By Arianne Lalonde
Drive into Akwesasne and the first thing you notice is the pot shops. There are a lot of them, enough that a first-time visitor could be forgiven for thinking that’s the whole story. Look again, though, and other things start to surface: Catholic churches, murky water, raised garden beds. All of which read as relics of a past nobody here signed up for. The churches once played a significant role in the destruction of Indigenous culture, and the contaminated waterways and soil are the inheritance of neighbouring manufacturing plants on both sides of the border, General Motors, Alcoa, and Domtar chief among them.
I grew up in Cornwall, the town next door. I attended a Catholic school, sat through Mass on Sundays, and my grandfather spent his working life at Domtar. For years I kept those details soft when they came up. “Near Cornwall” was easier to say than to admit that my own family’s story was stitched into the very things that had harmed this community. The guilt was not loud, but it was always present, a low hum I had learned to live alongside without ever quite naming it.
A few weeks into my placement with the Akwesasne Community Justice Program, I attended a training offered by the Seven Dancers Coalition on the New York State side of Akwesasne. A fellow participant raised her hand and asked about the presence of Catholic churches on the reserve. Without the slightest flinch, the facilitator answered:
“The churches were never the problem; it was the people. Most of our elders were raised in these churches. It would serve no good to take away the only thing they know. So long as you are not hurting anyone, you can believe in whatever you choose to believe in, whether it be the Creator, Jesus, Buddha, or all of the above.”
I did not say anything out loud. But the low hum I had been carrying since before I could name it went quiet. The Church, like the Canadian government, was not the villain of the story. The villains were the individuals who chose to wield it.
The Akwesasne Community Justice Program (ACJP) supports First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples navigating the Canadian criminal justice system, primarily across Ontario and Quebec. It operates through the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne, the community’s self-government, which means that from day one, we work in the seams between two legal worlds that do not always want to meet. The barriers are not abstract. I have been asked to leave, or refused entry, to courtrooms where our clients’ matters were being heard. I have watched a lawyer quietly lean on a client’s lack of legal knowledge. I have seen disinterest in traditional diversion, plain discrimination, and, more than anything, clients who feel alienated by a system that was never designed with them in mind.
Similar to the church, one cannot say that the Canadian legal system itself is to blame; it is the people behind it. Many legal actors have been open-minded and have encouraged ACJP’s practices, including Gladue reports and the presence of Indigenous court workers. Others have been dismissive, causing the very barriers described above.
As a McGill law student, my first instinct has always been to charge at every injustice I can find, ideally all at once, preferably before lunch. ACJP has been gently correcting that reflex. Advocacy matters, yes, but so does keeping a working relationship with the state, the judiciary, and defence attorneys. The job is a fine line: letting go of the smaller battles to protect the relationship, so that the relationship survives long enough to win the larger one, justice for the client.
So I keep coming back to that drive into Akwesasne. The pot shops and the steeples, the garden beds pushing up out of soil that carries someone else’s mistakes. None of it is simple, and none of it is the fault of the buildings. That, in the end, is what this place taught me. Our decisions, as the law students of today and the lawyers of tomorrow, leave marks on the world around us. And if you want any hope of winning the battles that matter, you have to be willing to walk past the ones that don’t.
