 So I'm very happy to introduce to you and they will speak more about their research through the next hour and a bit. So we have Gita Lubicic. Did I say that correctly? Lubicic. Lubicic. Sorry. Her maiden name was Ladler when I met her, so she challenges me. Gita is with our Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering. She is very much in love with the North and working with people in Nunavut, Labrador, Newfoundland. So I will just say that Gita has, through the course of her professional career in academia, she marries the concerns of the individuals with the environmental issues that she looks at and so she brings that perspective to our panel. Steve Cook, I remember when Steve joined Carleton. Steve is a fish biologist, there is a technical term for that, he's going to talk about that. But again, Steve is, the interesting thing about Steve, well first of all he is involved in so many things. The research that Steve, that I first became aware of that Steve was doing in my pre-award work, which is working in the research office, is that Steve, a lot of what he does is around to fish feel pain. So that's really interesting, isn't it? But he's also unique in that he's one of the few natural science and engineering people, the natural science people, who's involved in a partnership grant. And so not only does he think about the fish themselves and their movements and habitats and all that kind of thing, but also in terms of their interactions that people have with fish and vice versa and also around conservation and good policy development. So Gordon and I met a number of years ago. We don't see each other on a regular basis, but we are very thankful that he joined us for this week. Gordon is, we met, as I did actually, with Jean-Bien. We met when there was an organization here in Canada, NCARA, the National Council on the Ethics of Humans in Research, NCEHR, it doesn't exist anymore, but we have developed relationships that have not just been years old. Gordon is, as you have heard, an academic person as well as being a practitioner, a lawyer, a biomedicine and also is the chair of the Research Ethics Board at the National Research Council here. Rodney Nelson, also a wonderful colleague here at Hamilton University, he's very much involved in the recruitment and retention of Aboriginal youth to post-secondary education here at Carleton. He is also a teacher, a professor in our Sociology and Anthropology Department. His specialty, if I am correct, is on Indigenous Governance and Economic Development. And we're very pleased to have him on this panel. Rodney has been to Hawaii and back, to the West Coast of Canada and back, and he is here not quite sure what time zone he's in, but he has lots to offer us today. And Patricia McGuire, so now, you know, Patricia is sort of related to me, too, since I married to Tom. Patricia joined us last year in the School of Social Work, so I'm going to sit down and I'm going to launch their talking by asking them if they would just take a few moments each. We'll start with Geeta and work this way, I guess, to talk about what their research is so that you will have a better perspective on that and how it is that it involves or affects Indigenous peoples. I'm from Ottawa. I lived here all my life. I never really enjoyed the cold. I was a big complainer about cold. I never spent a whole lot of time outside, although my parents tried very hard to get me into it. But I just, I highlight this because I've always been interested in learning different perspectives of the world and I've always been interested in learning from Indigenous ways of knowing and being, but hadn't had much exposure through growing up here. I got really interested in it at York University through my undergraduate degree in environmental studies. And there was a wonderful instructor there, Deborah McGregor. She's an Anishinaabe scholar and she had, she since went to U of T for work and she's actually now back at York University as a professor there. But she really kind of helped start this journey for me and I was interested in environmental issues and learning from Indigenous approaches and perspectives. So I wanted to keep learning, so I wanted to keep going in school, so I went to Queens to do my masters and there it was, it was much more a science-focused project. It was learning about, learning about connections between on the land but also how you could learn from remote sensing perspective. So it was, it was kind of geography, environmental studies, geomatics, all kind of together. But at the time my supervisor gave me three options. He said it was all on vegetation research but he said you can have, you can work on a project I have in Quebec or in Ontario or in Nunavut. And I thought I would probably never otherwise go to Nunavut and I would probably never go back so it would be a wonderful adventure and learning and a very big personal challenge and kind of a once in a lifetime thing. So for that project we spent two months on the tundra. So there were three students, we got flown in in a small plane, dropped off on a riverbed runway in the middle of the tundra on Bouthia Peninsula which is very the northern most mainland of Canada, kind of central Nunavut, dropped off, plane flew away, we spent two months there. So I had never been camping outside of a campground before, never been to the Arctic, really did not know this context but it was a wonderful adventure in that moment. And I did not know how it would go for me. I would either really love it or I would be really challenged and probably not go back. But so it was two months living on the land in that sense and that was the first exposure for me and it was, I guess built my own connection in a way with the land. It was just a completely life changing experience. We were there to learn about plants but really I was learning about myself the most through that time where you have no communication with any family for the two months and you're really in this remote location and it was so life changing for me in an inner way. I also learned a lot about tundra plants but in that time it made me realize I wanted to learn more, I wanted to come back to the Arctic but I wanted to learn more from people. So I did not want to just be there doing the science side of things, I really wanted to learn more from people because Inuit had been living in those lands for generations and generations and those were, Boothia Peninsula is just north of current day Telukjok, the community and so Inuit have been using that area for generations. So I wanted to keep learning and continuing in school was one way to do that but shifting focus towards more the social and cultural approaches to research, continuing on in geography which really emphasizes connections between people and the environment and understanding those relationships but wanting to learn more from people, kind of switching from the terrestrial environment, the plants to learning more about the marine environment. So sea ice which was through much consultation identified as a priority from the national level down to community level. So that was kind of the the foundation for my PhD research was to work with and learn from elders and hunters in Pangatang, Iglulik and Cape Dorset which are all around Baffin Island in Inuit and that has then kind of evolved into a journey and a long-term commitment for me to learn from and contribute however I can to the communities that we work with and also to addressing locally identified priorities. So the sea ice was certainly a priority and it was a really a focus on Inuit to terminology like understanding the fundamental perspectives and concepts around sea ice but the importance of that in the past and today that the connections of sea ice to all aspects of life in even in current day communities it's very much used as a platform for hunting and harvesting as a connection between communities. It is the highway for most of the year connecting people as well. So all that to say that kind of my ongoing focus in learning from Inuit and learning from indigenous knowledge more generally is to really try to understand these kind of complex socio-ecological connections from Inuit ways of knowing and to work specifically around priorities identified by the community partners that we work with. So most recently in Joe Haven through a