 I'm Ian Caglio. I'm from Canada. I'm a Métis person. My mother's family is from England and we've got your Scottish and Irish descendants. And my father's family is from the Michelle First Nation, which are an Iroquois tribe. So historically, we were from Ontario and Quebec. We're mostly like around the Mohawk, the Iroquois Confederacy area. But my personal, my father's personal family story is that his ancestor is called the Sun Traveler, Carquante, which means the Sun that travels. And they ended up working as voyagers for the Northwest Company and Hudson's Bay Company. And through those travels ended up in Western Canada and settled there. So Iroquois are not native, so to speak, to Western Canada. So we're sort of a bit of an anomaly. And as such, we don't really exist, even though my great uncle was the signatory of treaty one with among other like Cree and Dakota and those types of people that would have been out there. So just to start, because we're going to get lost and I'm going to get lost and we're going to get lost together, I'd like to maybe show you a few quotes to sort of help us get lost and also help us to sort of establish the territory. First is a quote from Guyantary Tafoya. Stories go in circles. They don't go in straight lines. It helps if you listen in circles because there are stories inside and between stories. And finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home. Part of finding is getting lost. And when you are lost, you start to open up and listen. And so that's sort of a lot of Indigenous research is that sort of sense of getting lost. And hopefully a lot of research is that sense of getting lost and trying to find your way back and sort of trying to find the resources to get yourself back. The next couple quotes are just going to sort of center us with regards to agency and who has agency and sort of try to center the idea of Indigenous research, non-Indigenous research. And the emphasis here is to try to treat it in a collaborative way and try to not to be antagonistic, although some of the quotes might seem a little bit antagonistic. That's not the intent. Bell Hooks wrote, no need to hear your voice. When I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. Only tell me your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in such a way that it becomes mine, my own. I'm still the author authority. I'm still the colonizer, the speaking subject. And you are now the center of my talk. And Bell Hooks wrote this and it resonates, I think, with a lot of research and a lot of researchers. And I think it resonates with a lot of contexts. And I think it is important for us to realize when we're doing research with the group that's not our own or even just with others that we have to be sympathetic and we have to find a way to do research that we aren't colonizing. So how can we do that? And that's sort of one of the things we can think. And this came from my own research. This is one of my participants. And this is what I was asking him about reconciliation in Canada. And I'll get to this and talk. And he says, I'm really aware of my limitations in terms of storytelling. So I don't speak for my nation. I don't even speak for my community. I suppose for my family and for those that have asked me to speak for them. And another one is you've got problems with representation. I've got no interest in speaking on behalf of anybody but myself. But there are many, many people out there who are speaking on my behalf, whether they've asked me to, whether they've asked me or not. And we have a really important task. And with indigenous knowledge, you'll often hear it is people will make almost sort of the academic process of citing. And when you talk to an elder, he'll tell you who told him that story. Or he'll tell you who told you that knowledge. Knowledge isn't taken for granted as something that you own. Knowledge is taken for granted that it's something from the community. And so when we do research and we're engaging with our participants, we have to be mindful of the fact that we don't use their words to talk beyond what they have to say. And some of that is coming, some of that becomes quite limiting. And we sort of like to work from this objective frame where we're quite far away from our research subject. But you know, academics like maybe would call that academic apartheid that sort of distance that you put between yourself and the people you research. And we really as indigenous research want to get close. We want to get dirty. We want to get messy. We want to sort of get lost in that thing. And we also don't want to overstep that because we're only able really able to define and research our context rather than, you know, that we're only able to situate the research within the context and really the understanding start to come from that contextual understanding. So this is a quote from a from a non indigenous academic Terry Tempest Williams, who remind us that we are not Navajo. Their traditional stories don't work for us. Their stories hold meaning for us only as examples. They can teach us what is possible. We must create our own stories. And I think that's another important aspect of sort of of getting started in this in this sort of research process is that, you know, I'm not Ojibwe. I'm not Ojikwe. I'm not Dakota. I'm Metis. I mostly associate as being Iroquois, because Metis culture isn't even my own. And so when I did my work in reconciliation, I had to be very careful to say, this is what these stories that are told to me, you know, if they're someone's carry shared