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Trish Monture: Haudenosaunee woman, Mohawk woman, mother, sister, auntie, cousin and kinswoman, friend, ally, thinker, scholar, writer, advocate, orator, lawyer, mentor, adviser, athlete, woman of integrity and courage, and, of course, schemer par excellence, passed away on November 17, 2010, taken by the cancer that she had battled for over three years. She was only 52 years old.
Into those 52 years, she packed more experience and accomplishments than might be considered humanly possible. Despite being discouraged from university studies by a so-called "guidance" counsellor, Trish excelled in her undergraduate degree in sociology at the University of Western Ontario, and earned her first law degree at Queen's. There, she began her work with women and men in prison which continued throughout her life. Her next degree from Queen's would be an honourary doctorate, one of two she received from Canadian universities.
Trish was called to the bar of Ontario in 1994, after the Law Society made optional the requirement that candidates for the bar swear allegiance to the Crown. As a member of a sovereign nation, she had contended that she should not have to swear allegiance to a foreign monarch. She was quoted at the time as saying that if she lost that battle, she would not practise law. Though she won the battle, she chose not to practise anyway. After earning her Master's in law at Osgoode Hall on full scholarship, Trish became a law professor at Dalhousie and then Ottawa University.
Trish described her decision to leave law teaching to join the Native Studies Department at the University of Saskatchewan as a conscious choice and a personal act of resistance that followed her realization that the law contains no answers but is in fact a very large and very real part of the problem Aboriginal people continue to face. Law is one of the instruments, she wrote, through which colonization continues to flow. Trish later became a full Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Saskatchewan. Though she had turned her back on teaching and practising law, Trish never stopped her quest for justice. Reflecting her view of justice, she...