Professor Aaron Mills, “Kinship’s Normativity: the Anishinaabe Law of Belonging” (Pierre Genest Lecture)

This annual lecture, established to honour the memory of Pierre Genest, a 1954 Osgoode graduate and an esteemed Canadian lawyer and advocate, is Osgoode’s most important named public lecture.

During this talk, Professor Aaron Mills will discuss his article “First Nations’ Citizenship and Kinship Compared: Belonging’s Stake in Legality.” This article challenges the common framing of debates about belonging to First Nations political communities as debates about citizenship. While kinship is often recognized as important in these debates, it is typically integrated into the concept of citizenship. The article argues that kinship should be understood as its own distinct model of belonging, rooted in First Nations law. Both citizenship and kinship serve as foundational models of political belonging, but they function differently. Kinship, like citizenship, plays a role in defining legal interests and rights, yet it has often been overlooked due to colonial influences. The article asserts that kinship is both a political and legal equal to citizenship and calls for a deeper understanding of First Nations law, where kinship is central to the structure of belonging.

Aaron Mills (JD Toronto, LLM Yale, PhD Victoria) is an Assistant Professor at McGill University, Faculty of Law, where he holds the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Indigenous Constitutionalism and Philosophy. In 2024, he was appointed as a Fellow of CIFAR’s Boundaries, Membership & Belonging research program. Mills’ primary field of inquiry is Indigenous law, which he uses to frame questions of legal theory, political theory, comparative law, and indigenous-settler reconciliation. As an Anishinaabe scholar (Couchiching First Nation), his approach to practise, theory, and method in Indigenous law is informed by more than 15 years of education with Anishinaabe elders from Treaty #3 and southern Manitoba.