story about Saab a big foot or the sturgeon that I that I was telling the story as if they were telling the story and accounting it to them rather than making it my own, you know, this is the real problem that we have as researchers is trying to, we want to sort of take ownership even without even trying to we end up taking ownership of this knowledge. And we have to really, really be careful about what those stories can tell us. And if what they're talking, we might not be able to understand the definitions that they're that's being told to us and not sort of the emphasis that we'll get to ahead with both research being quite personal. So quite briefly because I don't have a lot of time and I prepared a 45 minute presentation, and I don't want to keep you guys here that long. My research came from my thesis, which was about understanding reconciliation in Canada from an indigenous perspective. And it was centered in Manitoba, Canada, which is quite, quite central to Canada, and engage with elders, educators, activists, and community leaders, all that were indigenous, or had a very, very, very strong connection with the digits community, usually meaning that they had children that were indigenous. It's my personal journey. And that was one of the things that was, you know, when I started the process, I was, I was sort of thinking that this is going to be a research project, and I'm just going to get through it, and it's going to get done, it's going to have a, you know, beginning, middle, and end. But going through it, I found that, you know, I was having, I was being changed by the research. And, you know, there's one of the quotes that if the research doesn't change you, you're not doing it right. And so I think that's an important sort of element to get across. And that's sort of what came across in my, in my, my work. Some of the methods that I use was sort of trying to build what you call these sort of circles of representation. So I started with things like elder interviews, within the elder of interviews, because you're engaging with elder, you also, you often have a research ceremony. And this research ceremony is really important because it's about building that respect and that trust like that, where I was talking about, and it also is going to, we're going to see later how it started building, building sort of what's called a social contract. One of the things with these, these long interviews. And one of the things that sort of, and this is something that was quite challenging to me, that you're going to see a lot of stuff when you do work with Indigenous peoples or Indigenous people are doing research that looks like Western practice. And then you're going to have to say, well, this is problematic. So the idea that elder interviews are elite slash expert interviews, which can be problematic. And, and reason why it's problematic is then you get that whole sense of agency and who's talking for whom and who are these people and where they're situated. But in Indigenous knowledge, elder knowledge is very, very important. It's very central. Mostly because it's not just knowledge that's vetted by the elder, but it's actually vetted by the community. And elders will be very particular about where their knowledge is situated and the extent to which they can speak. And an elder, an elder knowledge is also doesn't preclude that idea that you have to do the learning and you have to do the understanding and you have to do the re-articulation of that knowledge. Elders don't want to teach you. They want to share information with you and you have to teach yourself. And so this is sort of sort of what I went through. One of the things at the bottom is this sort of relational accountability and findings. And one thing you'll see a lot with a lot of Indigenous research is this idea of context and building contextualized understandings of knowledge. What that means is there's a guy back at Teri Tafoya and he's excited and Sean Wilson and he's citing a theory from physics, a guy named Heisenberg. Heisenberg has this theory of I think certainty and that you can never know the exact position or the exact speed of a molecule at the same time because to understand its position you have to remove it from its speed, understand its speed, you have to remove it from its position. How that extends to Indigenous knowledge is that you can never know the exact, you can never know the context, you can either know the context or the definition which means that to understand something definitionally you have to remove it from its context or understand something contextually you have to remove it from its definition. The further you get to defining something, the more you've isolated it from its context. So in Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous, what I did with my research I guess I should say was contextualized with long quotes. And what you can do with a long quote is you can try to sort of see where that quote occurred and try to get into the spirit or into the space where I was when I was listening to that quote rather than atomizing the quote and picking out sound bites here and there. So how did I do this? Well, when I went to the field and did my research I was sort of trying to find a way to articulate how reconciliation has happened in Canada and how the harm and tinnitus generational harm has occurred in Canada and what sort of came to me and it actually kind of is funny because after going through this whole process I went back and reread my interviews, literally the day before I submitted my thesis in and I found