The Public Interest Pipeline, Creation Stories, and the Lie of Legal Objectivity

An invitation into my worldview as an Indigenous lawyer building a practice grounded in legal pluralism, spirit, and story.

I went to law school not to become a traditional lawyer, but to leave a legacy of positive change. Without pathways of nepotism available to me, higher education felt like the only realistic mechanism to advance the sovereignty of my Indigenous and non-human kin.

Throughout those three years, I felt like a fish swimming upstream, grasping onto my values for dear life. I remember a beloved professor warning me to "be prepared to continue knocking on closed doors" as I spoke of my drive to work in the public interest environmental field. As I progressed through my legal education, my surroundings felt increasingly alienated from my core purpose. Yet, I persevered—eventually building a legally pluralistic, heart-led practice at the intersection of Indigenous and environmental law that I am still actively expanding today. And finding people and building a community that is doing meaningful work, and that inspires me to keep pushing. I am grateful to have made it to this place, having learned a great deal from the past 6 years of my career working as a public interest environmental lawyer - a label I never felt truly fit me. As I transition into a new chapter of my career, I have the privilege to reflect on what defines my practice and approach to law, and the services I am best suited to offer.

Recently, I listened to a conversation between Harvard Law Professor Jon Hanson and host Haze Khadra on the Society for Perception Studies Speaker Series at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. It sparked a deep reflection on what defines my practice, how we internalize legal training, and where I am taking my work next. Consider this essay an invitation into my worldview.

1. The "Public Interest Pipeline" & Institutional Alienation

During law school, I realized that Canadian law was not necessarily designed to administer justice. The system - and all our relations - would benefit immensely from reframing the law to align with the human collective experience and feeling of what is just and fair. While a few professors acknowledged this, it was not an institutionalized mindset. Instead, we were asked to study under the unexamined presumption that the Canadian legal system was inherently legitimate. That it was doing as was intended - administering justice. Yet, for myself and many of my Indigenous peers, this created a profound sense of alienation.

When Jon Hanson spoke about the "public interest pipeline," I felt instantly seen in having felt this way. Which is interesting, because it isn't explicitly about diversity or the shortcomings of western law. His critique focuses on the educational system.

He describes how eager law students enter school wanting to use the law as a tool for positive social change, only to emerge three years later disillusioned, stripped of their original values, and conditioned into the conception that justice is whatever best serves our client in a given instance. He suggests that this happens, at least in part, because we are taught to consume “the law” without interrogating the broader system — treating its rules as objective truth rather than recognizing them as human constructs embedded with unconscious bias, power dynamics, and political choices.

To suggest that Canadian law is a neutral, coherent system to be blindly applied in the "best interest of a client" completely overlooks what it actually means to administer justice. It also makes me wonder... how do we actually define justice, and can it be defined for all people? Maybe part of the hindering assumption is that we all have the same definition of justice.

2. The Facade of Objectivity vs. The Honesty of Story

In Western law, we are taught that rules apply neutrally, regardless of the story, at least in most circumstances. Yet in practice, we see the story prevail all the time — the lawyer builds a story that best suits their client. Facts, court decisions, and statutes and their provisions are framed to uplift the client's interest, and the courts decide what to do with that story - what parts of it are relevant, and which parts constitute justice. Western law disguises this subjective process as objective truth, oftentimes because privilege and bias are baked into the rules themselves.

By contrast, Indigenous legal traditions are honest about subjectivity.

In Indigenous law, the story is the form. Human bias, emotion, and context are expected and anticipated -- they are an explicit part of how we share and arrive at a legal rule. Indigenous law does not force a false sense of objectivity. It is spiritually situated within ancestral lands, ecosystems, and oral traditions that gradually shift as the storyteller and socio-political context change over time. This is not intended to paint a romantic picture -- of course this system comes with risks, and it also comes with responsibilities, such as telling stories again and again so that they can be grappled with by young minds, and even lived into. So that lived experience can inform how the story is interpreted. It does not mean the system functions flawlessly, but there are aspects of Indigenous approaches to law that to me feel a lot more like justice. It allows for different truths to find a home without imposing a clear dichotomy of right or wrong.

In Canada, the colonial legal system consists of written statutes and court decisions that shape the stories that are told. The rules they detail create the container for what is relevant to understanding and interpreting justice. The law only changes insomuch as the court decides is necessary for its legitimate application to the "facts" at hand. But we can overlook the way this process creates a certain story itself, and that story may be interpreted differently by different people. You can rarely comprehend a single statutory subsection in isolation from court decisions, legislative history, and societal facts that breathe life into what a particular subsection actually means in practice. And the many applications of the rules in different contexts constitute stories themselves.

Western law needs the backdrop of its own stories to make sense of itself. The system simply wears a mask of clinical objectivity, which artificially separates the self from the system, and ultimately serves to subordinate truths that are not baked into the system, and the people who carry those truths. Many legal efforts of pursuing justice for Indigenous rights-holders is actually an attempt to expand Canadian definitions of justice to include Indigenous understandings, so that justice can be administered in a manner felt by those who see their truth the least in the administration of Canadian law.

