Beading the Law

Transformative, creative pedagogies are urgently needed in legal education. Far from the cutting-edge of pedagogical practice, legal education is heavily shaped by conservative notions of ‘professionalism’. This, in turn, has often constrained the pedagogical imagination of staff who teach in the field. Where cutting-edge practices are present, they are rarely captured in literature on legal education. Increasingly, scholars and practitioners are pushing for changes in legal education that could enable students to learn differently, creating forms of ‘professionalism’ that demonstrate a deep commitment to social justice and inclusivity. In this blog series, Who said that learning law is boring? Bringing Creative Teaching Methods into Legal Education, we explore how arts-based, affective and embodied teaching methods can deepen students’ learning of law and enrich socio-legal teaching. These blogs start from the premise that everyone is creative, and that taking creative approaches to legal education can build critical analytical, vocational, and civic skills. Read more about the blog series and our motivations here.

by Sabrina Gilani and Ashleigh Keall, University of Sussex.

‘We learn through our bodies and spirits as much as through our minds’

Gregory Cajete, Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education (Kivaki Press 1994) 31

The Context

It’s a Monday afternoon at the University of Sussex School of Law. One of us is walking down the corridor in the Freeman building, laden with acrylic paints, stretched canvases, and jars of paintbrushes. Another week, it will be cases of glass beads and felts; another, poster paper and coloured felt tip pens. We are preparing for the Aboriginal Law module that we co-teach, with Sabrina leading the first six weeks and Ashleigh the final five.

We are two non-Indigenous Canadians living and working in the UK. Ashleigh is a third-generation descendant of European settlers and Sabrina is a second-generation Canadian of Pakistani heritage. Our own legal education has been shaped by Western legal epistemologies that privilege written texts, doctrinal reasoning, individual rights, and human-centred understandings of law. We do not position ourselves as experts in Indigenous ethics. Rather, we design and teach this class from a place of humility, curiosity, and respect for Indigenous peoples and communities. Our class is an invitation to students to question the epistemological assumptions through which they have learned to recognise law in the first place, and to identify ways of practicing and experiencing it differently.

Aboriginal law is a comparative law module that introduces students to settler colonial law in Canada, Australia, and the United States, and to law’s role in both accommodating and constraining Indigenous rights and justice. The module is divided into two parts. In the first six weeks, students are introduced to Indigenous legal traditions. Here they explore the colonial origins of Indigenous-settler relations and learn about the significance of nature to Indigenous conceptions of legal normativity. Within these first seminars, students are invited to think about embodied approaches to law by examining Indigenous sonic practices like throat-singing and story-telling, and the role that aesthetic practices such as artwork and beadwork play in establishing political relations and conveying knowledge within Indigenous communities. In the final five weeks of the module, students examine contemporary social justice issues affecting Indigenous communities living in settler colonies, including criminal justice, violence against women, and the intergenerational effects of residential schooling. Students are encouraged to think about the processes of reconciliation and self-determination by drawing on Indigenous worldviews and norms, and comparing them with settler colonial frameworks of rights, title and self-government.

This past year, we have introduced an exercise exploring Indigenous beadwork as legal practice. In Week 2 of the module students were asked to:

1. Read about Nadia Myre’s project on beading as a form of resistance to the colonial violence deployed by the Indian Act;

2. Read Danielle T Mamer’s article ‘Looking at Law’ which references Myre’s art project;

3. View Danielle Lussier’s webpage ‘Beads-in-Law’; and

4. Watch a short instructional video by Two Wolf Studio on Indigenous beading on YouTube in preparation for a class activity on beading.

Students were asked to think about the question ‘what is law?’, come up with an image in response, and sketch it onto a small (2” x 2”) square of felt. They would then spend part of the seminar beading their designs. What the students didn’t know was that the real point of the exercise wasn’t the question they were asked to reflect on, or even the image they had created. It was the practice of beading together as a community that was the instructional element of the seminar.