development grant that I had been talking about a few days ago we were able to do planning meetings just to simply identify what would be the research priorities in the community. How would the community advisors want to move forward with that? What kinds of methods would they want to use and how would we work together on that through all phases of the project? So it's really we focus on various kinds of environmental issues and priorities as identified by the community but part of my research is also very much the process. So how do we work effectively together in a cross cultural context? How do we ensure mutual understanding and meaning and mutual benefits to that? Somewhere along the lines I ended up in UBC for a postdoc and it was at that time that I really started to interact a lot with with indigenous people studying Pacific salmon sort of a given there's inherent connections between between salmon and indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest in many cases that sort of held up as you know a sort of you know a flagship in many ways. The we interact with indigenous people in a variety of different ways so first of all to access fish we need to access waters and lands that that are traditional traditional territories or of the indigenous communities that we we work with and so part of it is for gaining access to resources it's also gaining access to the knowledge that they have so helping us to understand if we're asking a specific question when we need to be there how do we catch the specific animals what time are they migrating earlier this year than normal what condition are the fish in relative to what they they used to be in and so on and then also in many cases working hand-in-hand with the research and so ideally that starts at the co-creation phase so this idea of generating research priorities and questions together applying for grants together and then in many cases as a as an academic I'm able to go after NSERC funding and then for virtually all the work that we do in British Columbia we write into those grants funds to hire indigenous peoples to work alongside us so there's a lot of variation among the communities that we work with many of them have good fisheries technical staff that are there people that have gone to college there are a lot of colleges in British Columbia that that provides through the Western science training and then a lot of the fishers have also worked fisheries technicians have worked as fishers themselves either as part of traditional ceremonial fisheries food fisheries or local economic opportunity fisheries which are small-scale commercial fisheries operated within those communities so they're bringing both their their traditional knowledge and experience as well as the more traditional Western education that they've gotten along the way and so so we're able to hire hire those individuals and they work hand-in-hand with our students and contribute to the training of our students we of course can assist with capacity building in some communities as as well in addition to the work that we do in British Columbia we also do work in other parts of the world we've done work in Brazil working with indigenous peoples that are affected by dam developments Brazil the Amazon basin is being peppered with with dams their communities there that have been historically very isolated and essentially there's huge frontier cities that are being built cities that are in the neighborhood of a million people that are popping up in the middle of the Amazon basin and that's obviously changing their way of lives the when dams are put in the water courses are changed communities are displaced and move inland so we've done some social science surveys there and so I just brought up this idea of doing social science surveys and I told you earlier I studied wild fish in the wild but I didn't tell you as my undergrad was in environmental studies before I really dove in and focused on on the fish biology and the fish physiology and the further along I have gone in my career despite being in a biology department I find myself coming back more and more to that to that undergrad training in environmental studies focused more on the the policy realm social science the human dimensions one of the things I've come to realize is that fish aren't the problem it's people and so it's about human behavior understanding human behavior and by doing so what can we do to change the behavior and and obtain outcomes that are more beneficial to fish and natural resources and so on and so now I'll take you back to British Columbia where we have students that are working on on questions we do biology we do a lot of radio telemetry work in our lab where we'll put transmitters in or on fish and track them to spawning grounds and look at how many make it how many die how many are inter intercepted by fisheries and and so on and so doing something like that brings up interesting questions so some of the indigenous peoples that we work with say whoa you're you know I'm not sure I feel comfortable with you putting electronic tags in those fish and you're using you're using drugs to sedate the fish to do the various processes you know and then we'll be working alongside alongside them and we'll see a recreational fishing boat drift by and they'll they'll have remarks about oh I don't understand why they're playing with the playing with the fish that's food source why are they playing with those animals for pleasure as opposed to focusing on harvesting them for for food and so that's brought up a lot of interesting questions or minding that the lower Fraser has three active fisheries there's the indigenous fisheries there's the recreational sector and then there's the commercial sector and then the indigenous sector is broken up into again the ceremonial fisheries and then small-scale commercial and so there's traditionally been a lot of conflict with within that within that group and that provides opportunity for us as as scientists to try and understand the basis of those of that conflict and understand their their perceptions about the research that we're doing threat perceptions to the resource and in many cases we focus on trying trying to identify barriers what are the barriers to to action what are the barriers of uptake to the knowledge that we're that we're generating and so I think even though I'm I guess a biologist at heart I'm spending more and more time in the again playing in that human dimension realm and we're learning an awful lot by by doing so I'm probably coming at this from a different perspective I'm coming at it from the perspective of being an ishnaabic washaka day we mean that I'm a jubilee meeting from northwestern Ontario and why I went to school and so I graduated from like a university with a BA in political science because I wasn't sure if I wanted to go into law or if I wanted to go into community development the reason why I had gone to schools because I had seen the community I'm from is about 250 people and so on like they began it was called McDermott was half of it was the became my Indian reserve was called Rocky Bay and then on the other side was the Métis settlement and that's where we live because we weren't considered to be status Indians because my mother had married my father my grandma grandmother had married my grandfather who was Irish and so so we were weren't allowed to live on the reserve site and which was in my view was good because if you owned your own house at that time you you could tell people not to come into your house or go on you can kick them off your land and so and when child welfare came by to apprehend children we weren't we were one of the few families that weren't apprehended so it was actually really a good thing not to be part of the Indian acts that but when I was being raised in that small community I kept seeing the same hill every year there would it would be brush cut and so and then I asked my dad he said well how can they do that every year like you know it's what and and these were choice jobs too for for young people and and he says old consultant a consultant wrote a report and so this is economic development and and I was thinking in my head is so okay I want one of those jobs but I don't want to be the one cutting the brush I want to be the one that's right in those proposals and my family and