this quote that I skipped and it was talking about this process of a tree. And she was referring it to this tree of life. She was talking about being a mother and she was talking about how she was giving birth and how the placenta inverted is actually a tree and how in Indigenous communities, her Indigenous community they celebrate that sort of that representation of the placenta being the tree and how that's that tree of life and that's that relationship. Well, what I had done in my research was to trace reconciliation to this construct of the tree and so what that meant was that I was able to take a proxy for my understanding and place it within sort of an ecological framework, which is something you'll see quite a lot in Indigenous knowledges and often try to explain things in a way and this is the real challenge because in Western practice it's almost seen as quite limiting when I talk about things in a concept of a tree they're going to say oh that's very cute that you're talking about it things that way but you know when you start to break down the components of a tree for instance roots can be a tree can be 60 plus percent up to 200 percent larger than that then you can see for the for the leaves and so when you're talking about intergenerational harm and you're saying that the hot that harm is actually the roots it's an invisible you can talk about a tree being unhealthy and that tree needing to be healthy but not really realized the extent to the damage that's been caused by the harm from the roots and so it actually is that's sort of a utility of Indigenous peoples explaining things within nature because we in our process of atomizing information placing things in different disciplines what will then happen is then you sort of lose out on that symmetry that happens in nature and a tree naturally grows and what's most efficient for it and if we were to break down that sort of structure of a tree and see and see how broad it is it sort of makes perfect sense that in Canada Indigenous peoples have faced harm and that harm is having these long-term consequences when you when you look at how widespread that harm is and across how many generations I don't really want to get too much into this I've already devoted too much time but just sort of that sort of how I how I contextualize it and then coming out of this journey I sort of started to realize that there's a lot of a lot of sort of different not truth but sort of things that I found with reconciliation or not with Indigenous knowledge and to teach too much it's a takeaway and what person's opportunity to learn and so you know when we when we come into these situations where elders are teaching us they don't want us to they don't want us to be told the truth they want us to be told some some facts or some opinions and we have to take away with that Indigenous people are less concerned with establishing that universal truth and more of letting one person make their journey for themselves and that's the thing that we've sort of tried to reconcile Western Western Academy is this idea bias and this idea that we can sort of understand someone's point of view if we think hard enough about it and if we just do the right ethics and we just do the right you know all these right things that we can we can make it but the reality is that's not true it's always going to be a personal opinion and you know there is there's you know that fallacy of that there's that circle of circular relationship with knowledge and that circular relationship goes beyond not only just the collection of the knowledge but the transmission the analysis and how it goes back and the idea the stories go in circles and this is really important because you'll hear a story once and you'll hear it again and it'll mean something entirely different in indigenous cultures in Iroquois culture they have them they have a the long house they talk about this long house and that's what the Iroquois people used to live in and having four doors and and and each of those doors was guarded by a different tribe and as you entered in through each one of those doors it meant something different and we're going to see that in practice later on but you may enter into a story at a certain time through a certain door and hear it in a certain way and doesn't mean that you know the truth of it because when you hear that story again it's going to have different meaning it's going to have different relevance and so you need to re-listen to these stories over and over again and that research is a ceremony and a journey so what's one thing that sort of I did and this is again I want to make perfectly clear the all you know all these practices are contextually based right you're all going to find your own practices for with with which you're going to be able to work with indigenous peoples or even at even work within your own communities it's this idea of the land acknowledgement which is actually something quite new and it's something that actually does have historic roots and it's going to be something that's going to be I don't say a little bit controversial because it's taking something that's been I don't know almost it's a bit comical now the land acknowledgement and trying to put into an academic space so what a land acknowledgement is is basically this this place where you know an organization every university in North America for most part now houses land acknowledgement they'll say we're doing we recognize that we're on treaty one territory traditional homeland of the DNA and this type of thing and we recognize that sort