 Without further delay, I'm going to introduce our next speakers. We have on the, you're far left, Rodney Nelson, and he is a professor with the Aboriginal and Rich Support Program here at Carleton University. He's from Nipissing First Nation, and he is the co-chair of the Aboriginal Education Council here at Carleton. Sitting beside him is the lovely Mallory White Duck, and she is Anishinaabe, excuse me, Algonquin, from Kitigan, Zibi, and she is currently doing her PhD at the University of Michigan, looking at literary traditions, kinship, and oral histories from her own community. So they're going to lead us in a little bit of a dialogue around their experiences researching and doing research, so I'll pass it over to them. Thanks, Benny. Great. Well, we just wanted to open this up just by saying that we're just going to talk, so we're doing it like podcasting, so we're just going to talk to each other. As a matter of fact, we haven't seen each other in a little while now, and we're really good friends, and so it's kind of two friends meeting on stage again. So, hey, Mal. Hello, how's it going? So, you're at University of Michigan now doing your PhD? I am, yeah. I'm really building on kind of my previous experience in research. I think I mentioned this on Tuesday afternoon that my master's research was focused around working with my grandfather to record oral history of our community that he had, that had been passed down to him from his grandmother about her grandfather, who was the first white duck to kind of settle in what's now our reserve, Kiddagon Zeeby, and that really sparked my interest in kind of family stories, so I found Brenda's presentation about genealogy just fascinating. So, yeah, I'm planning on building on that, so what are you up to these days? Well, we've been, I've been working a lot in communities, and I guess that's where you and I wanted to really talk about is what sort of work we've been doing in communities. My work stems around governance practices, traditional knowledge, traditional ways of knowing, but also how can we use that today in more contemporary governance structures, and economic development is another area. So, I've been working a lot with the communities these days in and out of communities all through the year from the east coast to the west coast to February spent up in the Arctic in Arctic Bay at minus 50, which there's an interesting story there. But by the way, I always tell Malorie, I said, when she's being bad, I call her black goose instead of white duck. Bad joke, sorry. What's hope? So, community-wise, how do you find the difference between the United States and Canada? Just, I'm curious of that myself and especially working with, you know, different communities. Yeah, I'm still settling in, and for me, it's been an interesting experience because it's my first time going outside of my own kind of traditional territory. I've always lived either on the reserve or in this Ottawa area. And for me, like, it's interesting to be a visitor for the first time because I'm used to really being very much kind of doing this kind of close insider research and starting from that point of already having really established relationships to build research from. So being there is a great learning experience. There's still a lot of Anishinaabe people and territories around that area, so that's good. But yeah, it's a completely different experience and the age of Trump, I know, is he wasn't president when I decided to move there, FYI. With the community like that, how do you get in then to the community? How do you get to know people? How do you get to talk to the people? Who do you talk to in that way? Well, I did visit, I don't know if anyone's familiar with Mount Pleasant, Michigan, but they have a Saginaw Chippewa reserve right next door that has this amazing place called the Zeboing Center. And it's a museum with like a large archival collection, and I was visiting the archive there, speaking to kind of the importance of archives, to look at this really old book that was bound and sort of this traditionally tanned deer hide cover. And so this museum is on the reserve, as they say, the reservation. And so I was just kind of like hanging out, looking at the book, and then kind of just walking around their library. And then I ended up just kind of chatting with the people who were working there. And I ended up kind of in my conversations with them being invited to this community lunch. And even though it was a different reserve, I was a visitor. It felt like home, like they brought me to this other center where they were doing like a language lesson, and people were repeating commands and kind of laughing at ones that sounded kind of like dirty jokes and how it can be on their threads. And yeah, so I think it's just, for me, that's a lot of what it comes down to is just kind of like being open and just open to kind of getting to know people, building on relationships, like we've been talking about at the institute, kind of how do you build a relationship with anyone is the same process for building a relationship with your kind of like research subjects. I had a question for you. Just thinking about some of the past work you've done, because I know you do a huge amount both in your scholarship, but also kind of on the corporate or business side of things, you do a huge