I I was out on the the line with my family until I was 15 and the last time that I was on the line with my family as my whole family was when I was in my early 20s and so about four four three or four months of the year we only came off the line when the police came and told us that we had to go to school and so and I treasure those moments with my family because now when I look at other people that haven't had those experiences I realize how what a privilege it was and what a responsibility as well because when I was listening to myself and myself the chim do and chimaco enzi talking this morning about the canoe I recognized a lot of the teachings that came from the land and also the I also recognize the responsibility that's given to people that have those knowledges of how to live on the land and so when I look at the research that I do I did my my MA on in sociology and I did my PhD in sociology and what I did is I looked at Indigenous knowledge and how did Indigenous knowledge is both a form of resilience but also a way to do development because our knowledges were externalized or decontextualized from our communities and so through residential school and there was a blockages so that if people if children were taken away to residential school and then this knowledges that people had they couldn't transfer them to their children or their grandchildren and when the kids came back from residential school not all of them but a large majority of people came back from residential school they couldn't speak the language anymore and so there was a there was a direct disruption in the transfer of knowledge from the knowledge keepers to the people that that would have retained the knowledge and so what I'm interested in is I look at those ruptures that happen and I don't focus on those ruptures but I look at the knowledges that we still have in our community and how the people that have had the advantages that need to transfer those knowledges to other people so the research proposal that I'm looking at right now is I'm looking at women that have had involvement with the child welfare system and I'm looking at how land-based interventions can help them to remember a time where they weren't traumatized and I think that some of the research that I'm looking at as far as people that have been writing about what happens to your body when you're on the land and what happens to your brain is when you're on the land for at least three days your blood pressure goes down your brain you start dreaming more you start and if you get rid of all the electronic devices I remember when I was teaching at a college and they asked me to teach a land-based course for tourism and so I took and I still can't believe I did it but I took like 38 students that had never been on the land on the land in the middle of February in Thunder Bay on Lake Superior and everybody came back with their toes and their fingers nobody got frostbite but one of the things that I noticed is that when we were there is is that the students the first thing they did is they put on all the electronic devices like you know they had batteries and I said okay first rule is get rid of those things right now if you want to leave you can leave if you have to check your phone every five minutes you can leave otherwise if you want to stay and learn you can turn all the devices off and and they were like shocked and some of them were like kind of testing me I said I told you guys if you don't have to be here this isn't mandatory for you but if you want to learn I want you to stay but you have to turn the phones off you have to turn the iPods off you have to turn off the computers you have to turn off everything and and nobody left and so they did that and so and then when I was doing a lesson plan with them after they turned everything off I realized the majority of them were falling asleep and and there was and then all of a sudden like I'm teaching and I'm looking I'm thinking everybody's falling asleep so I told everybody I said okay but we're not going to do this right now I think you guys need like 15 20 minute nap and they did they they they went to sleep and for the for the whole three days we were out there the students didn't turn it on and so and then we made fires we went snowshoeing we looked at the bush we we were on the land and and the students were amazed that they could function with all the devices they also said one of the things they said is that I've never slept like that for a long time and I realized that all the the stuff that they were doing actually doesn't give their brain a break because if you constantly stimulate it then your brain really doesn't have a break and so that's one of the the reasons why I look at what what you can do on the land over a year period and and what it does to your body but also what it does to your brain because I was really concerned when I was reading it was a young it's an academic she's an anishinabek from treaty three pompays or last name and she's at McGill University and elders had always talked about blood memory like when I started I do birch bark biting so when I started doing birch bark biting it was like my I couldn't believe it it was this like it was so easy and so I was making like all these different kinds of trees I was like doing like butterflies and bees and and everybody else like when I tell them they would say well I did this this this one this one design and I was like oh because I was kind of shy to show them right and so when they seen me it was like who taught you how to do that and I said I don't know I just decided that I wanted to do that one day and so when I phoned Maria Linkler who's who's her and her husband have taken the opportunity to teach me and and I really dive a lot of respect for them and the Maria said your blood memory is coming back and I didn't know what she meant when she said that but what Amy Pompey does is that she looks at blood memory but she's a geneticist and so she looks at that how in her research concerns how trauma is transmitted through through the mother but and so she's looking at blood memory too but she that and so that the and so there's studies that say that that trauma is it changes your DNA but it also changes your brain chemistry in like simple terms because I don't know the complicated ones of genetic research so that's what I understand about it and and so I was really I was really upset when I heard that because I thought like what kind of interventions do you design them like how can you help people heal like how can you you know what do you do to help communities like what do you how do you teach people and then I realized the the land is there and so you have to get people back on the land and once I realized that I realized that when people are on the land the trauma that occurred in the last 140 years or since 17 or 1876 or whenever the last the the last major consolidation of the Indian Act is that that's when things started to change in my area anyway that's what elders remember is that up until that point people lived together quite well without government interference but when the Indian Act was consolidated and children were forcibly removed from their homes and forced into residential school that's when changes happen so I so when I looked back at that time I realized there's thousands of years that indigenous people have been on this land and we just have to tap into that memory we have to tap into that blood memory so that's where where I thought the best thing to do is to take especially woman in um when um I usually start off like when I speak I also have like powerpoint and I always bring up a picture of three of my grandmothers that we've um my father gave me this picture and it's my grandmother um Agnes Nagola and then um the Pika Guzikwa is in the middle and she's my my great great grandmother and then um then my great-grandmother is Kajisha and my dad always talked about how the the signing of the treaty when Kajisha was there but also Pika Guzikwa how she outfitted her daughter and taught her daughter how to to go from Heron Bay down the river onto Lake Superior and up to Lake Nebuchadne when she was 14 and how they made a canoe and um and all that old lady and her granddaughter made this canoe and um so so for me that's a reminder that I have to talk about women because my father also never