Amanda Leslie
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New graduate Tracey Lindberg received the Governor General’s Gold Medal, the most prestigious award given to a doctoral student in the area of the humanities, at the University of Ottawa’s fall convocation, on October 21. She joined a long list of distinguished recipients of the Governor General’s academic medals, including Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Kim Campbell, Robert Bourassa and Gabrielle Roy. The University also conferred Lindberg with a Doctorate of Laws.
Audience members stood and applauded enthusiastically as Lindberg proudly received her doctoral hood and diploma. Accompanied by her thesis supervisor, Professor Constance Backhouse, she was greeted with special pride by the former dean of the Common Law Section, Bruce Feldthusen. Lindberg worked for Feldthusen as a teaching assistant in the legal studies program for native people at the University of Saskatchewan, where she completed her first degree in law.
Her thesis entitled, Critical Indigenous Legal Theory, is based on extensive research into traditional Cree legal principles. Instead of asking what Canadian law says about the rights of Aboriginal peoples, Lindberg explored the multiple ways in which Canadians and their legal system violate Aboriginal principles of fairness and community responsibilities.
“Tracey Lindberg’s research is revolutionary,” said Professor Backhouse. “It tips much of our customary analysis on its head. She has begun the immense task of educating non-Aboriginal lawyers and scholars about Aboriginal legal traditions. It will be sobering for all of us to realize how deeply our laws and practices violate traditional Aboriginal ways of being.”
A Cree Métis from northern Alberta, Lindberg is a graduate of the University of Saskatchewan College of Law, and is the first Aboriginal woman in Canada to complete her graduate law degree at Harvard University. A popular visiting professor at uOttawa, she will join the Common Law Section as an associate professor in January 2008.
Lindberg attributes her strength and success to the great indigenous elders, leaders, and scholars with whom she has been acquainted, including the late Harold Cardinal, a Cree writer, political leader, teacher, negotiator and lawyer, as well as Elder Maria Campbell, a Métis author, playwright, broadcaster and filmmaker.
In addition to her many scholarly publications, Lindberg is also an accomplished fiction writer and blues singer.