The Background to Indigenous Beadwork

Depending on the region in which it is practiced, Indigenous beading is grounded in forms of aesthetic practice that use shell and bone, seeds, stones, copper, animal teeth, and porcupine quills to establish and communicate spiritual, political, and cultural relationships. One commonly recognised artifact of Indigenous beading traditions is the wampum belt.  Made of marine shells, wampum belts have been created and exchanged by Indigenous communities for thousands of years to further diplomacy, develop political relationships, and cement trade relations. For the Oneida Nation, the wampum is significant because the weaving of beads into belts expresses ‘the authority of the spoken message…any statement not accompanied by the wampum was likely to be false or trivial.’

As Lussier explains, ‘beads have been used to entrench, codify, and disseminate law’ long before the first arrival of European settlers. These embodied ways of creating and communicating legal relationships are largely forgotten by political and legal systems which ‘prioritised the written word.’ Beading is an Indigenous tradition that is passed down from generation to generation and has been described by Indigenous people as ‘embodying epistemological concepts of reciprocity and respect and interconnected with storied intergenerational knowledge transmission’ (2).

To get a ‘feel’ for the importance of the wampum and the intimate relationality engendered by the wampum belt, we felt that it was necessary to encourage students to experience the practice of beading. Students arrived at their seminar with felt squares that depicted a diverse set of images in response to the ‘what is law?’ prompt including trees, a Venus Fly Trap, footprints, a flower, and the sun. Interestingly, we were only one week into the module, and yet none of our students used an image that could be described as ‘legal’ in the conventional western sense. There were no images that one could connect with human power or authority. In fact, most if not all images were nature-based.

The Classroom Activity

During the beading process, desks were arranged in the form of an Indigenous-style talking circle, and each student was given materials (a beading needle, thread, a large container of microglass beads, scissors, and a plastic tray) to bead their design. No in-class instruction was given. Within a few minutes, we noticed that students were engaged in conversation with one another about the ‘best way’ to bead, with students who had watched the instructional video giving direction to those who had not. Periodically throughout the exercise, students were prompted to reflect on their project with a single question put up on the screen. Students were then invited to share their response in the form of a talking circle. They did not have to speak when it was their turn; listening was encouraged as a form of equal participation. Reflection questions asked students how they felt the week before when they were notified that they would be beading in the next seminar, how they selected their image, why they selected it, and how it represented their understanding of what law is. Students were also invited to reflect on earlier readings of colonialism, including Myre’s art project on beading the Indian Act, and asked to situate their image within these larger conversations. They were asked to share whether they saw their image as reflecting law as a system that protects, as a system that control or harms, or some combination of the two.

Students were given one hour to bead as much of their design as they could, with the opportunity to stay on after the conclusion of the seminar and to return to their project throughout the term, outside of class. At the end of the hour, students were asked to put away their beadwork projects and to think more deeply about the process of beading. Four questions were posed to them:

1. How did the structure of the beading circle shape who spoke, how people listened, and whose knowledge felt valued?

2. What did the slow hands-on process of beading change about how you thought, felt, or spoke about law, colonialism or injustice?

3. In what way can beadwork operate as a form of protest or resistance to the law we know and practice?

4. If the beading materials were not just something you used, but something that carried meaning or made a claim, what do you think they would be conveying to you?

Students were given a few minutes to reflect and jot down notes on each question, and then we proceeded in a talking circle where students could share their responses to any, some, or all of the reflection questions. Again, students were not required to participate by speaking – listening was enough. This discussion generated some very interesting insights.

One student explained how the beading circle made them feel ‘safe’ in sharing their ideas because other people’s ‘eyes were not on me.’  By having others focused on their own projects, students felt they were not being ‘judged’ as much. We talked about judgment as an embodied practice, something we experience not simply through words, but through the ways in which bodies are arranged in relation to one another. One student mentioned how they had failed to watch the instructional video before class and thus felt ‘very lost’ when they started the project. I asked them how they adapted. They said they ‘watched and listened to what others were doing and also by paying attention to how the practice affected me.’ They realised they may be on the ‘wrong path’ every time they ‘pricked themselves’ with the needle they were using, or their ‘thread got tangled up.’ Other students shared how the beading circle itself was instructional and normative, how it supported knowledge transfer between those who had experience (because they had watched the instructional videos and/or practiced at home) and those who were learning (had come to class without any prior preparation), similar to intergenerational knowledge transfer in Indigenous communities. This was also an excellent opportunity to discuss the meaning or norm-generating potential of materials or objects, how things can shape human thought, behaviour and emotion, like the needle ‘prick’ which conveyed inexperience, vulnerability, or incompetence. This conversation helped the students grasp and appreciate the significance of material relations in Indigenous legal and philosophical thought, including the sacred meaning attributed to wampum and the political power wielded by objects.

