Questions about Questions: Law and Film Reflections on the Duty to Learn

Rebecca Johnson

doi:10.22584/nr50.2020.004

Abstract

In 2015, The Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that reconciliation will require new relationships between Canadian and Indigenous legal orders. How are legal professionals to participate in making these new relationships? How might lawyers engage productively with the many different Indigenous legal orders in this land? The article takes up challenges of Reconciliation and the Duty to Learn, with a focus on the place of questions in the process of learning. Stories are one important location for this work. Reflecting on the course Law 343: Inuit Law and Film, I offer some thoughts on cinematic stories as a particularly productive site for legal thinking, with a focus on the place of questions as a technique for building understanding and relationship across difference. Using the film The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006), I explore six different questions, and consider the kind of work that one can do with each question. This approach invites us to consider the relations we build through the questions we ask, not of others, but of ourselves. I close with some reflections about steps one might take to act on the obligation to learn, taking up the work of questions in our practices of building relations across legal orders.

Highlights

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada concluded that reconciliation will require new relationships between Canadian and Indigenous legal orders
How are legal professionals to participate in making these new relationships? How do lawyers learn about others in a different legal and cultural order? Stories are an important location for this learning
Part III turns to The Journals of Knud Rasmussen to explore six different questions, and consider the kind of work that one can do with each question

Summary

Questions and the Duty to Learn

In 2012, Chief Justice Lance Finch of the British Columbia Court of Appeal, said that the honour of the Crown demanded of all legal professionals “a duty to learn” about Indigenous legal orders.[1]. The business of learning is not about information It is about developing the art of judgment, the ability to focus on what is important or to make choices in complicated new circumstances while being aware of and attentive to the possible outcomes available.[7] The musician does not memorize a list of songs, but develops a relationship to their instrument and to the language of music. In parallel and as a result, the person being asked the question may not know what information is being sought, they may not have specific answers, and they are being asked to think through so many possible orientations before answering It is exhausting and a lot of work.[10] It can make one feel as if they are subject to interrogation. How can a person learn about people in another legal order in ways that don’t impose a burden on or exact significant costs from those with whom one hopes to build relations? How might lawyers pick up the burden of learning so that it is not cast on the backs of Indigenous Peoples to do the work of educating others?

Learning from Story and Film

Working with The Journals of Knud Rasmussen

What is the Work of Questions in the Duty to Learn?