FEATURE: INDIGENOUS STUDENTS SHINE
Mohawk law student set to em peoples internationally While growing up on the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory and then in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Kanyen’keha:ka woman Stacia Loft saw the impacts of colonization on her people. She experienced her own loss of culture, the inability to speak her language, the silencing of women’s voices, and the loss of solidarity in her community. When she was raising a child on her own, she struggled with finding housing, accessing food, obtaining childcare and making ends meet. It’s through all these experiences that she learned focus, drive and determination can lead to positive impacts. She then set out on her own path to make a difference, which would include earning a law degree from Queen’s. Over the past 15 years, Loft has dedicated her work to empowering Indigenous peoples to access cultural, language, educational and employment opportunities and to achieve financial independence. She served at federal and provincial levels to support communitybased Indigenous programs, dealing with such issues as addictions, mental health, justice, homelessness. In 2015, she was elected a Band Councillor of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte for what would become her first of two consecutive two-year terms. Last fall, she campaigned to be Chief, coming in second to none other than the long-time incumbent Chief R. Donald Maracle. Since September 2017, she has been balancing all this work with her legal studies and heavy extracurricular involvement. How does she do it? Stacia Loft, Law’20, discusses her academic and community service experiences, her exciting new endeavours and her plans to take her work global.
Tell us about your work to empower your fellow members of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte. My work on Council was focused on creating increased opportunities by ensuring fair and equal access for our membership. This was done by raising and addressing underlying systemic practices of bias and conflict of interest, stemming from hundreds of
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years of colonization and intergenerational trauma. It was also a priority for me to ensure that more opportunities were available for the community to hear about the work underway or voice their concerns. During my tenure, this included holding consultation meetings to draft our own cannabis laws, presenting financial audits and implementing mediation tables to address concerns of community members. During my time on Council, I felt it was my responsibility to advocate for change to policies to achieve fairness. This included not only the two portfolios I held over the four years (Community Well-being and Housing), but all areas including education, infrastructure, policing, policy and human resources. The highlights that I found most rewarding were meeting with community members to hear their concerns and identify avenues for change. What I found in many situations is that the solution came back to policy considerations. Advocating for changes to policy to address gaps or capture new priorities, was definitely one of the first steps to identifying potential solutions. In instances where solutions could not be found in policy, the gears shifted to advocacy at the provincial or federal level. These cases included emergency housing, triaging rental housing applications based on need, engaging with legal counsel on band business, and land claim negotiation processes. All matters were not necessarily resolved through advocacy or resulted in a change to policy, but at least areas of need were flagged for future and further discussion on how to address gaps. The work was also focused on identifying opportunities for our own source of revenue in order to realize our independence and sovereignty as a Territory, and not at the behest of outside governments.
What did you learn while running for Chief of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte? I learned that we still have a lot of healing to do as a community. Lateral violence (directed against one’s peers) is an everyday challenge to overcome for many