forget your grandmothers but also it's a reminder that that we have to start looking at how we heal on the land and that's so that's part of my research. Thank you. So bozo koe koe Rodney Nelson and Dishnakas, Nipissing and Ndujube Makwa Dodam. I'm Rodney Nelson from Nipissing First Nation and um I'm from the Bear Clan but I also have ancestry that goes back to the Lakotas down in Rosebud First Nation down in South Dakota and during the Indian wars in the States one of my ancestors came up um after uh the the massacre at Wounded Knee and came up through into the prairies and of course was called horse thieves and sent back but uh what a lot of people don't know is that a lot of the Sioux spread all throughout Canada as well and one man made it all the way across to uh into Nipissing up near North Bay and married into the Nipissing group so that's part of my heritage and I have uh along what was I just discovering a royalty side in the English side so my great great great grandfather was the Lord Snowden apparently who knew and then uh and then I have some Dutch heritage that I always say that's where I got the big head from so uh so I'm a mixed bag I guess a Heinz 57 um interesting mix uh I've always grown up in and out of the bush my father was always dragging us into the bush uh kicking and screaming sometimes because uh you know I I would I would love to go but the mosquitoes were always bad and I was allergic to mosquitoes so it was a hard life for me growing up being allergic for mosquitoes and having to go into the bush every weekend or other weekend as we did uh he was a military man so we moved around a lot I was born in Sisqa territory out in the west um and always had part of my heart there as well as all over the place I spent some time um some horrible time in a day school where I was beaten daily and uh I'll never forget the day that my father came in and and rescued me I call it he came in with this full military uniform because I'd finally told him after months of this I was sent down every day and and and beaten with either a two by four or by a giant board for shooting spitballs I was a bad kid sometimes I was shooting spitballs so I joke about it at least he were to get over that kind of thing but he came in and and told him and said you touched my son again and I will kill you and that was it the last time they laid a hand on me and then I was out of that out of that school which was nice um so education and me we didn't get along very well for the longest time uh but here I am in the institute now fully immersed loving it enjoying it and uh doing a lot of interesting work with communities everything I do has to do with community so if I'm not helping community if I'm not helping our communities or people alleviating poverty helping reduce suicide rates in our community helping on governance helping chief and council board of directors set up for economic development corporations these are all things that I'm interested in doing which I guess is my research area I'm also involved in emergency management planning pandemic planning and whatnot as well it's kind of on the ethical side which is very interesting I think probably one of my most interesting things I've done was I was the ethics officer for public works after Gomery so if you remember the sponsorship scandal they uh they pointed me in to be the ethics officer to clean up everything so I don't think they realized that they asked an Ishtavi person to come in and clean up ethics in the public service but hey it was an interesting post for me I'm very interested these days I just came back from from BC and being you know at least I won't say that I certainly wasn't living on the land because I had a Mustang convertible as I was driving through the land which was quite nice but it's it's always an experience you know Patricia was right you you get this immediate good feeling about being out and enjoying that that that connection and as I was going to there's several communities we just met with well I just met with which was eight communities out in Okanagan Valley and we're talking about healthcare and access to healthcare and you know they're they're struggling they're struggling a lot with just finding any kind of medical care within their communities and I was nervous going in as I usually am at the beginning and I was going along and uh and and I thought I'm not even prepared for this you know I I have to go in and facilitate this discussion and pull out for them and help them out and talk about some of what I've done and how we can incorporate that into into their accessing healthcare and I was really nervous and then I I was driving down with my top down in my in the Mustang which is really I should not only why I tell you I was in a Mustang but it was a cool car never driven a Mustang before and I looked up and there's these beautiful hills passing me and I was feeling very very nervous and then I saw this beautiful bald eagle just floating in the sky and coming down and landing on the on it on top of a treetop and you know I looked up and saw the beautiful white tail feathers in the white head and just the spread and the river was running through that and I thought you know I take it as a sign as as basically saying you know this is a I'm on a good path today will go well things will be good and I immediately just started to relax and for me looking back at our traditional stories our traditional ways are traditional values I'm always looking for a way to incorporate them into today so into our research into how we live daily how we look at all of our research even as an academic but as a community member how we can bring these together and will they work together and I think absolutely there's so much similarities and major differences as well but it's a beautiful thing when they finally come together and you see that a lot of these traditional teachings can guide the way that people are doing business today leaders in their communities social workers working with their with their with their community members so that's my real interest is in is in looking at our traditional stories and our traditional ways and how we can incorporate that into research and thank you for being here and I've been I know I'm a little tired I didn't even acknowledge I wanted to acknowledge the elders in the room I went around to see everybody except for Cleo I hadn't had time to say hello to your grandfather but hello good to see you again so miigwech I as I said I don't do um Aboriginal research I um maybe I'm not sure why I'm here but I'm trying to uh maybe represent the perspective of research ethics boards and the kinds of things that they're maybe looking for or worried about curious about uh from that but I will say and I also I won't speak too long because I'm um trying to remember that the creator gave me two years but only one mouth for for a reason um but I do um the recent some of the research I do do I do has been in uh international research primarily health research in Sub-Saharan Africa and I'm just sort of finishing up a project now uh about um prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV in um some of the poorer countries of of Sub-Saharan Africa and I and the thing that has struck me and and and the TCPS mentions this and Susan Zimmerman talked about this yesterday but the uh in in dealing with or trying to come up with uh research and undertaking the research in a community that is has somewhat different worldview somewhat different uh sort of cultural understandings and so forth um that the uh I was really struck by some connections between the need for community engagement the need for consultation understanding um as we think about in terms of indigenous people's research uh and also uh thinking about the need for fair benefits of the of the research process and the doing of the research um community to community perhaps and so certainly those are issues that I think about and I think have perhaps some connections when when we think about the uh Aboriginal communities these international uh communities in quite different cultures so uh I'll leave it at that thank you for inviting me and I'm uh looking forward to the rest of our discussion you you have questions and we we have been trying to address questions around incorporating indigenous knowledge into your work presenting that