Dene lawyer becomes Law Society of Manitoba’s 1st Indigenous vice-president

Sacha Paul says he wants to bring more Indigenous people into the field

A Winnipeg lawyer has become the first Indigenous vice-president of the Law Society of Manitoba.

Sacha Paul, a lawyer with Thompson Dorfman Sweatman, says he wants to use his new position to bring more Indigenous people into the law field.

“My hope is that there will be an increased interest amongst Indigenous people to consider law as an attractive career option,” Paul told CBC’s Weekend Morning Show host Bruce Ladan on Sunday.

The news means next year, Paul — who is a member of English River First Nation, a Dene community in northern Saskatchewan — will move on to also become the society’s first Indigenous vice-president.

For him, the dream of becoming a lawyer began as his father’s.

However, when the elder Paul suffered a broken leg that left him unable to finish the program in what’s now known as the University of Saskatchewan’s Indigenous law centre, he passed that passion along to his son.

“He really saw law as a vehicle for positive social change,” Paul said.

That passion came despite his father seeing at a young age the negative effects the law often had on Indigenous people, he says.

When Paul’s father was only six or seven years old, he was forced to attend the Beauval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan.

Years later, both Paul’s parents went on to become teachers, jobs that eventually brought their family to communities across Manitoba, including Pukatawagan and Norway House.

It also brought them to Hollow Water, where they lived when Paul’s father was able to get government funding to send his nine-year-old son to boarding school, St. John’s-Ravenscourt School in Winnipeg.

It was a bit of a culture shock to move from the Anishinaabe community to the private school, Paul recalls.