Val Napoleon, a 2026 Fellow of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, reflects on how different legal orders can coexist, be understood and engage with one another without one serving as the sole reference point for interpreting the others. 

In this video, she explains how similar concepts can serve very different functions across legal systems and introduces the idea of “radical co-presence,” which calls for recognizing Indigenous legal traditions in their full complexity, without measuring them against a dominant framework.