Conference session

This session will benefit educators, scholars, and program leaders seeking relational, community-engaged, and decolonizing curriculum approaches. Participants will leave with practical examples, conceptual insights, and an invitation to reimagine legitimacy, authority, and knowledge through Indigenous legal orders, such as Wahkotowin, Minoayawin, Mino-Pimatisiwin, and Mino-Wicitowin, which are informing new pedagogical models rooted in story, identity, trauma-informed practice, and land as relation. Developed with Elders, community partners, and Indigenous scholars, this work reframes wellness and learning as ethical interdependence with land, ancestors, language, and all beings. We then show how these OT innovations are influencing efforts to renew legal education. Indigenous legal orders, understood as living systems held in story and interpreted in community, offer epistemic, ethical, and pedagogical approaches that challenge Western disciplinary boundaries. Through collaborations with Indigenous legal educators, we explore co-teaching models, trans-systemic approaches, and curriculum practices that honour Indigenous knowledge systems as foundational rather than supplementary. This session will benefit educators, scholars, and program leaders seeking relational, community-engaged, and decolonizing curriculum approaches. Participants will leave with practical examples, conceptual insights, and an invitation to reimagine legitimacy, authority, and knowledge through Indigenous legal orders.