in a protocol to a research ethics board trying to think about ownership and possession and access to information and also dissemination so I I put it to you and some of the thoughts that you might be having if you would like to ask questions of our panelists well I will start so I'd like if you would please to maybe talk let's take it to the end of the research and maybe work our way backwards to talk about how it is or some of the approaches and strategies that you have for making sure that not only do you disseminate to your colleagues in scholarship but also to the communities maybe I could you know I just I'm not going to point to you just jump in because this is meant to be more of a conversation now we do a workshop once a year at UBC where we bring in all the folks that that we partner with and so that's uh federal government provincial government and ENGO's indigenous community members and in that form there were 71 people at our meeting this past year so this is not a not a small group and that's it's it's two way it's not just us saying what we did it's also where we then have an opportunity to get feedback on where we're going in the future and so we find that useful but we also use students quite a bit I mean I'm an academic and that means I'm also an educator and so I can't be the only face of our group I need to provide an opportunity for our students to do so and so our students are the ones that are going out and doing the majority of the interactions especially on the back end in terms of sharing information sharing sharing results that works quite well not quite as well on the front end but on the back end the students are really the face of our group it's not the PIs going out so that's how we get the you know offering you know to come and and speak with with groups it might be a group oftentimes the fisheries groups come together so in the lower Fraser River there's the lower Fraser Fisheries Alliance so we don't have to go to 20 or 30 different bands they're all members of these umbrella organizations and so we can go there and then people hear about it and we get other invites from there we we very much empower the students to go out and and be our voice I guess I have a a challenge is that I like you know as an academic you have to disseminate knowledge and your research to academics and to publish and talk to your research journals and whatnot and things like that but I've always wanted to reach again like I said I work with community so I want to publish in if I'm publishing or if I'm disseminating information I want it to be in journals or not journals even but access that the community can use they can look at they can understand I mean it's really hard to go to a community and say oh we're going to talk about Foucault and everything like that when they look at you like you're nuts right so you know very I don't know if it's a nervousness I have or this fear of publishing in these journals or if I just don't think it will give the access that I want to see happen at the community level so there's still this definite dichotomy of of two different types of publishing but as an academic you have to do that but as a community member you'd rather do more things like community reports and be with the community working with the community or or publishing through people if I'm going to publish like can do you know which is the development officers or or AFOA or other groups in which makes an impact because it's being read by community members so there's that interesting thing is you almost have to write two articles right one to disseminate to the academic world one to to put out into the community world so I still struggle with that today I really want to emphasize um you know in any of the early planning discussions we've had with any of the communities we work with the concern comes up over and over and over about kind of the historical legacy of poor communication poor reporting to communities and two individuals that researchers had worked with in the past I think that is changing and and it's definitely improving um but the elders would ask over and over you know what are we how are we going to benefit how is the community going to use this information how will it be accessible so so one thing I I've really prioritized since the earliest of those discussions um was to not think about reporting or dissemination only at the end of a project like it's all the way through the entire relationship from the earliest stages to the end and beyond so there's many ways to do that and we've tried many things but but one of the things that I really emphasize and I always try and do is do kind of reports so any do kind of progress reports or we call them trip reports but any visit that we have any kind of formal meetings or workshops or discussions even if it's preliminary planning ones that we do short really short reports with pictures and highlight who we worked with what we did why we were there and and kind of the next steps so it kind of keeps that conversation going and we heard many times as well you know if that even sometimes reports are given back at the end of a project but if it's four years after the start of a project it it people forget about it and it kind of seems like nothing was ever given back or if it's only reported to the community organizations like at an organizational level that's very important but the individuals involved don't always hear from those organizations so so this kind of ongoing interim reporting we do it in a written form and it's translated into local dialects we also do it informally in many ways just keeping in touch with people so that interim aspect I would really encourage as well as reporting to the formal organizations as well as every individual involved so I sometimes do these mass mailings like the post office knows me now they see me coming and they're like ah where I still do a lot of hard copy mailing because a lot of people don't have email and so we print out all these reports and and mail them to every individual involved and sometimes it can be a large pile of of letters by the end but it's just been one way that we've been trying and and I have visited elders you know many years later through an ongoing project and they they see me and they kind of open a drawer where not everyone does this but some have kept like all the stack of letters I've ever sent them and it's just neat to see at least it's getting there and it's the translation is so important if that is appropriate in the community and it's it's just one way of doing it but there are many other ways I just really encourage you to think about kind of on dissemination is ongoing and it's a two-way flow can I play off that a little bit more one of the things that we've done the the more successful partnerships that we have are when it's not thought of as projects but a program so projects and and of course that means you have to be doing something where you've got some funding stability thankfully Pacific salmon provide such stability they're sufficiently in the toilet that there's opportunities for us to obtain funding from a diversity of funding pots but a project usually has a you know a terminal date where it's over it might be a grad student project it might be a specific research project but if you can frame it in the context of a program where there's not it inherently makes it there's some longevity it's not just coming in going back out and yes we have students that do projects that are embedded within our program but it's it's seamless it's not it's not viewed that way by the communities that we're interacting with I think that's really really helpful it's that continuity the PIs are always there in the background and some of our research technicians the students will come and go but we don't make a big deal of it you know Katrina's leaving by we don't you know it's it's that there's a transition as you know one thing transitions into the other and I think that brings a sense of stability to the relationship instead of it being stop start stop start does anybody have a question yes I'm I'm not sure of a day it's I guess the question of how do you deal with the stuff we can't control so I'm not sure but so here's they've not contextualized this but well I guess the question is how do you deal with some of that information that you're producing