Justice within Indigenous paradigms sees the self as interconnected with and interdependent on various human and non-human kin and their life spirit. So when stories of this nature are told again and again, the subjective state inherently shifts to includes broader considerations of well-being and responsibility. The same cannot be said of western law and its conceptions of justice, which are often individuated, absolute rules and static measurements of fairness in accordance with property law, western conceptions of admitting fault and taking accountability, and capitalist economic structures of power.

3. Creation Stories and Living Without Fixed Endings

Indigenous conceptions of justice are often much more nuanced than right versus wrong, or good versus bad, and entail collective dialogue and subjective interpretation. Yet in Canadian law, defining in written word what is right and what is wrong in all circumstances is central to law's function.

I notice the way Canadian law has impacted me subjectively. Like when I tried to learn the Oneida Creation Story, which I had only heard a couple times in my life, and had to read an adult to figure it out. In the story, the Skywoman's daughter eventually gives birth to twin brothers (after being confronted by a rather scary man). One of the twin brothers represents creation, goodness, rightness and was born normally, and the other twin represents destruction, wrongness, and leftness, and after an unusual birthing of the left-handed twin, the Skywoman's daughter dies. The story goes on to depict how the right-handed twin possesses the capacity to create life, feeling deep empathy and connection. While the left-handed twin holds the power to bring destruction and darkness, rendering living beings poisonous or fatal.

Embedded within this depiction is the reality that life force exists in constant relationship with both birth and death, growth and decay, light and dark, right and wrong. In human form on Turtle Island, the twins simultaneously symbolize our own dual nature: our capacity to care for the natural world and nurture abundance, alongside our power to inflict destruction. These tenets felt immediately accessible when I first engaged with my creation story in my adult life. But the ending left me deeply confused and steeped in curiosity.

Every version of the creation story I've heard or read has offered a different ending, each leading to distinct interpretations and real-world outcomes. I didn’t really know the ending. I was not raised in a traditional setting, so I was rarely told our creation story, and when I began learning it as an adult, I initially felt a wave of intense frustration—a painful reminder of how much culture has been disrupted, which I was experiencing a microcosm of as I googled my creation story and could not figure out what sense I was to make of this. I picked up my book on the great law of peace, seeking comforting and assurance that I knew my own identity - my own creation story.

Then I realized: that ambiguity of knowing without certainty is the precise nature of Indigenous law.

Indigenous legal traditions derive from stories that deliberately create space for human interpretation, shifting contexts, and co-evolution alongside ecosystems. The ending does not need to be literal or fixed. Perhaps that is why Indigenous nations have survived centuries of violent oppression -- because our legal frameworks orient around process, relationship, and continuous adaptability rather than rigid, static rules and outcomes.

The creation story doesn't neatly explain why the twins carry these conflicting drives -- they simply exist within them, much like the systemic forces, conditioning, and internal storms we all must navigate. And every version of the story I've heard, there's a different outcome - one brother dies, one escapes, they both leave. It was at first, very confusing. But I have come to realize that, while the twins themselves have the perception of a clear dichotomy - good versus bad, left versus right, life versus death - there is a whole spectrum of possible outcomes that stem from what appears to be a clear dichotomy. Maybe this was all that I needed to take from the ending -- that outcomes are more nuanced than we may initially believe them to be. Maybe justice lies in the exploration of those possibilities.

4. Deconditioning the Legal Mind

In the podcast, Jon Hanson is seen to understand that our free will can easily be manipulated by the systems of power that be, suggesting that if we do not acknowledge the ways in which we are being conditioned, and seek to peel back the layers of influence, we are not “free” agents, and maybe we never really are.

The western concept of individual agency was acknowledged as a sort of disguise for the conditioning forces of power that shape individuals' expression of free will. To make his point, he references tobacco companies who used marketing content that leveraged individual purchasing agency, while behind closed doors using data to maximize addiction, making the smokers’ agency a façade. He suggest that if we do not actively interrogate how we have been conditioned by our legal education and societal norms, we are not truly acting as free agents. 

How do we bring this realization into the practice of law?

We do not need to hold a single, perfect ending to act with integrity today. We do however need to build legal frameworks that help us peel back the layers of influence that perpetuate injustice, and to acknowledge our individuated and collective power and responsibilities -- to tame our destructive tendencies and engage in our life giving ones, to embrace story and nuance, to be present and open to the process of justice unfolding before it is clearly defined, and return to a reciprocal relationship with all our relations.

To develop lawyers who are genuinely capable of improving legal systems for all living beings, we must engage in the daily mental exercise of unlearning. We must peel back the layers of legal conditioning, cultivate bodily and spiritual awareness, and build comfort with uncomfortable, non-linear spaces.

I don’t have every answer, nor do I claim to have it all figured out. But as I enter this next chapter of my practice, my goal is to break through rigid legal polarities, center legal pluralism, and walk alongside those who are ready to decondition their minds in pursuit of collective justice.