Otter's Journey through Indigenous Language and Law
Otter’s Journey employs the Anishinaabe tradition of storytelling to explore how Indigenous language revitalization can inform the emerging field of Indigenous legal revitalization. Indigenous languages and laws need bodies to live in. Learning an endangered language and a suppressed legal system are similar experiences. When we bring language back to life, it becomes a medium for developing human relationships. Likewise, when laws are written on people’s hearts, true revitalization has occurred.
Storytelling has the capacity to address feelings and demonstrate themes – to illuminate beyond argument and theoretical exposition. In Otter’s Journey, Lindsay Keegitah Borrows follows Otter, a dodem (clan) relation from the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation, on a journey across Anishinaabe, Inuit, Māori, Coast Salish, and Abenaki territories, through a narrative of Indigenous resurgence. While Otter’s Journey is guided by a literal truth, it also splices and recombines real-world events and characters.
Through her engaging protagonist, Borrows reveals that the processes, philosophies, and practices flowing from Indigenous languages and laws can emerge from under the layers of colonial laws, policies, and languages to become guiding principles in people’s contemporary lives. We need the best of all people’s teachings to lead us into the future.
AWARDS
- 2019, Shortlisted - Indigenous Literature Award, Southern Ontario Library Service
Lindsay Keegitah Borrows is a staff lawyer at West Coast Environmental Law in Vancouver. She is Anishinaabe and a member of the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation in Ontario. Each fall in her home territory she helps run land-based Indigenous legal education camps for Ontario law schools. She has been a researcher at the Pascua Yaqui Tribal Court in Arizona, the United Nations, and the University of Victoria Indigenous Law Research Unit. She is a recipient of the Law Foundation of British Columbia Public Interest Award.
