First Anishinaabe woman to head bar association hopes her example creates ‘ripples’

While she says she can’t change the world alone, Stacey Soldier hopes her achievement of becoming the first Anishinaabe woman to serve as president of the Manitoba Bar Association will create “ripples” and bring other Indigenous women forward.

“I am only the 11th president who is female,” Soldier said. “Never mind Indigenous presidents or someone with a racialized background.”

Soldier, who is from Swan Lake First Nation, graduated from the Faculty of Law at the University of Manitoba in 2007 and was called to the bar in 2008. Over her career, she has practised criminal and child protection law and is now a senior associate at Cochrane Sinclair LLP in Winnipeg.

While Soldier was completing her undergraduate degree in conflict resolution and political science at the University of Winnipeg, she decided she was going to write the Law School Admission Test.

She said she didn’t have anybody to turn to and ask questions, calling it a “very lonely feeling.”

“We deal a lot — women and racialized people — deal a lot with impostor syndrome,” Soldier said. “Going to law school, it was really lonely. There wasn’t a lot of other Indigenous students.”

Soldier is now on the U of M’s admissions committee and said a lot has changed since then. She said she has seen many more Indigenous students applying to law school and that the calibre of students is “absolutely amazing.”

The Manitoba Indigenous Law Students Association holds events where the students can support each other, she said.

“It makes me wistful for the fact that, you know, I didn’t really have that.”

Soldier said she hasn’t experienced direct racism through her law career, which she thinks may be because of her strong personality and ability to never back down from a fight, but she has surprised some of her clients.

“I remember one message that I received — I got a really good outcome from a client, and he sent me a message later and said, ‘Gosh, I didn’t know you were going to be such a good lawyer,’” Soldier said, adding that the client was from a northern reserve.

“Having people meet me who were going through basically the worst process and time of their life dealing with criminal charges … I understand where they came from, because my family’s from a community very much like theirs,” she said.

During her year of presidency, Soldier wants to focus on the importance of the rule of the law and the responsibility lawyers have in defending the rule of the law.

She said while Canada has a strong system, it’s not perfect. One issue she wants to focus on is access to justice.

“We still have issues … with timely access to court dates, legal representation, not having a lot of legal representation for people in rural areas and certainly a misunderstanding of how the law works or doesn’t work for everyday people.”

She admits she doesn’t have all the answers on how to fix it, but said there needs to be a conversation about it.

Jessica Schofield, the previous president of the Manitoba Bar Association, said Soldier truly cares about the association and is everything they could ask for in a president.

“She’s proven herself to be a great mentor, to be someone that cares about her clients and about her colleagues, and she works really hard to make sure that she does very well at everything that she does,” Schofield said.

It’s important for young women who are lawyers to see strong women, and specifically strong Indigenous women, in roles of power like this, Schofield said.

Soldier expressed gratitude to her family and ancestors, who “fought and lived through probably the worst events in Canada in terms of the discrimination of Indigenous people.”

“It’s them I always think about, and it’s them in my community of Swan Lake First Nation that I want to represent,” she said.

» sanderson@brandonsun.com