ILS Speaker Series: Indigenous Research

Leah Ballantyne, LLB LLM, is from the Mathias Colomb Cree Nation in Pukatawagan, Manitoba. The community is signatory to Treaty 6. Leah is the first and only member of her community to become a lawyer, and she follows a long line of both elected and hereditary leadership from her Nation.

Leah graduated from UBC Faculty of Law in 2005 and earned her call to the bar in 2008. She then went on to study her master’s in international law and governance and graduated in 2017 as valedictorian of the University of Hawaii at Manoa Richardson School of Law. She currently holds a lawyer’s license to practice in both Manitoba and British Columbia, and she is a member of both law societies.

She has served many community grassroots leaders, Chiefs and organizations in upholding Treaty and inherent rights. She continues to work as a lawyer in a variety of capacities, currently with her First Nation, having undertaken child and family services legal reform work, alongside residential school site reclamation projects at Guy Hill and Sturgeon Landing former residential school sites. Leah also provides her time to the Lower Fraser Fishery Alliance for the RELAW project – “Revitalizing Indigenous Law for Land, Air and Water” which produced a legal synthesis report aimed at Indigenous law-based fish habitat restoration strategies for the Lower Fraser. This work is created in collaboration with the RELAW team of Re-lawyers at the West Coast Environmental Law Foundation. Kwantlen Polytechnic University has hired Leah to edit a textbook in Criminology to ensure that culturally appropriate and safe language and theories are used to describe Indigenous Peoples. She also currently serves as a Board Member at large with the First Nation Health Authority in British Columbia.