OJEN x Law Society of Nunavut
OJEN has worked closely with the Law Society of Nunavut (LSN) for a long time. Why? Because the LSN is one of the only sources of public legal education and information (PLEI) available to those living, working, studying, and teaching in Nunavut – and there is a lot of work to do. Nunavut stretches over 2 million square kilometres, its communities often separated by leagues of water, land, and ice. The people living in these places have a right, not only to knowledge of legal services and protections, but to meaningful access to those things as well. That’s the basis of our relationship with the LSN, and we’re continually thankful that we can contribute our efforts to this goal in Nunavut.
This past year, we worked with members of the LSN – lawyers and teachers from across the country and people living in Ikpiarjuk (Arctic Bay) and Mittimatalik (Pond Inlet) – to modify and deliver OJEN PLEI programs in the Arctic.
Not one-size-fits-all
Both Ikpiarjuk and Mittimatalik are located on Baffin Island in the Qikiqtaaluk Region of Nunavut, closer to Greenland than Ontario. In these communities, relationships to legal authorities, infrastructure, and services are varied and at times broken, plagued by legacies of colonialism and systemic racism.
In collaboration with the LSN, OJEN ran variations of these programs:
- Navigating Police Encounters for adults
- Navigating Police Encounters for youth
- Know your Rights: employment law
- Know your Rights: housing law
- high school mock trials
- appeals, reviews, and record suspensions.
We also ran a few new programs, designed in collaboration with the LSN:
- changing your name or gender marker
- your age and the law
When adapting these programs for Ikpiarjuk and Mittimatalik, it was as much about changing program delivery between legal contexts as it was about tailoring the thrust of the programming to the needs of the communities we were in. One factor that really helped to make the workshops successful was collaborating with experts in Ikpiarjuk and Mittimatalik, who were alive to which issues were important to those living there and why.
In Ikpiarjuk, we learned that privacy rights in the housing law context weren’t as top of mind as access to housing lists, and schedules of repair priority. In Mittimatalik, we learned that there had been recent labour disputes with one of the community’s biggest employers.
In October, both communities were processing grief as the result of tragedies that had occurred prior to our arrival. If we hadn’t been working with people from those places, we wouldn’t have known to pivot both our funding and our programming to help support those who were suffering. In the Arctic, when one family is going through a tragedy, the burden belongs to the whole community.
Some of our most important goals as a PLEI organization are to promote access to justice, to deliver quality public legal education, and to listen to the voices of the young people who use our resources. The work of southern organizations visiting the Arctic must look like this. If it doesn’t, we risk providing ineffective PLEI at best, and at worst, perpetuating colonial legal legacies. This is what the LSN does so well: connecting people with different things to offer and making sure, above all, that it is rooted in the actual articulated needs of community members.
What’s next?
We are thankful to the LSN for its continued collaboration with us. We already have a few projects in the works for 2025, perhaps some even a little closer to us here in Ontario. If you are part of the Inuit community in Ontario, please feel free to reach out to us if you have a resource or project you are interested in seeing. Keep an eye on our website and newsletters for upcoming projects.