of thing and it's it's very common and it's also you know the reason why it's kind of interesting is it's come out of the sort of imperative for reconciliation but often within the language there's this sort of controversial aspect to it I mean I'm going to show you one in particular and and what's controversial about it is that it often doesn't achieve what sure it might build recognition but it often doesn't achieve what what what it's and old goal is and what I'm going to pull up this one from Concordia and I don't know if anyone can make a guess on it's within the first line about something that would be it's in the first sentence there's going to be something that's a little bit ironic about about it I mean it's a great it's a it's your typical let territorial acknowledgement land acknowledgement so anyone want to take a guess unseated indigenous lands right so you're recognizing that you're doing work on indigenous plans isn't Concordia University going to tear down Concordia University and move it probably not right so this this is the thing so it becomes a sort of problematic thing you know they call it what somebody on Twitter called it a pro forma platitude you know something that's done just to you know make itself feel better and it the land acknowledgement can become this sort of proxy for continued colonization I mean who does land belong to who has the right to use occupied land and then there's this question of who should write it and who should it be written for and Ryerson University the guy who wrote the land acknowledgement for Ryerson University said I wish never wish you never did it and like why do you wish you never did it like why is it because I wrote it I worked I'm indigenous person I worked at Ryerson University and they asked me to do it so I wrote it for them but but you know that's like getting the teacher to do your homework right like she he shouldn't have had to write it he knew exactly what was supposed to be and of course he did because I mean he lives it and so this is the sort of this the sort of aspect of it that that becomes sort of problematic but you know there is sort of a sense of can there be a good land acknowledgement I'm gonna show one a bit of one video and a bit of the other video and and and neither one of them I would say are less early good so that's you know come shows just you know how problematic these land acknowledgements can be right like I mean that that what's the intention what we're trying to get out of out of them and what sort of the purpose out of my core sort of hint to that earlier like who's writing them right you and and and I think that there is a this is just quickly it's a current practice of land knowledge there is there is a way that you can use land acknowledgements in a positive manner you just have to think about how you can do it so the current practice amnesty's got a bit quite good practice so you're naming the indigenous territory you're on you're explaining why you're acknowledging land you're addressing the relevant rights and and I think that's sort of like the start but actually think that it's actually something that can be used in research you know for me I had an landing on law acknowledgment right at the beginning of my of my of my thesis it's because I thought that you could use it as a social contract not to traditionally social contracts or something out of politics it's about like the right to govern a right to be governed but the contemporary usage social contract is about consent that you consent to do something that you consent for the state to govern you or you consent for somebody to have sort of power authority over you and that power is quite important because when you're making that consent you're saying I'm doing research here I this is I recognize that these are the values and this is what I pledge to do it changes that balance because now you're held accountable for the research you're doing right and and you can be held accountable obviously if that nobody's reading it in indigenous community or nobody cares but it but what it does is that that accountability helps you sort of locate yourself and sort of get back to that sense of being lost once you start to establish the territory that you're working in and start to locate yourself you can start to look use that that a land acknowledgement as a tool to sort of navigate and and and get yourself out so this was my land acknowledgement and it's not perfect it's something that I am working on but you know it was what I used in my research right that my research where where the research took place who who was with the Anishinaabeg, Oji Kiritakota, Anishina Moeka, Metis and Denne land also land of Treaty 1 and again that's not that to fully inclusive I think if we go back historically that you probably see there's other indigenous groups that would have territorial claims that land but that I pledge to respect the land and the people and one thing that I made point of is that I was reflecting accountable, relational accountable practice went on the lands and off them and that sort of you know this is to me is sort of the idea that you can start to use this tool of a land acknowledgement which has sort of become a bit of a you know in some ways a joke but you can use it to make yourself accountable for your own research and like I said becomes a sort of centering practice I was going to do this exercise but I don't think we have the time so we're just going to plow right through if that's okay but I was going to get you guys to write your own land acknowledgement and just