Event Description
Join us for our first CLE Speaker Series of the year with Dr. Pamela Spalding! Dr. Spalding will discuss her recent article “Making Space for Indigenous Legal Relationships with Plants in Aboriginal Law” published in the "Our More-Than-Human Constitutions" special issue of the Review of Constitutional Studies, Nov. 2025. The article explores how important relationships between native plants and Indigenous peoples are generally overlooked in legislation, case law, environmental assessments, and modern treaty negotiations.
For Zoom link details, email: cle@allard.ubc.ca.
Speaker
Dr. Pamela Spalding is an Assistant Professor in the faculty of Indigenous Studies at the University of Victoria. Dr. Spalding is a Métis Canadian (Scottish, Cree and Ojibwe of the Red River, Manitoba territory) and an enrolled citizen of Métis Nation BC and the Métis Nation of Greater Victoria. She is an ethnobotanist whose research examines dimensions of Indigenous people’s relationships with plants, ecosystems, resource stewardship, Indigenous feminism, Indigenous legal orders, and customary legal landscapes. Her collaborative research with T’Sou-ke Nation over the last decade indicates that the magnitude of plant use in the traditional economies and lifeways of Indigenous peoples (particularly women) across North America warrants a much larger discussion about Indigenous plant use and ecosystem management in Canadian, US, and Indigenous governance. She is a former Mellon postdoctoral fellow with the Center for Global Indigenous Cultures and Environmental Justice at Syracuse University where she was introduced to how Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee relationships with the more than human world are expressed in law.
- Centre for Law and the Environment
- All Students
- Faculty
- Graduate Students
- JD
- Staff
- Research Talks
- Student Events