amount of work in First Nations. So I'm wondering kind of, if you'd like to share any challenges you've had or yeah, any challenges you've had kind of doing all that work. Nope. So I have a question for you. Joking. I'm always kidding, by the way. There's always challenges. I think that one of the, you know, it's funny how much you get influenced by even every single day that you're on. I was on a phone call this morning when I had to leave David's presentation, and I apologize to David for that. And it was a group I'm working with, a creative community, and they're having these struggles internally because there's so much conflict of interest happening that, you know, how do you basically fire your cousin, right? And so they're trying to be mindful of this, but then there's different things that are happening. So, you know, it's really tough when you're working in a community, especially if you're outside of the community coming into the community, realizing that there's so many interconnectedness, just like we heard from Brenda, was that even in communities they're so interconnected, right? And that conflict of interest there, and that's just a fancy word for it, right? It's just everybody's related in one way or another. I mean, there's usually three families per reserve kind of thing. And it's tough because you can't just apply all these, you know, uniform, compartmentalized things like, well, that's a conflict of interest, you need to fire him, but that's my cousin. How do I fire my cousin? And then especially when you're going into a community, you know, who do you talk to? And how do you work with the people? And the one thing that strikes me is interesting and is language, and not just traditional language, but when we go into communities, and I was recently up, as I mentioned, in Arctic Bay, and we're new scholarship for the Aboriginal University Support Program, and I was working with some of the Inuit, and the one, the head there of the council was struggling with the word aboriginal, and he was like stumbling over going to aboriginal, enriched support program, right? And I was like, man, you guys don't use that term. He goes, never. And it's like, Indigenous, never, right? So these are all terms that we have here that we use at the institution to talk, but in the communities, you know, you go into the communities and the languages, you got to be a lot more accessible. You just got to talk to somebody like you're at a kitchen table, and you got to find out who you talk to and go in and sort of mingle. And I love your story about, you know, going to the culture center because I did that out in Simshan territory where I just showed up to a museum and started talking to them. And they said, oh, come for lunch or dinner. They said, come to dinner. So Ashley Siskel and I went to dinner as a friend of ours. And then they told, just told us everything. Oh, you got to talk to this person, you got to talk to this person, you got to talk to this person. But through that conversation, and just within an hour, I found out that there was a traditional governance structure there of traditional chiefs and an elected chiefs. And the next day, we were holding a meeting, which was, it was basically a corporate council and Aboriginal relations, which had everybody from the CEOs of CNCP, SNC Laval and all these big companies, and the community. We had the traditional chiefs, we invited in the regular chiefs, the elected chiefs. And there you go. And so right in the middle of the meeting, they were called in to negotiations because they were just negotiating the Kitimat port, which was a multi-billion-dollar deal and contentious with the communities because it's all within the traditional territory. And it was going nowhere. And so right in the middle of our meeting, and I remember Ashley and I having a panic attack because all the Blackberries went off of the CEOs and they said, we'd just been called back in a negotiation. So up they went and started moving towards the door. And then about a minute later, the elected chiefs got called, and then they were up, and they said, we got to go to negotiation. They were at the door. And we were sitting there saying, looking around, or like, something's wrong here. And I remember Stephen Lindley, his VP of SNC Laval, and I was like, Stephen, thanks for destroying our meeting, first of all. But the second of all, look around the room. And it was all the traditional chiefs left. And I said, why are you guys not in the negotiation? They said, we're never invited. And when I asked, and when I got involved in it from that point forward, we realized that nobody knew that there was a traditional chief structure because they never asked. And these are the questions like, you just got to go in and just ask and be with people and talk to them and not talk about intersectionality and stuff like these, which doesn't exist in our minds, but it doesn't exist in the language of the community. Yeah, as a theoretical framework. Yeah. It's practiced, but the language that we use in academia isn't necessarily always the same. Exactly. You know, it's interesting that we both kind of had these experiences of being so welcomed into the communities that I think it's worth kind of picking that out of our conversation a little bit. Because I think sometimes we do this institute to prepare for doing research with indigenous communities, and it's all very useful. But sometimes I think when you are kind of thinking things through, it's important to think about it, obviously. But at the same time, we don't want to kind of build up any sort of expectations that reach the level of like a heightened fear of like not wanting to approach people. Because I think if we think about our, the two kind of experiences that we just mentioned, the particular first nations that we were visiting or communities that we were visiting where some of the most friendly, open and my experience welcoming, just kind of caring and loving people that I think that deserves to be sort of mentioned and also taken into consideration. Because sometimes when you're thinking about approaching a community, you get it in your head, there's this history of like research that's been done poorly, and it's created these barriers to researchers coming in, which is absolutely true and exists in many communities, this kind of level of distrust, but also like first nations and you and Métis communities are some of the most like rich, funny, wonderful places. That's a humor. Yes. The sense of humor in a room full of like yeah, native people is just. And you know you're in when the elders start picking on you. Yes. But isn't it amazing that we're just talking about this to some people is that like if I bring my boy or my girl into the community or into anywhere pretty much or anybody, kids will find kids and be playing within 10 minutes, right? I mean it's just and they're off running around and then they come back. That's my best friend forever. And as researchers, we're still sitting there saying, you know, what's the proper protocol? Can I talk to this person and who's my list? And can you get me an introduction here and things? And honestly, a lot of times it's just and I do this believe it or not on vacation, I just my wife did driver nuts, but I stop at every reserve, right? And I just like, oh, there's a reserve, right? Go to the gift shop. And I usually knock on chief and council's office. And I'm like, I mean, don't be scared. I mean, just walk in and just start talking to people and say, Hey, how are you doing? I'm from, you know, the East. I just want to drop by. And I've had a lot of interesting experiences with people just doing that. And they're saying, Oh, you got to talk to this person or what do you do with this? And it's amazing how it just that interconnection happens. And but the one thing that I will, I mean, going cold into a community is really difficult at times, right? And it's always nice when you find somebody that's been there and then or knows somebody there. Even in the last couple of days, I mean, you know, I've talked to somebody who's going up to car cross, and I'm like, Oh, Ashley's worked at car cross, I got to connect them. And they know and, and then, you know, someone who's going up north. And I'm like, I got to connect you to this person. Because once you have that connection, then they'll say, Oh, these are great people. You need to talk to my cousin. You need to talk to this person. You need to talk to that. And when I went up to Arctic Bay, they had a list of who I need to talk to, right? And I was like, Holy cow. It's like, Okay. And I says, But you got to go to this elder's place. She's the oldest elder in Arctic Bay. And, you know, go see her. So I brought her up from Kitak on Zebia. Actually, it was a beautiful little birch bark basket that that I had that I had. And I thought, boy, I'm being cheap, like I'm bringing up this small tiny little basket, right? I'm like, I should bring her something bigger. So gift giving, gift giving was, was important. But she lived in and it's not an igloo, but it's, it's a sod house constructed. It was minus 50 out. And she had no heating, no anything in there. But what she did of heating, she, she had two oil skin lamps that heated and it was beautiful in there. And I gave her this gift and that's where she lives. And she's an amazing elder. And once I talked to her, it was like floodgates of community opened up, right? And I gave her this gift and I was like, Oh, you know, I just did something little. And she, and I looked around and her space was no bigger than this. So it was a small gift. And I told her, I thought it was too small. And she says it's perfect for my little area. And right here, and she put it up with, she has all these little trinkets of things off from all over. But it's those kind of things, find out who the elders are, right? Find out who the chief and council is and who's, who's there, find out who some of the traditional people maybe are and, you know, find out who are the families in the area that you're going to work with and talk to them and, and, you know, meet people and that networks you out. And that's, that's the only way you get into community. And you have to be there. And that's the other thing I think you and I have experienced many times is you can't just call a community and you will get no response. And then you got to go be with the community. You got to go, even a few days in a community, you can amazing how, how ingrained in you can get into a community. Yeah, I think, yeah, I think it's also important to follow the lead of what the community kind of wants, the type of relationship that they want, because I think we've touched on this a little bit throughout the week that communities, they're really so unique and certain communities will want, will want this full on relationship and they really feel that that's the only way that they want to engage in a larger research project. Others on the other hand might think, you know, I want this, you know, thing to be done in two years. I have a lot of work and I'm going to kind of like move on in a different direction in the future. And I think really kind of having those initial conversations to ensure that like your, you as the researcher and the community's expectations about kind of where this will go, how long it will last are clear, because I think often when conflicts inevitably happen, it can happen because perhaps there was these different expectations that were set up at the beginning that maybe didn't match up, because I think, yeah. Especially expectations around time. Yes. Time seems to slow down the further you get away from Ottawa. And yeah, when you get into communities, like even relationships, it takes time. And you know, you're on a fiscal schedule here, but in communities, I mean, we just finished in Cree Nation Goose Break, right? Which is good luck getting anybody for two to three weeks up there at Goose Break. Forget it, right? And all of a sudden your research are like, how could you do that to me? And expectations can even differ from individual to individual within the community. Like part of my background, I worked for two years at the Native Women's Association of Canada doing research on what was then their Sisters in Spirit project, which was some of the earlier research on missing and murdered Aboriginal women and girls. And part of that was to work with families of women who had been murdered or gone missing to kind of form their entire life story. So starting from kind of their childhood and building it up to the event of their disappearance or death, and also kind of going into sort of the aftermath of how the families coped and dealt with police and different issues like that. And can imagine when dealing with kind of more traumatic subjects like this, families didn't always want to have kind of this ongoing relationship. It was something that they would engage with me as a researcher to do because they wanted their daughter or mother's story to be shared, to be out there. They wanted to counter sort of the media attention that just kind of painted them one way and show that they had this entire rich life. But some families did want a relationship. Like they wanted to talk on the phone and because this was a national project, so there were people all over. While others kind of just wanted to do the work, interact changes back and forth by email, and then kind of move on to the next thing. So it was all very individualized and I think it was important to kind of treat that research in that way where we really let the individual families kind of set the expectations of the type of relationship that they wanted to have. And some relationships took place during the time period of that research project, while others I still see from time to time, have on Facebook, that kind of thing. And it's interesting you say that about the relationship between the researcher and those they're working with. But also, and we were just talking about this earlier, is protection of self. And that's one thing that we don't talk about here as we're talking about this relationship. But you worked at NWAC, you worked with some very sensitive material, some very traumatic material. And then as a researcher, you're going to take that on. And I've known many people to go through that experience as friends of ours who it really can destroy you. It will eat you up. You take on trauma. I mean, it doesn't matter where you're from. So you have to protect yourself in that way. So I know that you said you always maintain this grounding outside of just your research, as well as you had family and it's ceremony and different things, as well to keep yourself well grounded. Because if you take on that trauma, you're not going to do well as a researcher at all. Yeah. Yeah, it's totally important to find those things that ground you and kind of give you that balance. And for me, I was doing at that time in my life kind of these two research projects. I was working full time at the Native Women's Association. I was working and I was working on my master's part time and that was doing research that was very so the research with my grandfather where once a week I would drive up to the res in the winter. And, you know, he'd be coming from the bush in his snow shoes, just like those ones that are on the table over there. And we'd go inside have tea cookies by the fire talking about, you know, his life experiences and our ancestors, some funny stories, some just straight up like logging stories. And that really, it was like food for the soul. It really kind of like enriched my spirit and gave me the strength to be able to bring my best to this other work that, you know, the families in that case really deserved. And he signed your waiver of consent form of being able to talk to your grandfather. Yeah, that was probably one of the strangest experiences of my life. I was really hung up on, you know, having to set this tape recorder in front of my grandfather and give him this consent form. And I spent a lot of time thinking like, this is going to be so weird. Do I really have to do it? But the answer was yes, I had to if I wanted to actually, you know, get this degree. But that brought us to that conversation about, you know, because you and I were, what, why do we have to do this as community members, especially I'm like, why do I have to go through the academic, you know, no offense bullshit when it's my community, and it's my family and everything like that. But then we quickly realized that again, as we mentioned the other day was that that access that you have is precious and it's special and they might be telling you stuff that you don't even realize because you're so close to it. So REBs actually can help and say like, well, wait a sec was this, you know, would they have told you this if you weren't, you know, in this position where you're recording them and using that information. And we're like, yes. So I remember that transition, even you and I went through that and we're like, yeah, you know, you're right. Absolutely. It's good to have that voice to help you out and, you know, bring you through that. Exactly. I think we're time for a few questions. Yeah, we want to bring you into the dialogue on the podcast. Absolutely. Less reluctant or more reluctant? Sorry, yeah. Or reluctant. Yes, reluctant period. Had that experience yet, luckily, I'm not far enough into my doctoral research where that has come up. But I think, yeah, it's something that is definitely possible and that I'll deal with as it comes. And I think in my case, I would just have to kind of like respect individuals as not wanting to be a part of the research. And I would never kind of apply any undue pressure to try to get them just because I'm in the family or in the community to try to get them to participate. I think kind of along those same lines, another concern that I would have is with this kind of insider research role is, as Ronnie just mentioned, people might get to a point where they share more than they would with another researcher. So Audra Simpson, I think I mentioned this the other day, talks about refusals in her book and having to, for Indigenous researchers, having to take this extra step to know when to draw that boundary, when to turn off the tape recorder, when something shouldn't be shared because it's more community or family knowledge than outside. But yeah, I think that's definitely something that I don't know, have you ever experienced that? I mean, I have, and it's persistence, persistence, persistence in a lot of way. I mean, you show up in a community and you say, okay, I'm here, let's go. And community says, whatever. And then you're there the next day and you're saying, hey, I just want to, I'm coming for the, I'd like to come for that feast. I heard that you're doing and stuff. And they're like, all right, you can come to the feast. And then next day, it's like, you know, hey, I want to talk to it. It's like, well, you're still here, right? It's like, why are you still here? And it's like, because I'm interested in sick. Oh, if you're showing that kind of interest, then we'll talk to you, right? Too often, it's, yeah, I mean, I love that mosquito thing, right? Because I'm allergic to mosquitoes. So that sucks for me. But to avoid that approach, but sometimes they will refuse and sometimes they say no, because our capacity in our communities is just not at the level in which we can deal with the amount of inquiries that come in. So if you're calling into a community and trying to set up appointments and they're not getting back to you, we don't have the capacity. I mean, it's just honestly, at one point, there was a community that told me that they get something like 40 to 60 calls a day from companies and from things like that. And they just, they just don't even bother answering them anymore. And so there's, there's, there's things like that are happening. You know, there's good things and bad things in communities too. And as much as the, I guess, one of the last things I'll say is, you know, the two-eyed seeing thing is, you know, it's an interesting concept. But I kind of criticized that a little bit myself, because I think that as community members, we're also very individualistic as well. We are not always just communal. We have to be an individual strong within the community as well. Individuals have egos and we do have egos, but we have to check it and balance. And, you know, sometimes there's anger, sometimes there's emotions in all the range that go along with individualism as well, which is in, which is in our communities. But we have to be in a good way. So, you know, the two-eyed seeing approach is that also, I look at researchers and I look at everybody in here and you've all got good hearts. I mean, everybody in here wants to do well and do good intentions and you're not that cold hearted side that, that portrays us as, right? And as both, as word warriors, as we call ourselves, we're part of both of those and we align them together. I'm not a, not a huge fan of that terminology because I think it binaries us, right? And it puts us all into this one category of a mosquito when we're not. You know, everybody in here is proof of that. But it does exist out there. I mean, I get it somewhere, but I've never met these evil people that they all talk about that are out there, you know, even from corporations that are out there to screw people over and stuff like that. People are people. And I think that's the biggest thing about relationship and relationality and building those relationships. Some people are going to like it, some people are not. It's just people. Thank you very much. I have a question. So, I really appreciate showing, or you sharing, the knowledge of communities. And in the academic circle, the other day, we were talking about how to navigate some of what you've just talked about where there's actually conflict within the community or there's parties of different opinion. And I just wondered if either of you have any experience navigating that type of situation where you may have widely differing opinions within a single community and how you would handle that or any advice on how to handle such a situation. Oh, boy. Yeah, I'm in one right now. What the question is making me think of is when you were talking about sitting in that room with the hereditary chiefs. And when you were telling that story, I was thinking that would have been a really difficult situation to be in because you said first the executives left the room, then the elected chiefs left the room. And how did you navigate that bringing forward the idea that those hereditary chiefs should be involved when those elected chiefs left the room? And we're clearly not involving them in the process as an outsider. How do you bring that forward in a respectful way? So does that kind of touch on? It's a good example. Yeah, that was a good example because there was a little bit of conflict between traditional chiefs and chiefs because the traditional chiefs and even some of them call them chiefs for life. You're not chief for life. If you do something bad, you can call yourself chief, but you're not going to be a chief anymore. So there was a little bit of conflict there. And I did talk to the chief about it, the elected chief about it. And I said, well, what can your traditional chiefs offer? And the interesting thing was, as I said, well, they're not involved in the negotiation because they don't have the financial skill sets and stuff that we need. And this is a billion dollar deal for us and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And I said, so what do your traditional chiefs do? And he said, well, they know the stories of the land. They keep the landkeepers and stories of the land. And it was almost like a light bulb went off on that chief. And I remember that moment of sort of like, man, they're talking about the land. And so for him, he said, yes, we should probably bring them in and have them talk about the stories of the land. And ever since Delgamuk, which now that it's admissible in the courts of evidence is oral history, they held the oral history. So there was that conversation that went along. But part of it more was, and I got to give all the credit to Stephen Lindley, who is the vice president of SNC Lavalin, right? I mean, here's this white guy sitting there going, no, damn it, we're going to bring in the elected chiefs. And he said, I'm not going into the negotiation. And he stopped, you know, CNCP, all these people and said, we're not going to negotiation ourselves unless the traditional chiefs are there. And it turned out the Port Authority said, we didn't know there was traditional chiefs. So, I mean, that conflict got resolved. And, you know, it was interesting because it was all about the duty to consult, too, which has absolutely zero power, right? And it was frustrating because it was, I forget how much it is, but it's like every single one of them was losing a hundred million dollars a year in consultation. So there, and, you know, that's billions of dollars. And it's GDP worthy, right, of what this is. So they're all frustrated right now. And you got to wade through that frustration, right? On all ends, from government frustration, to academic frustration, to businesses and corporations, to community frustration, there's a lot of it out there. So, yeah. A researcher in a community, it would be useful to remember not to gossip. And that's really important because of what you have to say, are there, even if it's a compliment to, you know, factors that don't agree with what's happening in the community, they'll hear about it. And you're really in trouble. And so it, and also in terms of, like, don't get involved in the controversy. I'm glad you did in that particular situation, but it's often not that cut and dried. But to be very honest and sincere in your dealings with, with the community, and you would build up a trust much more quickly. But, and also you're under scrutiny by everybody. And they might be gossiping about you. Oh, they will. But, you know, you just have to be aware of those very human interactions. And it's part of protecting yourself and your project, I think. It's my view. Wise words. Absolutely. Don't get involved in the gossip because that'll kill your research faster than anything. And it's hard not to because once you get involved in community, you get involved, right? And it's who's with who and who's doing that. Yeah. And you don't want to build trust with someone through gossip at the expense of, you know, other people outside of that particular circle. For sure. Yeah, that's a great practical tip. Thank you so much, guys. Thank you. Thank you so much.