sort of just to think about who you do research with and the values that you have to reflect while doing that research and then sort of try to replicate something that like I did so we'll go just a step further because I don't know how much time I have left so one of the aspects in indigenous knowledge is a sense of relational accountability right it's like being accountable for your research being accountable within research being accountable to yourself and what I what I found is that with this in within this attention of within the object of the research there is several tensions that you have to navigate the land acknowledgement sort of defines that terrain and the context the context but there's still a need to get out right you're lost you need to find you know get out and often when you come back with your from these foreign lands you've got the great stories everybody wants to hear right and that's the the goal of the research so to go negotiate the territory yet to negotiate this territory and train you have to negotiate these different relations or the relations with people the relations with the environment the cosmos and the ideas things that indigenous people sort of negotiate within their own understandings of their own societies so the land contract doesn't become a burden it becomes a tool and this tool itself is negotiated right because it shows that you have an understanding of the cultures that you're doing work with and therefore it can sort of act as a map or a compass so one of these tensions that you sort of have to navigate this is what sorry this is tension I had to navigate within my research what this sort of I had a curiosity and I had to get to knowledge right we started a specific point right so I started at my curiosity but and if you consider like for me the this became well take this would be this point became reconciliation right that's what I want understood my curiosity was probably quite broad so knowledge became who had the knowledge it became the elder the elder had the knowledge so we start this journey and if you've ever navigated in in the woods or out you use a use a compass or whatever you take a bearing right that became my bearing we started quite broadly and we sort of worked our way down to a narrow narrow spot just just like the elder or whoever had the knowledge they too had a broad base of knowledge and they would often meet me in the middle with a narrow sort of focus of knowledge so if I went to talk to an elder about reconciliation they weren't going to talk to me about like medic medicinal plants unless it was like pertinent to reconciliation so we must negotiate that distance and there's also a level of trust that we're going to meet up in the middle right another tension was this sort of tension between analysis and tension and the tension of respect with indigenous communities right like that the problem is is that often people are coming in claiming the knowledge and then leaving them with the knowledge so if we're going to negotiate this sort of sense that we want to do sort of analysis with them with indigenous we want we have to sort of get this respect how do we get indigenous knowledge unless there's that level of trust and with that level of trust comes a level of respect indigenous elders and indigenous communities know that we're going to be doing analysis right that sort of that sort of comes comes to pass but that land acknowledgement then sort of holds us accountable for the type of analysis we're going to do plus it sort of does in many ways inform how we're going to do the analysis and this this trust and is also part of this personal journey I'm a Goulet reflects how the journey is evident how indigenous people pass on knowledge is as one experience is they learn and access to knowledge is a function to access to experience right and so what what will happen in it with indigenous communities with indigenous knowledge is an elder will tell you as much as they think you can handle they aren't going to tell you everything and as you learn you're going to handle a bit more and one of the things that was that came out with one of one of one or an ethnographic researcher had was doing a just living amongst one of the people that the hell took I believe in in near Alaska and he went on a dog sled he'd always wanted to go on a dog sled see how they they commute and see how they get around and the after being on the trail for about four or five days they said you're going to take the reins tomorrow he'd never he never pat pat piloted a dog sled before but they'd expected him because he'd been there and if like any person would have been he would have supposed to have been watching nobody's going to tell him how to run a dog sled no one's going to tell him do that because that like I said before would be disrespectful to tell him exactly how to do it so he got on he supposedly did fine because he lived to tell the research tale about it but that's sort of the that's sort of the aspect of that level of trust in that relationship you have and you know if you try too hard to gain that trust you're doing it wrong you know if you just are respectful and that relation to the accountable way they're going to respect you and they're going to respect that you know when when I went and spoke to my elders and I did the ceremony I gave them tobacco I listen to them they told me about there was no talk about this is how you should analyze it this is what you should think and that's what you should do they knew I was going to do what I was going to want to do right because