THE ADVOCATE 917
VOL. 79 PART 6 NOVEMBER 2021
had gone through the front door, she climbed the steep set of granite stairs,
pulled open the heavy steel door and walked right on through. This act was
a visibility issue and foreshadowed her work in law—charging forward
because it was the right thing to do.
Leslie was hired by the late Grand Chief George Manuel to serve as inhouse
counsel with the Union of BC Indian Chiefs (“UBCIC”). Mary Lou
Andrew, an elder from the Seabird Island Reserve, was the head of the Legal
Department. Mary Lou taught the art of listening, and Leslie absorbed the
teachings. Each person, each community had its own story to tell, and each
nation its own language, customs, traditions, and laws, culture and spirit
steeped in their homelands. Leslie listened with the ear of her heart and fulfilled
her twin desires as a writer and a lawyer. She was brilliant in both.
Leslie, with her partners Louise Mandell and Clarine Ostrove, established
the then all-women law firm Mandell Pinder. Out of their small Gastown
offices, Leslie encountered another formidable door: the rights of Indigenous
people denied, their voices silenced, their territories considered “terra
nullius”. One question dominated: How did the government get the land
that Indigenous people occupied, without conquering them and without
paying them? She would find the words to convince judges that there had
been a mistake and we had to fix it. She took control of the story by revealing
what was underneath. She walked into the many courtrooms, her literary
mind alive in her legal work, and case by case, she shaped the law to
pry that door open, wide open. Fiduciary obligations, the honour of the
Crown and reconciliation are now central themes in the law. Equity was the
scaffolding for every case.
The 1980s were heady days for litigation to protect the rights of Indigenous
people. Indigenous voices were excluded from forums of debate about
the proposed patriation of the Canadian constitution. UBCIC instructed
their lawyers to launch a court case in the British courts claiming that the
Dominion of Canada included the Indigenous nations who were not consulted
and did not consent to the Canada bill. Hundreds of historical documents
were unearthed, and Privy Council cases were closely analyzed.
These essential papers to support the chiefs’ case were transported around
London in Leslie’s orange leather briefcase, affectionately known as Oscar.
Leslie had been out of law school for less than two years.
No brief was too big or too small.
Canada’s national railway, CN, proposed to twin its existing track along
the Fraser and Thompson Rivers. The first track was laid down in the early
1900s through the homelands of the Secwepemc, Nlaka’pamux and Sto:lo
peoples. The tracks came through without warning, without discussion, as