afterwards and so I guess to contextualize here's an example is that a conference not too long ago and they were talking about how you know they were going in they were tracking you know migration of I can't remember what it was they were tracking migration and they were tagging just like you were saying they were tagging and they were trying to figure where things were going and locals were kind of you know skeptical as you were talking about your approach because they've gotten you know hundreds of years of teaching to talk about migration patterns and so forth and what are the problems was afterwards this information came back the scientific information came back and government started pointing to that sort of needs of further colonization right to kind of say okay now we're going to start controlling you know hunting patterns are going to start controlling you know who can do what and how you just sort of live off the land in certain ways so I guess it's kind of the question is how do you deal with the stuff afterwards that you can't control or this information is incredible information but it's information that could easily be used in different ways right by someone else looking to further colonization further market life I'm not sure if that's a fair question but it's more it's not obviously not the responsibility but how do you deal with that it hasn't happened to you how do you grapple with that I guess big question sorry don't first of all don't apologize because it is a very good question and you're anticipating a problem it's the name of this panel and trying to find solutions right and it I guess if I could just maybe give you a moment to think about the answer to that but it but it does speak to the methodology and it does speak to the interaction and it sort of speaks to well not sort of it does speak to the kinds of information that you're eliciting and what people are comfortable with giving to to the researchers and the levels of their participation right and not just being seen as research subjects there there will always be unscrupulous people but it's it's in your it's in your relationship in your design I would imagine and if you want to you have like given you enough time to think about well you certainly don't want to do harm I mean that's that's the ultimate goal and you know there's a there's a heavy burden and responsibility on your research that afterwards you know you're you're looking at it and saying I hope this never gets used against the community I think one of the things and and you said build it into the research is all along the ways you're talking to elders and to leaders and whatnot and you're saying you know should this be shared should this be shared can this be used you know and even asking them to to a degree have you you know is this is this data been used before against the community in a way if you will but we also as as the researcher have to think about the harm it has that it that it could do as well later on and I think that that's that's the burden right that's that's the hard thing to do is that you know community might not think that you know oh this is fine it can give you a caribou migration and here you go and then all of a sudden the government uses your research to forbid hunting of caribou and then you destroyed a protein source the rate the rate there right so you know we also have to think about it in different ways too as to how this research may be used against us I've seen I haven't had it happen to myself to tell you the truth I mean a lot of my work is it doesn't involve a lot of that kind of harm but I think that you know I imagine if it did I don't know what I would be doing back in there groveling apologizing and and you know it would be it would be a really hard thing to do because it would really hurt and harm a relationship and it is about a relationship right so yes I think that you know building in it as much as you can as far as constantly thinking about how the data will be used if not making it anonymous you know even changing that study up so that it wouldn't even necessarily affect or even be identified to that community or that area kind of reminding me what you're saying earlier about the publication of this stuff right like sometimes where you publish this information you may want to just share with the community or as information that you do want to have it disseminated everywhere and maybe some you know depending on the situation maybe that's some of the conflict I guess the tensions and absolutely having to publish publish publish publish publish and talk to your journals like you say maybe sometimes that's not the best thing to do this seems like a really hard hard problem because I'm speaking perhaps from unfortunately from a biased standpoint of the more traditional sort of scientific or scholarly way is I think that a lot of people have taken the view that or have just sort of come up in a culture that knowledge is knowledge right knowledge shouldn't belong to people knowledge is for everyone for the whole world and and anybody who can use that knowledge should be able to have it because it's knowledge and so what so it sounds like what we're talking about is okay then how is that knowledge one is it good knowledge has it been validly collected methodologically rigorous and so forth is it true knowledge valid knowledge whatever and I know those are sort of oversimplifying concepts but in any event how is that you know going to be used and I think it sort of thinking about it from my more traditional research sort of way of thinking about it when people sort of predict okay how is this going to be used is that going to be bad is that going to be good that starts to be sort of worrying in terms of the production of true knowledge or valid knowledge or knowledge that is really real and I mean I get the point about how knowledge has been misused in the past how it can be have you know racist uses or inappropriate uses or insensitive uses and or wrong uses but I think that I think that that that sort of way of thinking that knowledge is important and people should have you know like I mean we expand knowledge for everyone right hopefully that's a bit idealistic but you know that that's the idea and it seems to run into that you know into this other kind of problem yeah I wondered about like you're talking about data that's written down um that is the western map but there's also other forms of writing there in addition to this new approach for well we've lost the ball for the morning history and anything but what's really um making me aware of the differences is when I hear you talk about knowledge it's like the noun is a thing and for Anishinaabe concepts of knowledge it's about doing it's about being involved in it we have a very verb oriented language and way of thinking and doing things and then the actual noun is formed out of a verb and we really trace back things to our linguistic sense of scholarship what I really see is problematic as regards to copyright issues is we have copyright law in Canada right but we still in Canada we don't have an equivalent of protection of indigenous knowledge there's indigenous traditional knowledge and then there's indigenous knowledge which is contemporary research done by indigenous peoples so I think that's one of the key problems and I remember last night hearing Paul Chartrand talk about the issue of communication and it comes back to that again right because whether it's spoken or it's felt experienced or it's actually written down or recorded through technological means it's still a way of communicating that information so I'm wondering how any of you can think about the issue of copyright especially when you spoke about the differences between publishing within the community because you're an indigenous person rather than in an academic journal which has different aesthetics everybody's looking at me again I would add to that I mean and I you said it so eloquently as well as that we have traditional knowledge but I would also add to that sacred knowledge and sacred knowledge is that which I've always been told by others is that that cannot be shared it's for a specific person or a time or a place or or whatever and when we do get that sacred knowledge we've got to be very careful you know especially then you step into the academic world can