I also contributed to and coordinated interdepartmental monitoring and compliance reporting required under environmental impact assessment follow up programs.

The through line that runs through these different roles is practical institutional literacy and negotiation craft: understanding how authority is exercised, how constraints actually operate, where flexibility lives, and how governance design and negotiated agreements can shift what becomes possible.

Academic research, teaching, and curriculum development

My academic interests in political science and philosophy emerged because they matched how I think and what I care about: political issues beyond the classroom, and the deeper questions of how we think, how we justify authority, and how our collective life is governed. That intellectual formation set the trajectory for my later work in governance and intergovernmental relations and negotiations.

My academic experience includes research and teaching roles in Political Science during my undergraduate and graduate years at Simon Fraser University and the University of Victoria, and curriculum and program development work in the Cultural, Social and Political Thought interdisciplinary graduate program at the University of Victoria.

In legal education, I served as a Limited Term Assistant Professor, and before that as a Teaching Assistant, in the University of Victoria’s Juris Doctor and Juris Indigenarum Doctor program, teaching Transsystemic Legal Processes, Research and Writing, guiding first year law students in developing rigorous legal research, interpretation, and writing skills while working across Canadian common law and an Indigenous legal order. The course engaged legal ethics from both legal perspectives and supported students in developing culturally safe and humble client service orientations, including the practical question of how to meet Indigenous clients’ needs for justice when Canadian common law offers inadequate legal redress.

My most recent academic project is revising a university course curriculum on Indigenous peoples and criminal law in Canada.

Writing

My writing sits at the intersection of Indigenous–settler relations, governance, legal history, and the structures that shape power and possibility. I have published a peer reviewed academic article on colonial dispossession, settler governance, and Indigenous women’s roles in land-based economies and governance. I am co-writing a forthcoming collaborative book project on how Indigenous knowledge and Western science can work together to address the ecological and intersocietal crises of our times. The book is a collaborative project in which I am working with two co-writers and a diverse group of Indigenous knowledge keepers, scientists, academics, and decision-makers who participated in an online dialogue series on Indigenous knowledge and Western science working together to address the ecological and intersocietal challenges we face today.

I wrote a book review of a history of a local coastal inlet area that traces the inlet’s ecological and industrial history and the communities connected to it, including the W̱SÁNEĆ peoples, settler families, and the Chinese and Sikh workers whose labour shaped the area. I have co-published scholarly work on reconciliation with Earth with leading Indigenous scholars and knowledge holders, and I have co-published work on practical change-making in professional contexts, including in relation to neurodivergence and the legal profession.

For more, see a list of my publications on the Writing page.

Professional memberships and leadership

• Law Society of British Columbia, called to the bar in 2023.
• Victoria Bar Association, Treasurer, Governance Committee member.
• Canadian Bar Association-BC, Chair, Women Lawyers Forum Vancouver Island Section; and Member, Equity Diversity and Inclusion Committee.

I have served in numerous other board and committee roles, primarily in executive leadership capacities. Board governance is one of my natural strengths and passions.

Education and awards

Juris Doctor and Juris Indigenarum Doctor, University of Victoria
Canadian Bar Association BC Branch Entrance Award
Maclean Scholarship for Research in Legal History

Master of Arts, University of Victoria
Political Science and Cultural, Social and Political Thought

Bachelor of Arts, Simon Fraser University
Political Science and Philosophy
Certificate in the Liberal Arts