‘You walk through the door, but you hold it open’ First Anishinaabe woman Bar Association president prioritizes mentorship, protecting the rule of law By: Melissa Martin Posted: 12:35 PM CDT Sunday, Sep. 14, 2025

In 1991, when Stacey Soldier was just 15 years old, Manitoba marked a watershed moment. After three years of hearings, the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry released its final report, a searing reckoning with how the province’s police and justice system had failed Indigenous people.

At home in Thompson, Soldier watched news of the inquiry unfold on TV. (“We were only allowed to watch the news in our house,” she says with a laugh.) The Anishinaabe teen was inspired to see an Indigenous judge, then-Justice Murray Sinclair, co-presiding over the proceedings, and was transfixed by the findings.

It felt “thrilling for justice,” she recalls. But it was also a stark lesson in the challenges her people faced to obtain it.

“One thing that the AJI made clear is that this is a system that wasn’t designed to help Indigenous communities and people in any way,” she says, chatting at her law firm Cochrane Sinclair’s Exchange District offices last week.

Looking back, Soldier thinks, that may have been the spark that drove her to blaze her own trail in the legal profession. She would go on to become one of Manitoba’s first Indigenous criminal defence lawyers, a leading counsel for victims of sexual violence — and, now, the first Anishinaabe woman to serve as president of the Manitoba Bar Association.

“For me, it’s a huge responsibility,” she says. “I also want to represent my own community of Gaabiskigamaag, Swan Lake First Nation. I want to represent them well and make sure that I work hard every day to make them proud of me.”

When Soldier rose to the position last week, having served as the MBA’s vice-president last year, it was just the latest step in a burnished career. Since being called to the Bar in 2008, she has worked in many key roles, including serving as co-counsel for the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs at the National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

Yet she is the first to say she did not do it alone. Soldier is quick to praise the many mentors who guided her journey: from longtime University of Manitoba law school instructor and elder-in-residence Wendy Whitecloud, to the late Sen. Sinclair, who she’d first met while an undergrad student.

She notes a teaching she’d received once, from one of those mentors. Being the first to do anything is a “proud and lonely walk,” she says, but it need not stay lonely for long if you help others come along. Now, she serves as a mentor for young Indigenous law students, and beams with pride as she discusses their achievements.

“You walk through the door, but you hold it open and reach out your hand for the next person,” she says. “It’s not just about you. You have gifts you have to share with the community, and that’s ensuring there’s a path and there’s a person waiting for them.”

In a way, her own family is testament to that lesson. Her father, Larry Soldier, was the first youth from Gaabiskigamaag to graduate from high school and enter university. He went on to a successful career in economic development that saw him move his young family to Thompson, where he later served as the city’s first Indigenous councillor.

“The more diverse our profession is, the more lived experience and different viewpoints we have, that only strengthens us.”

For Soldier, Thompson was an “amazing place to grow up,” she says. She played baseball and hockey and gymnastics, and found many friends in the close-knit community. Her parents always stressed education, and after graduating high school, she enrolled in the University of Winnipeg, studying political science and conflict resolution.

At first, a career in law wasn’t in her plans. After earning her bachelor’s, Soldier went to work at what was then Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, which was eye-opening: “you have really great people who want to do right by communities,” she says, but she saw how they were constrained by the system around them.

After a few years at INAC, she took a job working for the NDP. This, she says, was less out of a strong political connection, and more out of a growing fascination with how policy was crafted. As she saw how lawyers helped shape and draft policy, she started having growing thoughts of entering the profession.

At first, Soldier told no one except her parents that she was thinking of applying to law school.

“I was scared somebody was going to say, ‘you’re probably not good enough,’” she says. “It’s that message we tell ourselves. So I told my mom and dad, and of course they were encouraging. Then I was accepted and I was like, ‘oh my goodness, are you kidding me?’”

Her first months in law school were difficult. By then, Soldier was a single mother of a young daughter; it wasn’t easy to give up her full-time job and go back to school, living off student loans. That first year, she thought about dropping out “probably 20 times,” she says. But elder-in-residence Whitecloud helped encourage her to keep going, and soon, she was thriving.

In her second year, Soldier fell in love with criminal law. Partly, she says with a laugh, it’s that she’s “naturally nosy” and liked digging into new files. But also, she began to realize that she could connect with Indigenous people facing the justice system in a way many had never experienced before.

“You walk through the door, but you hold it open and reach out your hand for the next person… It’s not just about you. You have gifts you have to share with the community.”

“To sit down with a client, and they’re like ‘whoa, where are you from?’” she says. “That’s always the question we ask each other. There was this dawning understanding that I’m going to get some of the things that happen in their life. A lot of the effects of colonization and residential schools have happened in my own family.”

That growing sense of direction was clinched the very first time she went to court.

“I got a really good result for my client,” she recalls. “(I remember) her being so happy afterward, and thanking me, and just that sense of I did something in the world that helped somebody, that meant something to them. That was just this amazing feeling that I had. And I was like, this is what I want to do.”

As her career grew, Soldier thought about the AJI often. She saw how the many of the problems it documented still persist, over two decades after it made its recommendations. Yet she also sees the seeds of transformation, and they are growing.

“That report could have been written a week ago,” she says. “In a lot of ways we haven’t gotten any farther. I will say that in the last few years and certainly in my legal career, we have chief justices of the courts who are listening and wanting to hear from the communities of what justice looks like for them, and how can we do this so it’s meaningful.”

And Soldier finds a lot of hope in how the legal community in Manitoba is evolving. In June, she attended the 2025 Call to the Bar ceremony at the RBC Convention Centre. As she looked out on the new generation of Manitoba lawyers, she saw a whole world of backgrounds and stories, far wider than when she had graduated.

“There was so much colour, and so many different genders,” she says. “That ship is turning to a different path, and I think that’s super important… the more diverse our profession is, the more lived experience and different viewpoints we have, that only strengthens us.”

Now, as Soldier looks ahead to her one-year term as Manitoba Bar Association president, there are many pressing issues on the agenda. Bail reform is among the biggest, as politicians across Canada, including Winnipeg mayor Scott Gilligham, have raised it in discussions about public safety.

“My focus this year is to talk about the importance of our profession to protect the rule of law and to fight for the rule of law.”

“Unfortunately (there is) a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding of what bail actually is,” Soldier says. “Public safety is one of the foremost things that they are considering. It’s not a situation where people are being let out willy-nilly. So that’s something I think probably I’m going to need to address, the more these kind of stories come out.”

She is also determined to champion the role of the legal profession in upholding free, democratic societies.

“My focus this year is to talk about the importance of our profession to protect the rule of law and to fight for the rule of law,” she says. “We’re seeing very dangerous ideas coming from the United States, and from around the world, in terms of attacks on pillars of democracy, the media, the government, the courts. And it’s really frightening.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca