 And now I would like to just take a moment to introduce Naomi Sarazan from the Center for Aboriginal Culture and Education and a very dear friend and one of Carlton's very active people for Indigenous welfare and issues. Here she is. Kwe Kakinah, Naomi Indigenous cause, Keisun Adana Ki. My name is Naomi. As John mentioned, I work with the Center for Aboriginal Culture and Education. My role this morning is to help moderate the Q&As following the keynote speaker this morning. So with that, I would like to introduce our keynote speaker Julie Bull. She is an award-winning researcher and educator of mixed Inuit descent and is a member of the Nunut Kuvut Labrador. She has more than 15 years of experience in community-based research with Indigenous communities. And her academic background is interdisciplinary with a focus on research ethics and methods for research involving Indigenous peoples. She works with communities, researchers, education policy makers to implement wise practices involving Indigenous peoples. Today she will speaking to how research is relational and how we can move towards achieving reconciliation by implementing its principles and putting them into practice. So basically, we will learn from her of how we can walk the talk. So please join me in welcoming Julie Bull. Thank you very much for that lovely introduction. Can everybody hear me? Mike's on. Video's good. Everything is all working as it should. All right. So as Naomi said, I'm going to talk a little bit today about research is relational and what that means in the way of practice. We hear a lot about what to do, what to do, what to do. We don't hear a lot about how to do it. And so I hope that today I'll give you a little bit of idea of how to do some of those things. My clicker is working. Never mind. So I'd like to start by, of course, acknowledging that we are gathering today on the traditional and unceded territory of the Algonquin Nation. So Miigwetch, thank you for being keepers of the land and allowing us to be here today to gather, to learn, to share in each other's knowledge and wisdom. So a little bit about me. I know you just heard enough about me. But part of this idea of research being relational is that we have to situate ourselves in that work that we're doing. Whatever that might be, even if you're not an indigenous person, you need to find out and understand why you're doing that work. Why are you interested in this work if you're not an indigenous person? If you are an indigenous person, why are you interested in this work? How do you locate yourself within those positions of the work that you're doing? So I wear many, many hats. Researcher, evaluator. I teach at U of T. I do research methods work at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. And I will talk to anybody who will listen to me about how we can do this work differently than we've been doing it in the past. So thank you all for being here to listen today. People often talk about intersections that we work in and we all do, right? We all work at various intersections in working, especially in indigenous communities. And so we will often think of intersection as being these two lovely things that just kind of come together. In the work that I do, I feel like the intersections look a heck of a lot more like this. And I'm sure with the laughter, you're all relating to that in your own work as well, that there's many, many intersections coming together. So how can we possibly make sense of all of those different conflicting, competing, different types of understandings? One of the things I want to kind of start this foundation of the talk with, and many of you, if you are an indigenous person working in academia or in research or in policy, you will feel this tension of feeling like you don't really fit in either world. On the one side, you have your community, you have the way that things operate there. It's not always congruent with the way things operate in academia or in governments or in different levels of how things work. And so for people to be aware that this tension is implicit and explicit for indigenous people working with you and on your teams and in the work that you're doing. So understanding that this tension is a real thing that can implicate or can have impact for people who are working in indigenous contexts. The foundation for all of what I'm going to talk about today is this idea of research being relational. So science has a great way of artificially compartmentalizing everything, right? We put it in a tiny little box. We have a very specific research question that we want to tackle and understand. But we then forget that that's connected to everything else. And so I remember probably my first or my second year of grad school when I gave a guest lecture at a social work class at Dalhousie. And I put this slide up with research as relational and all of the students, we couldn't even get past this slide. We then spent the rest of the talk or the class just talking about this because that's different. This is different than how we're taught research methods in university. It's completely different. And so we need to understand that when we're looking at things in indigenous contexts, they're different. The foundation of what we're doing starts different. Therefore we need to do something different in our practice. I love the title of this particular article. It's done on HIV. I have the link or the citation below. But this idea of that if we follow our hearts, then we provide that path for other people to also do it. When I started doing this kind of work 15 or 20 years ago on research ethics, nobody gave a crap. Nobody would have ever... There would not have been 50 people in a room listening to research ethics for indigenous people back then because nobody really cared. It was preaching to the choir, people who already knew it, people who already lived it, people who already did it. We were there, we were talking about it, but it wasn't this wider acceptance and understanding. And so what I want to remind people then is that when we do that, it's important to follow your heart. Do what you think is important. All those people back in the day telling me my philosophy degree would be useless. Finally, I have something. The philosophy degree came in handy despite everybody saying it wouldn't be. Though I do want to also say to you to remember to bring your brain with you. Don't follow your heart, but take your brain with you because sometimes that can be a bit of a conflict, even within ourselves of how it is that we move forward in those kind of ways. I'm sure that you're all used to seeing this kind of idea that the magic really happens when we're outside of our comfort zone. Yet we still all tend to spend our time in our comfort zones at our desks, in our offices, whatever it is. Wherever our space is that's safe and comfortable for us to be, we're there. And it's hard to step outside of that. So I think for people in this room today, you've already done that. You're outside of what's typical for your work. You're in this environment to learn from each other and to figure out how you can start doing things a little bit differently. So I want to talk about this idea of two-eyed seeing. Has anybody heard of it before? A couple people. So there's an elder in Nova Scotia. His name is Albert Marshall. I've had a great privilege of knowing him for many, many years. And I saw him speak probably 15 or 20 years ago when they were first starting to pull together this idea of integrative science. How do we bring indigenous and Western perspectives together? We recognize that there's value in each. There's things that are important in each one of those types of knowledge systems. And in fact, one time Albert Marshall said, the Creator doesn't give us anything that's not useful, including Western science. So it's this idea then, indigenous people lived here long before Western science, long before Western medicine. So how was that? How did we survive during all of those times before the way things are now? So on the one side, we have this Eurocentric view. This is how things are taught in universities specifically. So in graduate school and the further you go in learning research methods and theory, it's very competitive, right? It's egocentric. It's all about me, me, me. What can I do? My degrees, my publications, my presentations, it's all about I. But then on the other side, when we start looking at indigenous perspectives, that competition piece is gone and it becomes more collective and collaborative. And so then somehow, when we bring those two together, indigenous knowledge systems, indigenous science, western knowledge systems and western science, then together, using both of our eyes, we then actually can start seeing things differently, understand phenomena in a different way, find solutions to problems that we couldn't before when looking at them from only one perspective. So this word reconciliation, I mean, I think it's driving most of us crazy because it's just everywhere now. What does this even mean, right? We're trying to restore these friendly relations that may or may not have ever really existed to begin with in Canada. And then, of course, the relationships are the way in which two or more people are connected. And we live now in 2017 where we can't pretend anymore that we're not all living here together. We're all here together and we need to sort out some way that we move forward in doing so. And we all have a responsibility in that reconciliation. It's a two-way thing. This is not just indigenous people educating non-indigenous people about things. This is not just non-indigenous people saying, I'm sorry, do something. I heard the walk the talk thing earlier. Let's do more of that. The doing of things in reconciling. Head of myself, just do something. This is kind of the point of the whole day, right? For us to take away, even if it's something very small, to just do something differently than you do now. So the context, I'm going to talk a little bit about a couple of projects I've been involved in and so just kind of give a context overall. We know that Canada as a country has tons and tons of laws and policies and ways that things are governed. And then each and every province and territory then also has its own. A lot of my work still happens where my family is and where I grew up in Labrador. That province has its own unique set of laws and policies with Labrador on the top. And what we see here are all of these policies that are based on our geographical belonging. So we can't help that, right? By virtue of us all being in Ontario or whatever province you're from, you are somehow bound by some of those laws and governing policies. Then where things get interesting, we bring in the people. Just for simplicity's sake, though, I don't like to compartmentalize everybody, breaking it into indigenous and non-indigenous people. Of course, all of these have different governance structures. We have different historical laws and ways in which we understand the world. And then here, we have all of these policies that are based on our ethnic or our cultural belonging. So then what happens in this space between the two? I think we're seeing that all over the place. I mean, right now I know an example back home that's close to me is with the Muskrat Falls Hydroelectric Development Project. There is a huge tension happening there about what Canadian law says and what indigenous law says. And I mean, that could be a whole talk, so I won't go off on a tangent about it. But if you don't know, I do encourage you to support people who are standing up for the water and for the environment. For all of us, this is not an indigenous issue. It's not just indigenous people who drink water. It's not just indigenous people who eat the plants. We all do that. So I think it's important, first of all, to hold that responsibility together. So what does all that stuff have to do with research ethics and research ethics review? It really is about indigenous people's rights to self-determination. And so this is, again, a bigger picture than Carlton, Ontario, Canada even. We looked at things like the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. And again, this is another document. If you have not heard of it, if you don't know it well, it's a reference document that I think is important for all Canadians to read and to understand, especially if you're working in indigenous context, to know why some of the resistance might exist, to know why some of the challenges might exist in the communities that you're working in. It might not just be what you see now in 2017, but rather a whole history of what's been happening in that community. So in the United Nations Declaration, they're very clear about talking about self-determination and that indigenous peoples have that right. We have an inherent right to determine our own governance structures, our health, education, economy. And of course with that also comes the governance of research. So for those who may not know, it was a decade ago in 2007 when the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People was adopted. And at that time, it was rejected by four of the world's biggest players, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. It was then almost a decade later, so in May of 2016, finally, Canada decided to adopt the UN Declaration. But then only two months later, less than, it was probably about six weeks when we learned that the UN Declaration is not workable within the current Canadian law. So again, we're seeing this conflict between this declaration of Indigenous rights, Indigenous governance, Indigenous law and Canadian law. They don't fit. So it's now been a year since that announcement of it not fitting. How far do you think we've come? Do you think Canada has fully implemented the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People? No, because it doesn't know what to do. So instead of doing something, it does nothing. So I encourage all of you and whatever your jobs are to do something. Right? The doing nothing part isn't working. Something. Just do something. So if we rewind just a little bit, we look at the UN Declaration that's out here now. We look back to 1996, which is now just over 20 years ago. And here in Canada, we had the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. So much time and money and energy and resources and all the things that went into producing this report with tons of recommendations that really hasn't done much since then in that 20 years. They did a lot of the talking around renewing a relationship with Indigenous Canadians. How many people in here have heard of RCAP, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples? Oh, good. More of you heard of that than the other one. I'm glad to hear that. Do you think that we've done a very good job yet in actually rebuilding this relationship with Indigenous people? Lots of head shaking, no. This was 21 years ago. And so it was also around that same time in 1996 that we saw the last residential school close in Canada. And then of course we waited quite a while, 12 more years after that for the Government of Canada to acknowledge and to recognize and to apologize for what's happened in that. That's almost 10 years ago now. 2008 is almost 10 years ago. What's happened besides the apology? When we see children and they say sorry, but then they keep doing the behavior, right? Eventually you're just like, well, the child is clearly not listening. It's not learning. It's not doing the thing. It's not sorry because it keeps doing it. So how is this different? We keep hearing, I'm sorry. But are people's actions different now? We heard from the Prime Minister at the time, of course, the objectives of the residential school to remove and to isolate children from their homes. And then I mean the very bottom line here, to kill the Indian in the child. And this is something that was very pervasive and this continues to happen. While this might not be as explicit anymore in some of our policy, the Indian Act is still alive. There are still lots and lots of policy that exists. And people who make decisions in our research, even for example, on your research ethics boards, who approves the work that gets done at your institution? Who is teaching your students how to do work in indigenous communities? If all of that's still happening from the top down, from non-indigenous people's perspective of indigenous peoples, then we're really not making that much progress. We did then, of course, hear about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Another time with a lot of energy, resources, money, and all the things that go into that kind of work. And, of course, calls to action made for all Canadians, regardless of what kind of field you work in. It doesn't matter if it's in justice, or health, or education, or where it is. There is a responsibility for all Canadians to do differently. And so, of course, the focus here is in education. Most of us are working in education institutions, or we're affiliated in those kind of ways. And as Justice Sinclair has said to us, it was the education system that really got us into this mess. Because while indigenous people were being taught that we were inferior and somehow not good enough, non-indigenous Canadians were being taught that exact same thing. So for many, many years, we had two streams of education happening where we were all being taught falsehoods that then continued to carry with us. So what I'm hopeful about, also in Murray Sinclair's words, is that it was education that got us in this mess, and it will be education that gets us out. And I really do believe that as the person in my family being the first to graduate high school, and to go on and do all the other things, I see the change that that makes for people in our communities. And so I'm very glad to see things like this happening on university campuses, where we're gathering together to learn different ways of doing this kind of work. So I think the time for action is long gone. I mean, I don't think it's just now. It's been around for a long, long time. Certainly it's here now. And I saw this tweet a little while back. It was just first when the missing and murdered Indigenous women's inquiry was starting to be talked about. So in the early 90s, we think our cap's going to be a game changer. Then in the early 2000s, we think that the TRC is going to be a game changer. And then we think that the inquiry is going to be a game changer. I don't know if people have been following the media with the inquiry, but I don't think that it's quite doing what people had hoped it was going to do. So we keep finding ourselves in this, and nobody prompted me, whoever was saying earlier about the walk the talk thing, that wasn't pre-discussed. Anyhow, we do have this great way in this country of saying one thing and doing another. So I'm always reminded about that. When I hear about that, it was with Maya Angelou. When you think about, we do the best we can, right? We all do that. Until at some point, you learn better. You know better. And at that point, shouldn't we do better, right? Once we know better, then we have a responsibility to do better. Yet somehow, so many of us find ourselves knowing better, yet still not doing any better. So what can we do about that? How can we start figuring out ways that we can work with each other and even with ourselves and in our communities to instead of talk one way and walk the other way, actually have it so that they're in balance with one another. The balance that many of us seek is that very notion, right, when our thoughts and our behaviors and the ways that we feel are all in balance with each other. That's the kind of thing that we're looking for. So finding ways, then, for us to actually walk the talk and to not be afraid to do it. I mean, often it's kind of trailblazing or it's doing it for the first time, and it can be hard. And sometimes you might be the only one or two standing to do something. But then over time, you'll start seeing people will join you and people will help to start spreading the message of how we can do this work in a different way. And back to my original thing about the philosophy degree. Many people over the years have told me that I was crazy and couldn't do this kind of work, and it's too hard. And how can you expect to change university policies? How can you expect to change how governments work? A little later, I'll talk about a project in Newfoundland and Labrador that's been doing just that, and it's been doing it for the last 11 years. And so I think in a small place like that, you can kind of look at them as a wise practice. How are they doing that there in a place with multiple and political and cultural jurisdictions? It's not simple. It's not easy. But we're sorting out ways to make that work. So let's get to kind of the meat of what, I guess, you're all here to learn a vote or to talk about research, ethics, development in Canada. It wasn't until 1998 that we had the first policy in Canada, the first tri-council policy statement. And then I've just listed here a few of the major players that happened in that early part of the 2000s, drawing your attention to the three that are highlighted. The first around 2004, the ownership, control, access, and possession. I won't talk a lot about this today, but just to know that it's a First Nations way of governing research. And then around 2006, 2007, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research put out their first draft of guidelines for research involving Indigenous people. This was specific to health, but certainly a lot of the principle-based work that they did could be applied in other jurisdictions. And then right around that same time, we saw the second edition of the Tri-Council Policy Statement, which now has a full chapter, chapter nine for research involving Indigenous people, whereas the first chapter, or the story of the first TCPS, had section six, which was just a tiny little paragraph that said, we don't know enough yet to create policy in this area. Stay tuned. And so we stay tuned for 20 years, and then TCPS 2 came out. There's a lot of criticisms of the TCPS 2 from community members, especially who were so actively engaged in the consultation process for CIHR, who felt like their voices were actually included in that document, and they weren't in the TCPS. But of course, TCPS 2 is the policy. That's the one that we follow. I will talk about, after in the Labrador example, we do still draw on the CIHR guidelines. Even though that's not the policy, it still exists. You can still find it online. And you can see some of the language that's used there that people in communities prefer over the TCPS. And so I came in on the ethics thing here around 2005 or so. I was at some of the community events for the consultations on the CIHR guidelines, and then I just couldn't stop once I got on. Oh, ethics wasn't just a philosophy thing. It wasn't just a theory thing. It wasn't just a thing I could apply in research. It was also a policy thing. It was also all of these different intersections coming together. So I felt like I found my messy place to start sorting through some of these things. Then of course, as we know, the Tri-Counsel Policy Statement for Research Involving Humans, the major focus of that whole policy is on the individual. So this is true of all research ethics. It's about protecting individuals in research. And so it's based then on the same principles as all research ethics, back from the Second World War, where you can laugh. It's okay. The autonomy, beneficence, doing no harm and justice. These are like the foundations for individuals. Remember, this is for individual participants in research. Then when we look at Indigenous ways of understanding, and OCAP is just one of many, many examples. It just is one of the bigger documents that exist. The focus shifts then from the individual to the collective. So obviously, individuals still important, right? Obviously, we still need to have individual consent. We still need to ensure confidentiality, not necessarily ensure it. We have to talk about it. Sometimes perhaps communities don't want to be confidential in the work that they're doing. But nonetheless, the shift is then moving from the individual to the collective. And so we're moving away from those individual protections to looking rather, oh, these poor stick guys are really like losing half their heads for some reason on this computer. We base it now on these more broad and foundational principles of respect, relevance, reciprocity, and responsibility. And I mean, of course, all four of those can be like a whole half an hour talking about just what each of them mean. But in a very basic and foundational way, it's that we're respecting the communities that we're working in and that we respect that they know things about what's happening in their community that we possibly could never know by living outside. I was at an Arctic conference once where I gave a very short, you know, those 10-minute scientific talks that they make. You give at conferences where you can't really say anything because it's only 10 minutes. And I talked about engaging Indigenous people in Arctic research. And this scientist came up to me the next day and he was just like, you could see his face so utterly blown away with what I had said the day before. And he's like, I've worked in the Arctic for 35 years. It never once crossed my mind to talk to the people there. This brilliant scientist who, whatever, right, never even crossed his mind for 35 years to talk to the people there because he wasn't studying the people. He was studying the ice or the seals or whatever he was studying and did not think that perhaps the people who live here all year long might have some valuable insight about that ice or those seals or that plant or whatever the thing was that he was talking about. It all often comes down to this idea of ego, right? Back to the beginning. Let's go back to that two-eyed seeing thing I talked about when we have the Western, very individualistic way of understanding. This is what it looks like. We're at the center. We are the center of the universe. And all the rest is there to somehow make my life better. Though, I mean, I think we should know that the Earth will survive without us, right? We can't survive without it, but it can survive without us. So somehow we need to shift from this very egocentric view to this much more natural one, where we are just one piece of this natural existence with the plants and the animals and all of the elements. We're just one. We're not at the center of it. We're just one. So even this slide alone shows the difference, right? Academic researchers, people who are trained from an ego place may have a hard time understanding, how do we do this in a way that's integrated? How do we do this in a way where I'm not the most important thing after all? I'm just merely a part of that circle like everybody else is and like everything else is. This foundational difference, individual versus collective, and changes how we understand the work. So even within the TCPS2, it talks about these relationships and it's not just relationships with each other. It's relationships with the spiritual world, with the natural world, with the social world. How many people have like taken a biology class where they talk about spirit? Anybody? Anybody ever take a physics class where you talk about love? Like these things are not commonplace in western science. They are integrated. They're part of indigenous science and indigenous knowledge base and indigenous knowledge systems. They're part of it, not separate from. And so that can be really challenging for people because for however many years we've been on the planet we've been force fed that it's individual, but that's not the way it is. Let us look back to our communities who are getting it right, who understand the interconnectedness of everything, who understand how bringing together the spiritual, the natural, the social, the cultural worlds all together. There's so much wisdom and insight to learn from communities who are doing it that way rather than this individualistic way. So with OCAP and like many of the other indigenous types of research ethics protocol and process that exist, there are kind of three foundational pieces that made a movement towards that. The core, as I mentioned at the beginning, is self-determination, self-governance. The inherent right that indigenous people have to govern their own people, their own lands, our own communities. Then the history of research with indigenous people has also contributed to that. And I mean there's not time today to go into all of the history and not just history. Even now in 2017 there's still things happening in research that indigenous communities are being exoticized, they're being romanticized, they're being all sorts of things in research that are just not appropriate. And then of course there's been an increase in interest and capacity within our communities. Not just not to do it like an academic way and to like give into the way that the western society is doing it, but communities are getting interested in figuring out how we can actually provide education to institutions. Communities do research all the time. How do you think hunters and gatherers and everybody, we use research all of the time for those things. We don't always call it that. We don't call it research ethics because that's not really in our language. We talk about doing the right thing, being true to yourself, doing that kind of work in all of the different pieces that we're involved in. And that's not meant to be seen as a roadblock, which is what so, so many people think. I hear this all the time, especially for my students who are like, but my degree is only a year and I want to get it done and I don't want to have to go through all that ethics and it just seems like too much work. It's not meant to be seen that way or as a roadblock. It might take extra time. In fact, it will take extra time. It is a lot of work up front, but then that's what's rewarding is that you build that together and then you have built something that will sustain you long, maybe even longer than you want it to. Maybe you would like to walk away at some point, but you can't anymore because you've built something together now and you're part of it and that will go with you. So not meant to be seen as a roadblock, but rather a way to weed out those projects that perhaps have no benefit, no value, missing those things like respect and relevance and reciprocity that we talked about earlier. And then of course, most importantly, it's about building the relationships with our researchers, communities, policymakers, students. A couple of the ways in which people around the country are, I don't know why those words look so small on this computer. But anyway, in Ontario, in the Manitouan Islands, they have gear, which is the guidelines for ethical aboriginal research. They focus on things like community empowerment and respectful partnerships. In Quebec, in Ganawagi, also talk about similar things. Empowerment, responsibility, self-determination. In Manitoba, they have created this diagram that shows you the complexities of applying OCAP, of applying ownership control, access, possession and indigenous ways of understanding ethics with the various people who may use that data. This again, of course, it can be complex when we start talking about maybe health data and personal information, those sorts of things. But is it different? How do we know how to do this work when it's with a government outside of our communities? What if it's with somebody who works in our community? What if it's a band member? What if it's a community member? What if it's somebody from outside who's never been here before? Do we apply the same blanket across everybody? Or do we kind of look at it in different ways? And so what they've done in Manitoba is illustrate the different ways that it works. The giving and the taking, the coming and the going of knowledge and data, depending on what your relationship is with the community that you're working in. So when we look at the Chapter 9 in the TCPS, which is of course the policy that we should be adhering to, there was consultation at the national government level for this document. So the five national Indigenous political organizations were involved. But again, the criticism from the communities is that there's a disconnect from grassroots Indigenous communities to national political organizations. And so there's something missing there. Then the perspectives of the people in the communities were not necessarily heard the same way as they were in the tri-council. So there's three kind of underlying questions that I would like you guys to think about. Maybe there's time at the end for you guys to process, maybe get in groups to think about these. First is how can research even proceed responsibly against this backdrop of colonialism and inequality? Secondly, where does the paradigm of individual consent break down? And why? And third, what is the role of community involvement in research? So these are kind of those three foundational pieces. And if we just look at them in three simple words, we see here that we're back to those same notions. First, it's self-determination, then research and relationships. So it's back to this, we know this, but we don't really know how to put those plus signs together to make all these three pieces fit and work together in a good way. So if you haven't figured it out by now, it's all about relationships. And this is the same as, like, imagine the first time you go on a date, the first time you meet a new relative. All of that stuff is still the same, right? The awkwardness, the not sure what to say, the stepping on your foot, the putting your foot in your mouth, all the things that we do when we're not sure yet. Maybe we're meeting someone from a new culture for the first time and we don't know. So what we know about them is what we've seen in a movie. So how could we possibly know what to say or how to interact or what to do? The relationship we build in our work and our research is the same. There's still relationships. And this idea that those professional relationships are somehow different than our personal ones, that's what holds people up and holds them back and it's why people can't actually get through their work because in our communities we will see those relationships as being relationships, not professional relationships, their relationships. We want to know how's your kids, how's your mom, how's your aunt, how's all the things. We want to know those things, not just how long is the proposal, what's the budget. Like, okay, we can get to those things but perhaps first can we have just a human conversation about how things are going. Simple things like that. In the TCPS, I'm not going to go through the whole policy. It's kind of long and drawn out and boring. Here's what it boils down to. Here are the foundational pieces. It's all about collaboration and relationships and building that together, the partnerships. It tells us very well what to do as I'm sure many of you know what to do. How though? How do you start to do these things if you don't already have a relationship in your communities. As the TCPS reminds us, we are all responsible for finding the guidance to do the work that we need to do. When I first started doing this work, critiquing CIHR and TCPS 15 years ago, there weren't many other people doing that. It was hard to find. So when people would call me up and be like, can you please just tell me some things? I'd be like, okay, fine. Because I know it's really hard to find them. But now in 2017, there is no excuse anymore because you can even just use Google and type in Aboriginal research ethics and you'll find so many rich pieces of information. Some is peer-reviewed academic literature, some is community-based, some are YouTube talks. There is a little bit of everything. The information is out there. A lot of communities have their own research processes in place. They know and they will say no. So it's about us as researchers, policymakers, whatever our positions are, asking questions, finding out what applies to us. Not expecting Indigenous people to bury or to bear the weight of all of that extra work. We can do that, right? We all have computers. We all have smartphones. We all have the ability to do that work ourselves. So when I was doing a project in Labrador, this was how many research ethics processes I had to go through. So you can imagine that for a two-year project, it took a very, very long time for me to get all the approvals. Over a year, in fact. And I knew that starting out, which is why I started early. If I had kind of went on the trajectory that the university told me I had to, I would have... I don't know how long it would have taken to get ethics, but I would have had to wait until after my coursework and none of those pieces would have been able to fit into place. So did it take extra time and effort during that time? Absolutely. During coursework to be able to also then do all the ethics submissions and all that. But it's important because when you have four or five different communities with different processes and a couple of universities and a regional health authority and all the players, you submit once. And then of course we all know that the REB doesn't generally approve it the first time around. You've got to find something to fix in there. And then you fix it, but then now maybe the other guy doesn't want to approve it anymore. So if you have these seven or eight different processes, this can just somehow be a... you're a hamster on a wheel, just not being able to sort through it all. So it can be quite this cumbersome long process. And now my clicker... Nope, there we go. A lot of people in our work in Labrador kept talking about how sick they were of all these policies. Like why is it? Why does it feel like every time you guys come back up here you're coming with a new policy or a new document or a new this or a new that? Will you just do something already? Right? Just do it. Like why do we have to keep waiting for... Who are we waiting for? We're waiting for the government to tell us? The university to tell us? We can just do it already. Always getting ahead of myself with this to do something slide. So I know for a lot of students this is how you feel, right? This is how we often feel. Like every way we go is the wrong way. And I know sometimes I still feel like this because whenever I work in a new community it's starting over again, right? Like I might know how to do this in my community. I know how to do it really well in my community. Or yours, or yours, or yours. So every time is like the first time. And you learn some things and you think, okay, well I think I know what I'm doing. So you start to try. But often you will feel like you're up against many, many, many challenges and barriers. And this is not usually from the community. I don't find that that's not where the challenge is for me. The challenge is in what the institutions expect that we have to do. Especially when we're working in communities. Because community-based research is different. Doing real community-based research, not like that you're saying you're doing it, but you're doing something else. The actual doing of community-based research, that's different. And universities don't really know what to do with that because it's not what they're used to. It doesn't fit their linear process. And so you will be up against these many, many challenges. But I hope to share some insight about how we can sort through some of that. So first is by having this idea of a GPS. And in this context, it's guiding principles and strategies. Because unfortunately for us, Garmin does not make a moral GPS. We can't just like punch in, I'm going to do such and such a thing. Is that okay? We don't know. So instead, we're left with the old-fashioned moral compass. The what's right and the what's wrong. And I know that whenever I work with elders and my family and my communities more broadly, this is what it's about, right? I have this idea that research ethics and all of that language, it's not even part of our traditional indigenous languages. But what is, is to do the right thing and to be true to yourself. And I think to do the right thing part, I think most of us would agree that we would like to think that most researchers are doing the right thing. I don't know if that's always the case, but we would like to think they're doing the right thing. But are they being true to themselves? Are you? When you do your work every single day, five days a week, six days a week, however much you work, hopefully it's not more than that. Are you being true to yourself? Are you doing what makes you feel authentically you in doing that? Or are you challenged so much by the systems that we're working in that you don't even feel like you can be you? How can we sort that out? Those guiding principles and strategies are what we talked about already. Respect, relevance, reciprocity, and responsibility. And then, of course, the fifth R of which all of this is based is the relationships. If you have the relationship, the rest will come. You will build on it. You have to work at it. You can't just, like, show up. You got to do more than that. You got to actually work on building the relationship. But then the rest will come. And so these then are kind of the building blocks of the work that we're doing. If we're truly respectful of the communities that we're working in and we're ensuring that the work we're doing has benefit and reciprocity for them, for their community, not just for us to get a degree or a publication or a promotion or whatever the thing is that we'll get from a research project. And it's about the responsibility that we have to communities and to ourselves and to the work that we're doing in these areas. And so to talk a bit about the authenticity, this was one of my greatest learnings from my graduate work, even though it wasn't what we were talking about. We were talking about health policy. But what was exciting and what stuck with me all these years later was about being authentic. And how can we do that? How can we figure out ways to be our authentic selves to be true to ourselves in these systems, especially true for indigenous people who find themselves in these systems? Because it's different. It's so ass-backwards from what we're used to. And so it makes it very challenging sometimes to be true to ourselves in a world that seems so counter to how we operate. And so one of the ways that we can all help ourselves sort out how to do that is to go back to some of our original teachings and to understand what that means. I gave a talk recently at a research ethics board meeting. It was a full day pre-conference, which I was super excited about. And for the first 90 minutes, one of my elders came and for 90 minutes just talked about the sacred teachings. And nobody else, everybody in the room were non-indigenous. Nobody had ever heard of it before. And everybody just left with this sense of, whoa, I can't believe I now understand this in a different way. And of course, as a person at the research ethics board reviewing this work, how valuable is it for me to understand these seven teachings and to know what that is for indigenous people and how that fits within the work that we do? Isn't this ethical? Aren't these things ethics? Honesty, humility, truth, wisdom, all that stuff kind of sounds like ethics, right? And so it was really great to see a whole lot of research administrators and ethics boards understand these very foundational human elements of what they're doing. So I want you to do all of those things in your work. Go back to all of the things. Even if you're not an indigenous person, you can learn lots from indigenous people, but also from your own cultures and your own communities. There's so much wisdom and knowledge that exists beyond the right now that we often forget about. And so I will encourage all of you to just soak up all of the things that people have around you. And we're talking here, of course, about practice. So it's the practicing of things, right? One of my great friends says, it's called a practice not a perfect for a reason, right? Like we have a medical practice, a dental practice, because it's not perfect, and there's not always just a linear line, there's no prescription of exactly how to do it. It's a practice, it's a thing you keep doing over and over again. Even if you fall flat on your face, keep doing it anyway. You're still moving forward, you fall flat on your face. So stand up and try it again, and keep figuring it out and practicing until we get it. So one of the ways that we've been practicing it is in Labrador. I'm going to talk very briefly about this research project funded by CIHR a couple of years ago. And we're really trying to understand this intersection and relationship between researchers, research ethics boards, funders, and communities. Because really it's all of those, and many more. There could be more circles, but just trying to keep it somewhat simple. We'll just look at the four. So we had two goals of our project to get funded by CIHR. We needed an academic goal. So that was how to best implement this system of governance in very complex political and social jurisdictions. And then on the community side, which of course is what we were most keen and excited about, was how we set up this rigorous system of ethics review for people in our communities or our lands. And I want to draw your attention to that part, the and or lands. The TCPS is for research involving humans. Research ethics boards look at research involving humans. They don't want to look at research that does not involve humans. However, in our communities, we recognize we are part of the land. And so if the research is being done on the land, it has to undergo the same sort of rigorous review process as it would if it involved humans. Which of course is different, again, than most others. The design of our project was explicitly a partnership model. You'll see here in the circles, or maybe you can't see in the circles. We all kind of wore many hats. Some of us were community members and academics, trainees, part of regional health committees. And then of course we had a couple of academics who were not part of the community team and only kind of came in at the end to help write the theoretical stuff and weren't really interested in the applied piece. But then the rest of us were keen and interested in the applied component. How do we actually build this in our community so that the community can sustain that moving forward? Not so that we have to be there. We don't want to build more work for ourselves, right? We come into a community and we have to start staying there to review all this work for years and decades to come. We need to figure out how do we do that so that we can then build something that communities can take and move on with themselves. So nationally, as you'll recall from what I've talked about already, we had the Tri-Consul Policy Statement happening. We had CIHR happening. OCAP was happening all around those same times. In the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, there was an interesting movement happening. There's legislation in that province, the only one in the country yet that has legislation for research involving humans. So all research involving humans, not just indigenous, all humans must undergo this provincial research ethics review process. This is in addition to your institution. So if you're from outside of that province and you go to a different university, you still have to do that and you still have to do the communities, but then you also have to go through this provincial board. And then locally in Labrador, our communities were gearing up to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the British Inuit Treaty of 1765. So there was things happening on all levels around governance and around land and about how that works and who gets to decide what happens on our land. So what a perfect opportunity for us to start understanding how this works there. So what did we learn? As this little guy down here in the corner is trying to do is fitting the square peg in the round hole. That's certainly how it often felt doing this kind of work with governments and universities and communities, all with our own priorities and things that are important. The biggest thing we learned, of course, was the idea around consent and what that looks like. And then the bigger picture, not just consent, but how we actually design our work together. So this is kind of a very basic image of what it looks like for researchers, right? This is the most part. We have our idea. We have a design. Then we write a proposal and get our REB approval. And then we'll go to the community and be like, look at our pretty shiny proposal we wrote. Isn't it lovely? Don't you want to be part of this? You too can be part of this. If you just come and do all of this work for us for free, you too can be part of this project. And so communities are like, wait a second, why have you already done all of this work before even having a conversation with us? So of course we knew from the very beginning that that perspective needed to be changed. And instead it looks something more like this. You can still have your brilliant idea. I mean researchers always kind of get angry at me. They're like, but Julie, I still really want to have my smart ideas and like do all that. You can still have that. But then instead of going and writing a whole research proposal, first pick up the phone and call the community. Simple things. Back to the relationship part. Have a conversation. Is it even something that the community is interested in? Do they have time? Do they want to participate? Because no matter how brilliant your idea is, if you have no research participants, you have no project. So I think people need to realize the implication that that has. And communities are really firing themselves up and are saying no to researchers more and more. And I love that because it's helping researchers take a step back and go, oh, if I really want to do this work, I have to do it differently. I can't just keep doing it the way I've always done it because they're saying no to me. And without participants in my project, I have no project. Then my brilliant idea really doesn't mean much anymore, does it? It's just like a brilliant idea. So the very first step then, once you have your brilliant idea, is to build this research agreement. And that might look different. In some communities I work in, that's like super formal. It's kind of legal. It's long. It has everything written out that you could possibly ever fathom. Other times it's super short. It's not even written down. We have a conversation. It's oral. We agree what we're going to do and we move on. And then anywhere in between, they can be anything. But you do that first. You decide what roles and responsibilities will you have in the project. The researcher, the communities, who will do what? Where will the money come from? Are you hiring community people to do the work or are you expecting them to do it for free? All those things should be talked about up front. Then you design a proposal together. Again, no prescription will not be the same everywhere. Sometimes someone might want to write it. They might want to physically actually write it. Other times they may want to do it more collaboratively. Sometimes they might be like, I don't really care. Please go write it and then bring it back to me when you're done writing it and then I'll read it. Like it depends, right? Every community will be different. Ask the question. Don't assume you know. Don't assume that indigenous people can't write their own research proposals. It's a very false assumption. A lot of indigenous people can write better research proposals than people in academia because they look at it more holistically and can see how things actually impact each other rather than that one linear way. But yet we should ask the question. And don't assume that people in the community have all this time to give to you because for most people, research is the off the side of their desk thing. Their job is front line. Their job is service delivery. Their job is something else. They just understand the importance of research. They're not getting paid for it though. It's not part of their job. That's just the thing they stay till 10 o'clock at night to get done. So please don't expect them to do even more of your work that you get paid quite well for at universities and governments and all these other places. Then we go through the rest of that process. The community approval comes first. Not the university approval. And this is right in the TCPS. They're nervous and think they're like breaking the law or something. I don't know what people get scared about. There's no ethics police, by the way, despite my friends calling me that. There aren't any. So you get the community approval first. The community says yay or nay. And then you go to the university and get their approval. And by then, your ducks will all be in a row. You will know so well what you're doing. You'll have it all figured out. That institutional review process should not seem as onerous anymore once you've now went through this relationship process. And then, of course, it's the ongoing engagement. This is a thing that happens often. People think ethics, consent, whatever, is like this point in time, a hurdle to get over that you just, I got through ethics. I'm done now. And then you never have to think about ethics again. You think that's how it works. So now you can just do anything, whatever. Because there's no ethics police. I'm going to do whatever I want. So this doesn't seem quite right. Not just for indigenous research, for all research. Ethics is not a point in time. It's ongoing. Consent is not a point in time. It's ongoing. And so to recognize that and to actually practice it in your work, revisit it. Even if you need to, like, put in your calendar, every four weeks I'm going to sit down and actually, like, look at my REB proposal and, like, am I doing it? If that's what you need to do, do that. Otherwise, have conversations with your community. Is this right? Are we still on the right track? Is this still okay? Like, this was okay six months ago. But now that things have shifted and evolved, is it still okay? Ask. Ask permission as you go. The consent has to be ongoing. So if we look at these two kind of models together, the one on the bottom is how universities typically operate, we see that indigenous people are left out of half of it. We don't even get a say in writing the proposal or doing any of those pieces. So then, of course, the preferred method is that we do a collaborative model. That we design projects together. That we work on it together. So the REB, of course, like all other REBs in that province, looks for the typical things around validity, benefits and risks, complete of interest, all those typical REB things. What the community looks for, because, of course, the REBs don't know what the community knows because the REBs look down the bottom of the province, which is typical, and then indigenous people all over the place. So we require review by the whole committee. And, of course, we also recognize this is probably not the best approach just because of how cumbersome this is on the system to have full reviews every time research involves indigenous people. But for now, we don't know a different way. What is a better way to ensure that we're not exploiting indigenous people in research other than to make sure we have a review process in place. And no research in Newfoundland Labrador will be approved by the provincial board without the approval from the community first. So other jurisdictions can look to that province to understand how we're making that work there. We're making sure we're applying the policy from the TCPS that communities have a say first and that they approve first, and then it goes to the institution afterwards. And so the indigenous community, their review or our review systems will look at the things we've been talking about so far today. Respect for the cultures and knowledge systems within the communities and our identities, not just individually but collectively. We look for things like relevance to our community needs and wants. There are lots of things that are brilliant ideas but they're just not appropriate or applicable right now. Maybe they might be applicable or appropriate next year but right now things are different. Making sure there's reciprocity of the research benefits and participation. We often hear in some communities about being researched to death and that's true, then in other communities we have virtually no research happening so we don't even know where to begin about any kind of baseline data. So how can we start making sure that we're being more reciprocal in sharing that kind of benefit of research across multiple communities? Our community review looks for things like ensuring that we are being responsible to minimize the risk of research and to maximize the benefit. And of course, we can't expect that every research project will have huge outcomes that benefit people in really big, tangible ways but there are ways that we can make sure that we're at least reducing the risk and that we're giving as much back as we can. We don't have to be just research. Maybe you could do an afternoon session on how to use PowerPoint, how to use Microsoft Word, how to build a website, how to code. There's so many other things that are not specific to your research that you probably know how to do that you could just spend a couple of hours sharing that skill in the community and then that helps people be like, oh cool, we can like learn some things while we're doing this too. It's not just like giving this research something back. Also feed them. Always, always, always feed them. Always feed them. And then our review in a community also looks for the relationship. So of course we know some relationships are new. Not everybody will have a 30 year relationship with a community when they're coming in. Some will be brand new. This is the first time. But there has to be evidence that you're actually committed to that community. Not just I'm committed for the six months to do this data collection and then I'm getting at a dodge and never coming back again. So that's something a bit more than that. And then sometimes of course there is not a community review process and in those cases the research ethics boards look for a researchers documentation of what that engagement process looks like. There is no necessarily right or wrong way of doing engagement. I mean it looks different. You go and you have a chat with people and see what may happen. Have some music have some food, have some things like that to bring people out. And then we look for letters of support from people in the community. Of course the challenge they may or may not speak on behalf of the community. We never know that for sure right. Even where we have a chain of command where we think maybe chief and council for example. They may not always be the people that speaks on behalf of the community by way of what research priorities are. So there's complexities around who speaks on behalf of whom. And as I mentioned briefly we talk about this continuum of community control and most times in research indigenous communities are expected in these top three where participants and advisors and facilitators and we do everything like we find the venues and get the participants and buy the food and find the hotel and drive you around and do all the cultural things and take you on Skidoo and show you everything you want to see and you expect us to do it for free. Then yet we hire students right we hire them at a relatively okay wage to do some of this kind of work for us. So increasingly starting to see indigenous community members being hired as research assistants research coordinators research directors and training our community members to do this work. You don't need to be a PhD student to be able to do a survey. You don't need to be Dr. Fancy pants to be able to do an interview I guarantee it. In fact some elders I've worked with are better interviewers than many academics I work with because they're compassionate and they're caring and they're really in it and they're not just there for the ego right they're there for a bigger and better reason and so I think it's really great when we're able to see community members sharing those skills in our research projects and of course for most communities the goal is having our own research offices where it's not this you guys coming in all the time but rather it's us coming out and finding you and saying hey let's work together on these projects rather than the way it's usually still done it's academics that approach communities so a little bit of a note to us all to look at the bigger picture this is not just like Ontario or Canadian context this is happening all over the world and so lots of places have been looking to Canada as a leader in indigenous research ethics which is sometimes terrifying when you look at how things operate here but we are a leader apparently in the world so we can take that I guess just south of us in the U.S. this year I actually haven't looked in the last few months but the National Congress of American Indians and the National Institutes of Health have collaborated to do something similar to what we've done in Canada with the T.C.P.S. 2 chapter 9 and so it's already on their website supposed to roll out as policy in June of this year so I'd be curious to see if that still actually happens now that they've changed government in the past little while a little farther away also in New Zealand and Australia we see this kind of work also being done around ethics and how indigenous people are working in this kind of work in the Scandinavian countries they've been talking about it for a long long time but not much movement has been happening there with the Sami in fact I just recently chatted to one of my colleagues who just defended her Ph.D. in Finland and they're actually talking about doing something like truth and reconciliation in Finland so I'm curious to see what may be happening in weeks months and years to come in that respect so I think we're now at a point where we can kind of act global and it's not just the thinking global part anymore we can actually act global many of us are connected to global networks where we're doing a lot of similar work and how great can it be if we start sharing that with each other and learning from each other instead of starting over every single time every time we just keep starting over instead of building on the foundations that we already have so four things that I practice that I feel like perhaps can be helpful to other people in doing this kind of work the first one is getting out of this deficit based model that we're so so stuck in and this is especially true in indigenous context right like I think every proposal I've ever read every paper I've ever read the first paragraph talks about all of the damning negative inequities that exists for indigenous people how often do I get to see a celebration of my community or talking about the successes in our community so so rare but they're there I know them I see them with my own two eyes they're there yet that's not what the public sees the public sees the deficits and so while there are deficits of course I think it would be naive for us to just pretend they don't exist but we don't need to focus on them that's not where the focus needs to be because what we focus on is what becomes even more so so if we can find in those challenges the opportunity to do it differently then I think that's one of the ways that I know helps me in my work in being able to do this because we find what the strengths are even in hearing like you know all these different terrorist attacks that are happening you look for the people who are helping right you find the good in what's happening because in all of those instances there is good happening there are strengths there are positive successful things for us to focus on so I would say that is the first thing to lose that deficit based model secondly we focus a lot of our attention many of us in providing equal or equitable services and while I think I mean we see here this illustrates equality is sameness right we all get one box but then from super short I still can't see anything with my one box so to be more equitable give the short guy two boxes then we all get to see the same thing but I think that there's a third option and this is the one that I focus my attention on and that is where we actually address the systemic barriers to begin with and there is no fence there is no barrier there is no need for additional accommodation or anything different we actually address the systemic barriers to begin with and start to slowly dismantle those systems the third one the third thing that I try to do is to just suck less this is my favorite quote from one of my research projects when we were just talking about like what can people do one of the community kept saying people just need to do something different what do they need to do just suck less just suck less and I think I mean okay so how do you quantify that I don't know get up this morning how much did I suck yesterday oh god remember that mistake I made it was so so bad today I will try to suck a little bit less than that and then if every single day we could reflect and suck a little bit less than the day before imagine right at some point we probably won't have any sucking left at all to be done we will just like we will have figured some stuff out and so in learning how to do that we build this kind of collaborative model the first part about being consultation of course we hear this all the time there's duty to consult indigenous people blah blah blah make sure you consult but that's just like one tiny little piece is it a consultation if I just come here like talk at you for 10 minutes and then leave well I mean I've consulted them I told them all about my project that was perfect they heard it all there has to be communication and like that the real communication like the actual conversation and dialogue back and forth not the talking at just like