Beading the law, in this sense, allowed students to experience Indigenous norms rather than just think about them. One student was so inspired by the practice that she returned throughout the term to work on her image.  Much to our surprise, Natasha gifted us her final beadwork project as a farewell memento at the end of the year. An image of her design at various stages of completion has been included below.

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Natasha B. Wilson, Beading Project, Aboriginal Law 2025/2026

Upon reflection, the gifting of Natasha’s beadwork was an act of trust and a commemoration of the relationship we had built over the term. In this sense, it was not unlike the relationality cultivated through the exchange of a wampum belt. The honour and affection we felt at receiving this gift helped us, as teachers, to appreciate the significance of intergenerational knowledge transfer more intimately. In that moment, we realised that our students had taught us as much about the interrelatedness, connectivity, and vitality of Indigenous law as we had hoped to teach them.

The significance of the beadwork exercise

‘Beading the law’ in Week 2 helped students habituate to the embodied and affective approach to legal issues that we were committed to fostering and developing in the later weeks on religious freedom, storytelling, and property ownership. We wanted students to be able to both understand and value their emotional and physical responses to the module materials.

Affective and embodied pedagogy recognises that feelings are not peripheral to learning and teaches students that learning is not a purely intellectual or cognitive exercise. For this reason, we regularly use artwork, music, storytelling, documentaries, and photography alongside more traditional academic writing as reflective prompts for students, encouraging them to take the time to notice how they feel and how they are responding, not just in their minds but in their bodies. By being attuned to bodily relations – paying attention to movement, voice, physical interactions, and sensory experience – students can gain a new appreciation for the role that emotional states like frustration, empathy, curiosity, discomfort, excitement, and uncertainty play in establishing norms. Making space for a student’s embodied, felt responses, allows them to experience deeper, holistic learning in a manner more in keeping with Indigenous ethics.

As Emma Jones aptly notes, western law traditionally views ‘emotions as the enemies of rationality and reason,’ and for this reason western legal education eschews emotion in favour of impartial and objective analysis. Legal analysis is typically presented as an impersonal and cognitive exercise: read the case, identify the rule, apply the rule, reach a conclusion (every legal educator knows the value placed on the so-called ‘IRAC’ method of teaching). However, we want students to understand that legal practice is also deeply affective and embodied. Injustice is felt on more than just an intellectual level; it can produce states of disgust, sadness, loneliness, discomfort, and anxiety. Good lawyering will require a practitioner to be able to understand these experiences, confront morally difficult issues and decisions, communicate them to judges in a meaningful way, negotiate with parties using empathy, and advocate for their client responsibly and compassionately. Good lawyering is about more than just the outcome in any given dispute; it is ultimately about how the participants in that dispute feel about the process. Yet, we provide very little opportunity for legal students to ‘feel’ anything about the issues that they are confronted with.

Relationality is at the heart of Indigenous ethics. This relationality includes not only human associations, but also the relationships that we have with nature, the planet, past and future generations, and the objects that hold memories, relationships, and history. The quotation at the beginning of this blog reminds us that we learn through our bodies and spirits as much as we do through our minds. Throughout this module, we have sought to cultivate an attentiveness to these bodily and spiritual ways of knowing and being, and to the sensations we experience as material beings moving through and in relationship with the world around us. By adopting a pedagogical approach to Aboriginal law that invites students to discover and experience these connections, we hope to bridge the perceived divides between cognitive, embodied and affective ways of knowing.  Ultimately, we hope this approach will help nurture future generations of lawyers who are not only intellectually capable, but also ethically attuned, emotionally intelligent, and socially responsible.

Works Cited

Cajete G, Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education (Kivaki Press 1994)

Jones E, ‘Transforming Legal Education through Emotions’ (2018) 38(3) Legal Studies 450-479

Taschereau Mamers D, ‘Looking at Law: Refusals of Settler Colonial Politics in Nadia Myre’s Indian Act’ (2021) 21(3) The New Centennial Review 135-64