Grandmothers often play the role of guide and nurturer in their families. Val Napoleon is a grandmother to four children, but her role as a guide goes far beyond her own family. Napoleon is a professor at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law and the Law Foundation Chair of Indigenous Justice and Governance, whose vision of Canadian and Indigenous laws operating alongside one another is reshaping the legal landscape.
It was only after the birth of her first grandchild that Napoleon decided it was time to get her law degree. In her twenties, she was accepted to law school but decided not to go. Instead, she worked in education and social services, had children and raised a family. As Napoleon got older, she noticed how women tend to become marginalized as they age, effectively disappearing in the public realm. There was still much she wanted to do in the world and arming herself with a law degree was a way to keep from being ignored.
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“A law degree is like a driver’s license. It’s a useful way of getting about in the world,” says Napoleon, who has gone on to become a leading force in reshaping Canadian legal frameworks. Napoleon is Cree from Saulteau First Nation (BC Treaty 8) and an adopted member of the Gitanyow (northern Gitxsan). While both communities are in northern British Columbia, Napoleon’s impact has been national. After graduating with a PhD from the University of Victoria Law program, Napoleon found herself more interested in research and theory than the practice of law. She co-founded the Indigenous Law Research Unit (ILRU), an independent research unit at the University of Victoria dedicated to the revitalization and implementation of Indigenous law and governance. The research approach at ILRU is relationship-based; they work with communities to develop practical legal and educational resources that make Indigenous laws more accessible and easier to apply to current issues.
Napoleon’s transformative approach to law did not stop there. She co-founded the world’s first and only joint degree program in Indigenous law and Canadian common law, where student training includes field schools with Indigenous communities and learning from Coast Salish, Cree and other Indigenous legal orders.
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Last year, Napoleon celebrated the opening of the University of Victoria’s new Indigenous Law Wing. This year, it is Napoleon herself who is being celebrated. Napoleon was one of just five Canadian researchers to receive the 2026 Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation Fellow award. The fellowship supports Napoleon’s latest project, Next Steps: Rebuilding Indigenous Law, dedicated to Indigenous law revitalization and rebuilding Indigenous legal orders across Canada.
Napoleon’s approach reflects her belief that law is broader than most people realize. “It’s one way of understanding what’s going on in the world around us,” Napoleon explains, encompassing not just governance but also how our economies and social relationships function. Napoleon sees a troubling trend impacting democracies around the world where civil society structures are eroding and people no longer feel laws are relevant to them. She points to the anti-government Freedom Convoy protests in 2022 as an example. In Indigenous communities, colonization created a void as traditional governance systems were dismantled. Poverty, addiction, land theft and power imbalances have further exacerbated the challenges facing communities.
“The work of every generation is to draw the law from the previous generation for today’s problems, so law is never static,” Napoleon explains. “[It] is ultimately about rebuilding our citizenry.” This, Napoleon believes, is work every Canadian should be doing.
A recent gathering in Alberta exemplifies her process. Napoleon brought together twenty women working to address gender violence in their communities. The mood of the meeting was celebratory, providing a chance to recognize their often unseen work, even though the topic uniting them was painful. “What we’re hoping to be able to do is to find ways for women, gender-diverse and trans [people], to draw on Indigenous law to build places of safety in our communities,” says Napoleon.
The gatherings focus on sharing oral histories and stories from the women’s home communities. They then follow a method for working with law that Napoleon has practiced with communities across the country to address a range of contemporary challenges. “We draw the law from those stories in a systematic and critical way, and then we synthesize it to actually create a resource of legal principles and processes and precedent.”
Stories and oral narratives contain numerous teachings that can be set in different contexts to understand legal rules and principles. The principles drawn from the stories provide a framework — including who has authority to address acts of violence and what responses are appropriate — for addressing gender violence now and in the future.
Napoleon’s approach offers a way for Indigenous communities to draw on their own legal histories and relationships to address today’s challenges in a way that builds on traditional culture and knowledge systems.
Reflecting back to her younger years, Napoleon remembers how her contributions, and those of other teens, were received. “There was no differentiation because we were younger,” she says, “nobody told us we couldn’t do anything or that our work was somehow limited by our age.”
Thinking of her own grandchildren, Napoleon believes today’s youngest generations need to be supported, especially given the problems they are inheriting from older generations. But she is optimistic about their potential. “I think that the newer generations are going to be creative and innovative in a way that we don’t yet know.”
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Shauna MacKinnon is a freelance writer from Vancouver. Her writing blends science and data with on-the-ground human stories. Follow her on Substack at Climate Connection.