I'm doing right now at you for this whole hour just talking at you not that that's the type of communication I'm most people prefer like a couple people in small groups or having conversation and dialogue and then third we need to have cooperation finding those pieces that we actually agree on because while there's going to be differences absolutely we're going to have differing opinions and beliefs and perspectives there will be things that we agree on and so we find those we find the pieces that we understand together and we work from that place of cooperation and then finally of course in this context but not just in research it's about consent and again it's ongoing so the consent can't be just implied you got it on day one you need to get it again on day five and again on day 25 and again on year 20 you can't just take day one and think that that's blanket consent for the rest of your life to do with whatever you want and then when we start to put all those four pieces together we start getting that real collaboration people on all sides of the table start feeling that they're contributing that they're getting something from each other that they're giving something to each other that it's reciprocal that they're learning that they're building that relationship collaboratively and collaboration is not just this idea of gluing together all of our 50 little egos together in one lovely thing it's not that collaboration is that there are many ideas that don't even exist until we are in the room together and then you say one thing and it spur me and then it spur something in you and then all of a sudden we've created something that we couldn't have even fathomed before we came in the room together and then finally participate in the community don't just show up with your fancy shoes and your briefcase on the day that you want to come do surveys and wonder why nobody came to your community to do surveys you have to participate be there and we're getting into Palo season now so it's a great opportunity they're happening everywhere they're all over the place go enjoy dance celebrate see what culture is all about I especially enjoy doing this with scientists and researchers who don't they work with human specimens but they don't work with humans right so like they work with brains or with organs but they can't even really understand that there's a human being attached to those things and so for them to go to a Palo and see and to just celebrate culture and understand there's more to that person or that brain or that liver than just a liver right there's a bit more to it than that and so then understanding that is so so important for people and in understanding how we work in our communities we build this kind of circular motion of we try something it may or may not work we check it out we reflect on it do it again if it worked don't do it again if it didn't work or figure out ways to change to and it just keeps going there is no beginning and no end it's kind of the joy of the circle right I mean it just it just keeps going as long as we're willing to keep going with it so those four very basic simple things using a strength based approach it's hard you will find yourself constantly going back to the negative I teach a course at UVic that's called wise practices in indigenous community health the whole course is about wise practices positive things things that work not one deficit the second anybody myself or it starts talking about deficits we bring the conversation back to strengths so it can be done number two addressing the systemic barriers they exist in whatever system we're working in all of us and I think we all have a responsibility to play in helping address those barriers that exist at that systemic level because all the rest of it will never change one of my colleagues has a great presentation called HIV is not the problem in relation to indigenous people's health the same is true of addiction of poverty of all the things blank is not the problem it's a bigger systemic problem that we all need to work on addressing and just suck last if every single day we just suck a little less than the day before and participate in the communities participate in whatever the place is that you're going to don't be like that arctic scientist who never talked to people for 35 years don't be like that guy like nobody likes that guy be the nice guy he goes up and like has a conversation right about what you're doing so we all then have that responsibility when we leave here to carry on whatever if you've learned only one thing if you've learned 20 things this week I'm sure by the end of the five days you will have information overload if you take one thing with you then you have a responsibility to enact that when you go back to your job your school or wherever it is that you're going to so some of the other things you can do right now that are not specific to research or policy or any of that stuff but just kind of general how do you learn more about indigenous people by indigenous products I'm so sick of seeing soft mock moccasins all over the place there are so many really talented indigenous people who make moccasins and I guarantee you that you can find them wherever you live you can find these people to buy from them there's ways that we can do more by making sure we understand what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is reading it, if not all of it because it's long at least the calls to action 94 of them, it's not that long we're used to reading lots of things figure out not only what is your responsibility in addressing that, what's your families what's your friends can you like have a chat about it over dinner some night what are ways that you can encourage children to do something I'm encouraged by children because I hear the younger students are finally starting to learn some things in school now so when I give talks to adults little Johnny came home last week and he told me about it so I'm hopeful that perhaps those little people are going to change things a little differently as I mentioned when you're participating in community, attend the local festivals whatever is happening in the community, not everyone will have hotels or casinos or places for you to stay and go but people will be there sharing in their culture and community find ways to participate in that go have tea, just go, just be there you don't have an agenda people really like to have agendas I'm going to be here for four hours and it's going to be just like this every six minutes doesn't work, just show up and see what happens I want to leave this question in your head this is from one of our projects in Labrador also and I hope that none of you will do this what do researchers really mean by partnerships is it just a way to get through the ethics approval and yes I think for some people it is just a way to get through ethics review I've sit on Research Ethics Board and you can see and how people write that they're not genuine in this engagement process they're like, yeah, I talked to the chief one afternoon he said it sounded like a great idea is that your engagement process is that what that's called you've built something together based on a five minute conversation not likely so one of the reasons why we feel like we're doing something we have lots of challenges and deficits too but we're focusing on the successes and the things that are working well is because in our work in Newfoundland Labrador we so far have three of these four who are working together of course it's always the funder that we can't get quite yet and that's where one of the biggest challenges is but we have the communities and researchers and REBs working together to understand what makes sense for all of us because everybody the researchers and the REBs also need to have it so that they can function in their jobs how do we do that in a way that's good for everybody so we bring back to this self-determination research and relationships so to kind of clue up because I think all that's between me and you guys is lunch right now or lunch is what's coming next after I'm done so I want to remind you that if you change nothing, nothing will change and I hear this all the time people are just like you say something like oh this is horrible nobody wants to change so you say to people who wants to change who wants to change everybody puts their hands up but then who wants to actually change nobody nobody wants to actually do it everybody wants things to be magically different but nobody wants to put in the effort and the work to make it different and I think we all have to because it's not going to work if you just have the one or two people over here beating their head against the wall the status quo when we know better, we do better and so as we start to do that then we have to do things differently and that is also to do the change and I always am I'm like the grand optimist always even when things seem very negative but I think it is amazing that we don't have to wait for anything every single one of us in this room right now can do something differently than we have done before we can all leave here and have a conversation with somebody chat about something different we can improve the world around us right now we don't have to wait for governments to approve a funding pot we don't have to wait for anything we can all change our world right now and if every one of us did that imagine the ripple effect that that would have remember at the beginning when I said when you follow your heart you provide that path for others same is true here they are inspired by you and then they might also do that and then we will keep changing the way things are working right now I want to remind you of the two I'd seen in all of your work I don't think this is specific to Indigenous work I think this is important for all of our work imagine the bringing together of multiple perspectives and you have this always when you chat with your colleague who's from a different country there's people from all sorts of different backgrounds different than yours and we need to find our ways to communicate and to connect with them and that is to use multiple ways of understanding and multiple ways of knowing one of the greatest lessons I have is like an overachieving type A let's do everything kind of person is to learn to slow down and to not live by that clock that we have right like the running behind all the time living in Toronto sometimes I specifically just stand in the middle of the escalator I can't help it because like everybody's in such a rush to go nowhere and I'm just like it will take you an extra 10 seconds so sometimes I just can't help it I'll just stand there and listen to all these people behind me freaking out that there are going to be 10 extra seconds getting to the top of the stairs and then I realize I don't want to live that kind of life where I'm in such a mad rush to go wherever I'm going I know the general direction I know the general direction of where we're going as long as we do that we can follow life by the compass not a clock and that's far more valuable I think for