we take that knowledge and you know we start writing about it yeah you can't do that right that's not that kind of knowledge to be shared but then there's traditional and then I saw traditional knowledge is that for everyone traditional knowledge is just a good way of being right it's a beam on the other way and it's it's that good good life a good way in a good heart and it's it's knowledge that can be shared with anyone at any time so I that's one I'm always walking that strange path between sacred and traditional knowledge and how much you can't share that but you can share this and and figuring that out but that's why we have the elders that are able to help us out with that and and community members that you know when they specifically tell you you know this is sacred knowledge do not share this or and and sometimes you get it word for word you know I love when people say knowledge changes also in stories change over time yes absolutely but there's sacred knowledge that has been shared word for word generation after generation after generation after generation that you are not allowed to change one word of it right but yeah that you know and I agree with you is that you know this we have to perpetuate knowledge constantly and it is a lot of knowledges for for sharing for everyone you know and let's say psychology you know you don't use a person's name you don't use and and for a lot of people looking at a body of work that you're doing they're not going to be able to decipher that community members will be able to decipher who you're talking about instantaneously but then you know out there most people wouldn't be able to talk about it so I've seen that before which is interesting would you also say because you know you you make me think about not just the issue of dissemination or copyright but also in terms of informed consent you know to be dealing with all aspects of your research and not just that part that involves the human participants of the secondary use of data you know using data that's already out there but in terms of how you envisioned your program of research where that project fits into it but the longer term and more extended viewpoint of what you do in knowledge creation and knowledge sharing so in terms of informed consent I think is perhaps one way that this knowledge that's shared with researchers and and in the in terms of the research that's being done is one way to help manage it because people understand better in informed consent what it is that you're you're doing together would that be a fair statement another way that we can do it is just by verbally and like I will write this is I you know I I said I'm not sourcing this I've written that directly into my PhD thesis this section is not going to be sourced period deal with it right and it's just and then I just talk from where the elder had come from and I did not get elders to sign off on a piece of paper I said it's it's I asked permission it was given and that's good enough right and so I kind of probably shouldn't say this out loud yet until it's like just you know it's kind of the academic is going to have to change a little bit to the way that knowledge is given and understood and permission given as well so I find that too with elders like just dealing with paper it's just re traumatizing when we think of treaties and signing over medical information and those kinds of things right so yeah for this is going to be a problem because a lot of elders are just are going to refuse to have even their voice recorded as you know substitute for signing a form so the research ethics board is going to have to deal with that that's not a problem right and and I think they are I think they're starting to look at that and saying you know we understand that this collection of knowledge is is coming from a different place in which it's not appropriate to get you know a written consent form to say that but we still ask permission right we always still ask permission for an elder so it's it's good I know Patricia an interesting part of that and I'm wondering how many historians there are in this room is what will be what will constitute knowledge and it seems like this group is on site but I'll use it an example from Newfoundland where all academics interpreted the only really living documents that existed by a guy named spec in a certain way and and this was commonly accepted but the optics of the Mi'kmaq and then a fellow named Wetzel a Mi'kmaq from Con River took specs information I realized that no direct communication no oral knowledge had been allowed to be included it was only specs interpretation and he reinterpreted the whole history of the biothic in the Mi'kmaq and caused a complete revolution and academics are still fighting there's a woman named Inkeborg Marshall who really adopted the idea oh yeah that the Mi'kmaq and the French helped wipe the biothics and it wasn't really the Newfoundland and and yet specs notes from the oral oral data that he had really disallowed that so now there's a whole new history but many historians still to this day tell me that it's not acceptable it's not written down so I don't know it doesn't sound to me like people have to deal with that here but here in our university it's still going on so what would even be considered as the knowledge do you have to deal with any part of that or is it just all okay in this gathering? I want to jump in but I'm not sure where to start those are all really good questions um from from my experience in in a few Nunavut communities I I doesn't certainly speak for for speak for any of them and it's only from a few but is that the elders and the hunters that we have spoken with and learned from and that were so generous with sharing their knowledge they want their names included and they want to be they they want others to know that it was them sharing that and contributing that information so we do work it into our we do have consent forms although we have been changing things a lot over time but where there's options of if you want your name used or not as well as options around how the information like where it would be stored who would have access and how that may be able to be used in the future and who gives those permissions there's kind of various options from only in the community to all the way to you know broadly for any educational purpose to not at all like there's a whole range of things one way that we've tried to deal with the the credit issue doesn't really deal with the copyright side of things but to really make sure that whenever we're sharing the results it's very clear that it's not it's not us like it's it's not coming from us we we as as outside researchers that we've been learning from many many different community members and so crediting that all the way through reports or articles whether it's an academic or a piece saying kind of like a citation like you would with a journal article but saying it's from this interview and and naming the person if they wanted to be named or not if they didn't want to be named as well as using a lot of of quotes so that it's the it's the best way within the written form that we can communicate some of that oral knowledge it's all been shared orally and so trying to really really carefully follow you know who was contributing what and try to really make that credit very clear that these understandings are coming from these contributors or these mentors as well as considering authorship in those reports or those articles some people have done you know include a whole community as an author and I personally just find that really challenging because there's no way that you could you could ever ensure that the entire community you know reviewed and and contributed to that paper but what so what we've done is is there's always kind of one or two really key mentors advisors coordinators and researchers they play those many roles within a project or yeah it's not only project-based but continuous work that there's been kind of one or two key people that facilitate all the work locally and so those would be the authors and that any other contributors throughout the process would be cited or acknowledged all the way through not just in an acknowledgement section where you just name everybody but really all the way through wherever they've contributed so that is just one idea I