Introduction

This series of commissioned articles commemorates the life, career, and work of Dr. Carol LaPrairie, one of Canada’s best-known and best-loved Aboriginal justice scholars, who died in December 2010. The articles are authored by colleagues who knew and worked with Carol and draw attention to the significance and influence of a lifetime’s commitment to academic and policy-relevant Aboriginal justice research.

Growing up in a mining community in the Yukon Territory, in northwestern Canada, Carol had early contact with Aboriginal people that inspired her lifelong commitment to critically examine and challenge the inequality, social disadvantage, and injustice that Aboriginal people face, not only in Canada, but also in Australia and New Zealand. Over the course of a long and productive career, Carol produced an impressive and diverse body of academic and policy work. She initiated and managed a number of ground-breaking Aboriginal justice research projects, produced 15 important government policy papers and research reports, published over 50 academic journal articles and book chapters, co-authored a landmark book on alternative Aboriginal justice practices, and gave countless public talks and conference papers. This body of work is even more impressive when one considers that it was accomplished while she was raising four successful children as a single mother and working, not as an academic, but as a government policy researcher, at various times, in federal government departments (Solicitor General, Justice and Indian and Northern Affairs) and in governments in British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, and the Yukon Territory. She was also an active member of the International Commission on Folk Law and Legal Pluralism.

Doing critical policy research in government is always challenging, especially in a highly contested policy arena, characterized by fractious political debate and complex cultural politics. That Carol was able to sustain such a long and successful career doing important and often policy-challenging research is testimony not only to her personal integrity but also to the quality and utility of her work. Her insistence that Aboriginal justice policy should be grounded in solid empirical research led her to directly engage her subjects through time-consuming and often arduous field-based research, in both remote and urban Aboriginal communities. This provided a sound and unusually authoritative empirical foundation for her insightful analysis of the complex problems and justice issues confronting Aboriginal peoples. Her research provided a reliable basis for both critique of and reform to existing conventional and also new, “alternative” justice models and practices.

As a non-native in a contested policy world, she knew that it was vital that her research be seen to be both independent and accurate, and it was these qualities that allowed her work to speak inconvenient truths to power and often challenge official Aboriginal justice policy assumptions and practices. While her work was not always welcomed by activists, its salience for Aboriginal communities is perhaps no more clearly acknowledged than by the tribute that was paid to her after her death by Matthew Coon Come, Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the James Bay Cree in Northern Quebec, where, with Jean-Paul Brodeur and Roger MacDonnell, she had undertaken ground-breaking research. He wrote, “Carol travelled throughout James Bay to meet with our people on issues of justice, policing and customary law. In 1991 she concluded a multi-volume report on her findings, which we consider a living document to this day.”¹

Carol’s policy and evaluation research was particularly influential, not only in critiquing conventional criminal justice treatment of Aboriginal people, but in examining the development of new Aboriginal justice practices and programs such as sentencing circles, restorative justice, and urban drug courts. Her academically oriented published work explored many of the same issues, but from more explicit sociological and criminological perspectives. She published numerous academic articles, in a wide range of Canadian and international journals. Her articles addressed a range of important and often emerging Aboriginal justice issues and problems, such as overlooked urban Aboriginal crime and justice issues; the links between Aboriginal community structure and crime and justice consequences; the challenges of introducing alternative Aboriginal justice practices, such as sentencing circles and...