our own personal sanity and peace of mind but then just generally speaking to avoid those rat race type things in subways I can no longer attribute this first quote to nothing without us nothing about us without us because so many participants have said this to me over the years so so many why are we still in 2017 doing research on indigenous people why are we still thinking we know something about them othering why are we still doing that we need to all have a part to play in the indigenizing and the decolonizing or whatever language and trust me that means something different to your institution than it does to indigenous people I can guarantee you that it does but include them include indigenous people in your work don't just have it as a token where you have one person at one meeting at one time that's not it it has to actually be integrated and be part of it in all of it and though it's hard to believe because I've been standing here talking at you for so long I do believe that it's better for us to listen than to talk and so of course we have one mouth and two ears we should learn to use them proportionately and to listen more when we listen we might actually learn something new when we're talking we're just repeating what we already know over and over again and if what we already know is back to that early slide with the ego in the front if that's what we know and that's what we're professing and that's what we keep teaching how is that changing anything we need to be challenged in those perspectives and to think differently and more holistic I encourage all of you to be reflective and yes you can be this kind of reflective if that's what's important to you but also be reflective be reflective in how you work as you go and leave here today and you think how can I suck less tomorrow well to do that you'll have to be a little bit reflective on what you did today know it's okay to trip up and make missteps they're gonna happen we're all gonna make them we all do we have to be uncomfortable we have to learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable because in these kind of scenarios we're working in different communities with different people with different interests and agendas there will be moments of tension there will be moments that feel uncomfortable do we just walk away from everything that we feel uncomfortable with there wouldn't be never divorce rate would be 100% like if we did that right I mean if every time we had a disagreement with our spouse then we would never work so we need to have the same kind of investment in our research relationships as we have in our personal relationships because for indigenous people they're not different no like okay we're not having sex with our researchers we are having an intimate relationship right that's it's also an intimate relationship I think people need to remember that and so in doing all of this work we're bringing together the theory and the learning there's so much that happens that we hear about we learn from and then we practice it and then we sort out did that work in this context or not and then we kind of continue to move forward and so what I'm really really excited about is that the grassroots voices are getting louder and louder and louder and in some provinces and territories the answer is almost always no unless they have been involved from day one in research and I love to see that because 10 years ago that wasn't the case people were saying yes because they thought they had to I thought I had to say yes to Dr. So-and-So from Fancy Place in Toronto because they're Dr. So-and-So from Fancy Place in Toronto like they must know something because they came here and said we want to do this study so we just said yes but now people are saying no and so I'm very excited by that I want to leave with this kind of notion of authenticity this is from Brenny Brown specifically authenticity is not something we have or don't have it's a practice a conscious choice that we make on how we want to live authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day it's about the choice to show up and to be real the choice to be honest the choice to let our true selves be seen and so I think the power of being authentic the power of being true to yourself and your work will inspire others to do the same it will inspire others to start shifting these systems that are keeping things the way that they are now and remember that though it may seem terrifying at first when you start doing that you do start seeing magic really happen when you step outside your comfort zone whatever that might be maybe it's just simply having a conversation with a person that you wouldn't have otherwise had a conversation with those little tiny what seem like little tiny things can actually have quite profound impact on the work that you do so I will stop talking with that and entertain any questions that people may have thank you if anybody has any pressing questions just put your hand up and I'll bring the mic to you very powerful presentation I guess I'd be curious to know if you're starting to see some shifts at all with NSERC I was thinking of your anecdote about the arctic scientist I no I don't that's the easy answer I feel like it's the slowest I mean CIHR I thought that SHERC would be the first one to make the move but I really think CIHR was but then when the TCBS two came out and the CIHR guidelines were no longer considered I don't really think that the others have made the same kind of strides NSERC specifically and I think that we shouldn't be surprised by that right that the natural sciences are going to take a little longer than the others because it doesn't seem as relevant we need for them to understand why it's relevant and it's easier when we talk about in the social science or humanities we're dealing with people it's easier to see how it relates when it's with people but when I'm studying zooplankton it's a little harder for me to understand then why do I need to do this engagement and why do I have to spend all this time and energy and money and all of this to make that work I think it needs to I think it absolutely needs to but it makes sense to me why it's a little slower to get to that point Thank you so much it was just an amazing presentation so much to take away I wanted to ask you about universities we still finding universities that the model of competitive achievement that one-eyed vision is a kind of systemic problem do you have any strategies for trying to change that so some researchers are kind of bound by that and I think that's part of the problem Yeah and it's really challenging because if you think even then bigger picture I know some academics who are trying really hard to challenge that process and to do real collaborative work but then their career is held back they don't get the tenure and promotion as quickly as their colleagues they can't possibly produce publications as fast as their colleagues because they're doing groundwork in the community that takes that time and effort what I see happening it seems to be happening more in smaller schools and bigger institutions which of course also not surprising that smaller schools can move things along a little faster there's a few on the east coast for example Cape Breton University in particular tiny little school people don't even know that Cape Breton has university and like they're doing really cool things I gave a talk there something like this one today around research ethics more specific on REB stuff and somebody in the audience asked a question I gave a response three days later they called me to let me know that they've implemented that thing at their REB and I'm just like I'm sorry okay how can I make U of T and all the others like do that how can only three days between having a conversation and the doing of the thing so like I think that some of the small schools are starting to sort it out but it still makes it hard back to like the competitive thing because if do you want to be a quote-unquote successful academic by academic standards then that is to do it very individually which is different than how people in our communities are okay we'll take one more I see a hand there while she's going there if any of you are super geeks on ethics and want to check out a book the whole book is around mine's the only indigenous chapter but the rest are all challenging the biomedical model of research review I think some of the other chapters might also interest some of you ethics geeks how could this all be applicable to government consultations because there's a hundred one million floating around for the citizens because to me this would be applicable all this ethics versus just collecting data for collecting data and making it look as if we're really consulting the citizens absolutely and I think that a lot of the communities that I work in especially the ones back home in Labrador they don't distinguish like we don't talk about this being a university thing the way that we're talking about building relationships it's across all sectors it's also with industry it's also with natural developers it's with people who come in with corporations who are coming to do whatever they're doing with the land it's how are we building those relationships with all of those people partnering with indigenous people to produce this kind of work so while today's talk was totally on research ethics the principles apply across all disciplines across all sectors for people who are working with indigenous people the relationship part is the same across all sectors so I think there is things to learn from that there's some work coming out of the University of Victoria around public policy and engagement and how there are different ways of doing that other than the typical like town hall meeting where you just come in you talk at them for half an hour whatever it is and you get out again so there's a whole book that's being written right now that talks about different ways of engaging in public policy so that might be helpful you're welcome it's called Spaces of Engagement it's in like it's we're writing it right now so you can't find it just yet so we're right at 12 o'clock I'm gonna invite Laura to come up and thank our guest speaker today Julie Research Ethics Institute this pink this surprise I'm just so excited this surprise is actually by one of our students here amazing he's a second year student in environmental science and he's actually kind of like a brother in law to me and he does sculptures he does tons of other artistic things so I really know that you emphasized the importance of you know local artist and supporting local communities and people and I really liked your part about slowing down and realizing the importance of balance in living our lives we can get so caught up in having that rat race kind of mentality and I know you and I had an interesting conversation beforehand about kind of living each step as if it was sacred because we don't get to take these steps on earth again so thank you for sharing that with everyone here and they're really important teachings thanks Julie thank you