that's part of that personal journey so these tensions and these negotiations and meeting up at the points they sort of they sort of have a meeting there is a meeting with it in indigenous cultures many indigenous cultures in in in North America they have this idea of a medicine wheel and a medicine wheel is just sort of this fork point compass right compass being for navigation but it's a four-point compass that's used to explain a lot of different social phenomena it's also used to explain with a lot of processes and it's a lot it's it's spiritual it's medicinal it covers a lot of different things right within each of these colors and with each each of these parts of the circle is sort of certain attributes that are generally ascribed to many medicine wheels this one I believe I adapted from an Ojibwe medicine wheel but there's also like a Dakota medicine wheel there are a lot of medicine wheel cultures and you actually will see the medicine wheel occur in other cultures and Polynesian cultures that have something similar to a medicine wheel right so note take note of these sort of the the the place placement of all those things and those negotiations that I had for those tensions all correlated to the medicine wheel and this is not something that really happened to me that I thought about this is something that sort of happened organically I knew I noted that I needed to get knowledge because I was curious well that sort of aspect within the medicine wheel is part of that being a child right a child as a child you approach the world with this curiosity and it's also interesting because the sacred medicine is associated with the with the spring is tobacco and tobacco is the gift that you give and you'll smudge and what the smudging was doing is it's actually preparing you it's clearing away the bad spirits it's clearing away the negativity and it's actually preparing you to be receptive of either knowledge or you know wisdom or even just an experience and so that you know that became quite important and as your curiosity moved just like on the medicine wheel towards understanding right that negotiation had sort of a polar opposite so as you move towards understanding it's because you were able to negotiate the respect to get to the understanding right and that and that's that sort of summer attitude of being a teenager and you sort of start to understand the world you start to understand your place in the world and with that you start to respect your elders you start to respect their knowledge and even though you there is always that tension and that tension is always there and that's the point the point isn't that we're going to absolve the tension the point is there's always that tension it keeps distance but it also keeps things close and that's moves that knowledge as you as you've progressed with your understanding you move to your knowledge so in turn in turn to you have that sort of sense of you you've built this knowledge and you've negotiated carry your own curiosity and this whole thing is part of a circle right all this whole experience within with an indigenous knowledge is part of a circle and it becomes a sort of ability to negotiate and understand yourself in this whole circular process that becomes your ability to sort of negotiate your way out of this muddy terrain of how do I do work with indigenous peoples what's indigenous knowledge right because I mean if you're receptive you know if you what what one of the one of the what I was listening to there's an Iroquois elder and she she was talking about reconciliation and she was talking about how we can hear how we can sort of pick up new knowledges and she said talking about opening up the space and just listening even to the silence you know and if we're just still in those silent moments we're still information that's being told in the silence you know we we talk about how you know this self-reflection is such an important part of indigenous knowledge such such an important part of being able to work work within this framework and I think that is an important sort of aspect of of being able to have these negotiations so hopefully we've found our way home I know I've got lost and I'm sure you've got lost with me and there's really interesting quote from Maya Angelou and I just you know I just I just really like a lot a lot of the literature Maya Angelou onto Lord and and the one who I forgot her first name but anyways Maya Angelou talks about I look up the road and I and looked up the road I was going back and the way I come and I wasn't satisfied so I decided to step off the road and cut me a new path and you know what if you're just going to follow the same routes you know Maya Angelou was probably going to the same place right the destination is the same but you know sometimes you have to take out step outside of what's the regular navigated roads in Western discourse Western Academy and and be able to sort of help yourself get lost and get found and get lost again you know and not sort of the process of of life as I just all knowledge there's some sources not not some resources for you guys just some stuff to look at some good readings this one right here this is quite an interesting one for non indigenous researchers this ways of knowing experiencing power Monday it's a little old 1999 or 98 but you know when I read it it's surprising I've never it's not it's not very well very widely cited think you know on Google scholar it's got maybe like four or five citations but his work that you can tell that he gets it you can he gets that understanding