want to put out there I know it doesn't quite deal with the copyright side of things but and also on the the issue of sensitive topics I would say a lot of discussion about that upfront but all the way through and and working together to discuss and analyze and interpret and verify any of the understandings coming out of this collective work is so important before starting to share it publicly and I think some of the Scott Nichols earlier this week mentioned that the idea of like open data policies and that everything is going to be required to be shared and shirk is coming with those policies as well and you know there's a lot of there's a lot of good in that but there's also you know needs to be really sensitive and not everything can be openly shared and that needs to be discussed with the community and what would be sensitive that they would not want shared and we do a lot of participatory mapping work which can be especially sensitive at times if you're identifying like really important migration routes or cultural sites or hunting areas or you know really sensitive potential places and and really meaningful places and so that's been a lot of discussion in all of these mapping projects is you know what can be freely and and openly shared widely and what what the community group would want to only keep within the community and not share broadly so I guess it's part of an ongoing discussion. It's never just the indigenous peoples and the academics together you know in a room unless we go and attend one of their meetings or we're working on an agreement together whenever we're doing project planning it's all the stakeholders that are involved in all the relevant governments and so right from the beginning we know you know it's the it's the the three fishing sectors the ENGOs government at various levels and we're all sitting around a table planning together so I think right from beginning we know what's coming and it's no surprise where the salmon go you know the the terminal spawning ground so a little bit unlike the mapping exercises we know where the salmon where the salmon go we know that they're genetically distinct stocks many of the questions that we're asking are about how many are there and how do we share them and so there's there's fewer secrets in that respect so it it's it's a lot of the the real challenges come around allocation issues and those are things that that we don't play a role in deciding we simply share the numbers and then it's it's the managers are tasked with that that horrid horrid challenge of trying to figure out who gets what and of course when you're talking about about wildlife conservation sort of comes comes first and everybody buys into that so so so we haven't come up against those issues where where there's any fears of data being used in in ways but I could see that certainly more in the human dimension side or some of the mapping issues where government does not know where a certain organism goes or where they spend time and I know in the north there's a lot of in pengerton actually work there on Greenland halibut trying to identify where the fishing line should be there's a work Aaron Fisk's group under the University of Windsor and trying to come up with management zones that have in the past just been arbitrarily drawn on on the map and now the science is suggesting well actually the fish go here and do this and do that so when you're generating new knowledge new understanding that's where there's potential for those things to be a bit more complicated oh dear so let me say I do I do have to to draw this to a close but I love it the fact that there are still questions yet to be asked because we will be moving into our lunchtime and then our group work this afternoon I would like to therefore invite you to continue with your conversations and with your questions of our panelists I'd like to thank our panelists very much and of course there was no intention that there would be an outcome from this discussion that we would come up with anticipating all the problems and finding all the solutions in an hour and a half that is not that is not but what I think we have learned and will continue to realize is that like all of earth and people plants we evolve and research ethics is evolving methodologies are changing and evolving relationships between researchers and communities whatever that community may be to reinforce it's not a geographic one necessarily that's evolving but also too when you put in your protocols to the research ethics board the research ethics board is made up of colleagues scholars around the table that represent for the most part the majority of the disciplinary projects that are going to come to them and they have also the ability to bring in ad hoc reviewers when they review our our sent an ethics protocol where there isn't that disciplinary knowledge around the table so these are not etched in stone to be the be all and end all this is an evolution in research in research ethics boards in shared knowledge so I thank you very much for being part of the discussion around that evolution and you know thank you and continue on with your conversations later so an apprentice storyteller and it was a position in the community as a young man would be allowed to tell a story until he got to one point where one inflection in the voice or one word was not right and one of the experienced storytellers the elder storytellers would gently stand by his side and complete the story for him this was not embarrassing there was no no intention of humiliating the young person it was just a matter for accuracy the next time the young man had a chance to tell the story he could see how far he could get if he could get through the whole story the story was then his and he could tell it in the longhouse but until he could get to the end of it an elder would gently move him aside and complete the story for him because the accuracy over thousands of years must be precise we are not written cultures we are oral cultures and I'll tell you another quick story and I'll pray for the food I work for parks for Parks Canada and the the Guayhanas Archaeological Boards sorry I said that wrong and Daryl Fede was the the main person in charge of the archaeology we were doing field work sitting around the campfire one night with myself and Daryl and the rest of the Haida crew I told him a story my uncle had told me he said that we lived in the north where Naikun people were at the far north end of the island we're the rose pit people in Haida Guay and one day the water started coming into the village and they moved the village for they picked up the the car posts and the house posts and they moved the whole village inland a little bit more after a while the water started coming in again and so they moved the whole village took it in hand took it apart plank by plank totem pole by totem pole and moved it inland a little bit more this happened three times and finally the elder said we're running out of space what are we going to do they said let's go to Skidigate Chief Skidigate will probably take us in so they marched on the inside on the east side of the inside of the heck it's straight passage down to Skidigate where Chief Skidigate gave said yes you can stay here you are relatives and gave the Naikun people the north end of the island we are still on the north end of the village we are still on the north end of the village Daryl asked me this he said John how old is that story I said I don't know I'll go ask my uncle we had a break for two weeks I went down to Victoria where my uncle lived I asked him uncle that story you told me how old was it he says I don't know it's maybe 500 years old so I went back and and brought up that point to Daryl fidget again I said Daryl my uncle says the story is maybe 500 years old Daryl said think again that story is 10,000 years old because what you're describing is the rising of the ocean as the ice melted at the end of the last ice age 10,000 year old story preserved word by word and that's why our knowledge is so important to us that it has to be handled accurately and that's why the knowledge which is private must be handled must be kept private and sacred must be kept to ourselves or things we share there are things we don't but our whole culture is built on the accuracy of those stories and the meanings of them