Saskatchewan-raised Leslie Hall Pinder joined a prestigious Vancouver law firm as its first female litigator in 1977, but this firm held its monthly meetings at a club that did not admit women. Asked to use the servants' entrance, she walked through the front door. Her employment ended-and her passion for social justice kept growing.

Pinder became the in-house counsel for the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, established her own law firm, and supported land claims for her First Nations clients from 1982 until 2005. She also published two novels and a 1991 chapbook, The Carriers of No, in which she criticized Judge Allan McEachern's notorious decision against the Gitskan-Wet'suwet'en land claim.

Now her third novel, Bring Me One of Everything (Grey Swan $16.95), blends fiction and fact to examine greed and expropriation of First Nations artefacts. It begins with a flashback to 1957 when an anthropologist cuts down the largest stand of totem poles in the world for a museum display, hoping to salvage the artistic remains of the Haida.

978-9834900-1-2

[BCBW 2012]