 Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Catherine A.H. Graham lecture on Indigenous policy. I'm Audrey Ploed, Dean of the Faculty of Public Affairs. As we begin, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge that we are guests on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe Nation. This acknowledgement is especially important today as we host our annual lecture on Indigenous policy. The Catherine A.H. Graham lecture was established in 2009 to honor Catherine's deep commitment to the sustainability of Indigenous communities, through public policy and citizen engagement. It's something she emphasized as Dean of the Faculty of Public Affairs from 2003 to 2009. The Graham lecture provides a vehicle for examining a wide range of policy issues, cases, models and tools related to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities across Canada. Over the years, we have been privileged to host a number of Indigenous experts who have furthered our understanding of public policy and of matters of relevance to public policy within an Indigenous context. I am sure you will find this year's speaker to be no exception. And now, it is an honor for me to introduce John M.H. Kelly, or Cleol's, his hydename to this gathering. John Cleol's M.H. Kelly was a full-time professor in the School of Journalism and Communication. Since retirement, he has served as an adjunct research professor in the school. He is also co-director of CIRCL, Carleton University's Centre for Indigenous Research, Culture, Language and Education. John is a member of the University's Indigenous Education Council. He has worked with Indigenous language and cultural revitalization and preservation programs for 25 years. He is also one of 15 researchers designated by the Federal Department of Canadian Heritage as a leading authority on language and cultural revitalization. John is Haida from Skidigit Village in Haida Gwai, a group of lush, rainforested North Pacific islands about 80 kilometers off the coast of British Columbia. I would like to invite John to offer a traditional greeting. With introductions like that, I don't know what to do. But thank you, I feel very honored. Kulchad Khangah, Jules-like Khangah, Detachable and Chloasis, esteemed women, esteemed men, dear friends, it's a pleasure to be here, especially because of what the topic is. This is something that has not been touched on enough. Native people have had our standards on the land, and the land and the environment protection of the environment comes first. It's good to see it being taken up by the universities. I came to Haida Gwai to my home by means of working in South Dakota. I was pretty close to the Lakota, and I got adopted in by a brother, Robert Greigel. And Robert was a tremendous inspiration to me. But at that time was when I developed an interest in finding out what my own cultural roots were. And I came across an old Lakota prophecy. It's a seven-generation prophecy that said that the newcomer, the white man, will not listen to us for seven generations. But in the seventh generation, it will start to come to us to see what to do about what's going on in the world. And I believe that that prophecy is coming to pass. So I'm deeply honored to do this introduction for Deborah. And I'm really, really looking forward to hearing what she has to say. So thank you for your attention, your time, and enjoy the meeting. And I know you're going to gain a lot out of it, and I know I will. So, hawa sta. Thank you to the man of great respect, hawa gulchad. Thank you to women of great respect. And hawa salana. Salana is the word for the Creator. Thank you, Creator, Spirit of the lives above the shining heavens. For this day, keep our hearts open and our minds clear. And make this a productive session. We ask for that, because we know that that's your heart as well as ours. Hawa. Thank you, John, for your very thoughtful and inspiring words. Hi, everyone. My name is Chris Worswick, and I'm the Associate Dean Research International for the Faculty of Public Affairs. And it is my great pleasure to introduce the keynote speaker for the 2019 Catherine Graham Lecture on Indigenous Policy. Deborah McGregor is an associate professor and holds the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Environmental Justice at York University, where she is cross-appointed to both the Osgoode Hall Law School and the Faculty of Environmental Studies. Professor McGregor is Anish Nabe from Whitefish River First Nation, Birch Island, Ontario. Professor McGregor's research has focused on Indigenous knowledge systems and their various applications in diverse contexts, including water and environmental governance, environmental justice, forest policy and management, and sustainable development. Her research has been published in a variety of national and international journals, and she has delivered numerous public and academic presentations relating to Indigenous knowledge systems, governance, and sustainability. Prior to joining York University, Professor McGregor was an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto and served as director of the Centre for Aboriginal Initiatives and the Aboriginal Studies Program. She's also served a senior policy advisor, Aboriginal Relations at Environment Canada, Ontario Region. In addition to such posts, Professor McGregor remains actively involved in a variety of Indigenous communities serving as an advisor and continuing to engage in community-based research and initiatives. And I think, as the screen say, but I'll read it anyways, the title of Professor McGregor's presentation is Indigenous Environmental Justice, Knowledge, and Law. Professor McGregor, if you're ready. I'll try not to spill my water, that's my task for today. So I'd also like to acknowledge the territory that I'm on, Algonquin, Anishinaabe. I have actually lots of relatives. I often go to meetings and Vernon McGregor does the opening and we say, hi, cousin. So it's nice to still be on what I consider to be the great expanse of Anishinaabe territory. I also think it's very relevant for today. So thank you for that land acknowledgement. To talk about how Indigenous knowledge, Anishinaabe knowledge, has been part of these territories for thousands and thousands of years. I'd like to remind people of that, our own legal orders, our own governance systems were part of these territories. Everything else is new to, really, well, I guess a couple of centuries old, maybe, maybe younger, but I do want to remind people of that because it just provides a little bit of context for what I want to talk about. So my other goal is to try to make sense because I am thinking about some new ideas about where I want to go with my work. Not only my research, like as part of being at York University, but work that I do for First Nation communities primarily and trying to respond to priorities that they've identified to me in terms of what they'd like to work on. So while this is growing through my mind right now, as I think about, or at least I think I've sort of, at least somewhat mastered the title of my Canada Research Chair, because when I left the University of Toronto and took the position, I thought, I actually don't know what that is. So my first job was to figure out what is Indigenous environmental justice? Because there really wasn't a field like it, so it was sort of trying to figure out what that looked like and how to define it. So I will talk about that, but now I'm at the point where I go, so where do I go from here? Now that I've sort of grounded it in Indigenous worldview, ontology, and the way people think, as opposed to indigenizing other people's ideas. Now where do I go at this in terms of trying to assist communities and move my work along to respond to some of the big challenges that face all of us these days? So I will talk a little bit about climate change or how I might frame as being climate justice since that's kind of top of mind all over the place at this point. Seems like every time I'm doing a talk right now, it's dealing with, if it's not a specific topic, it's certainly the elephant in the room. So I will, I'll present to you some of my thinking around this and where I think I'm gonna go with it. So I will talk about people, place and relationships, how I come to know what I know, why I think the way that I do, and what I consider to be my priorities and it really guides the kind of approach that I take to my research. And not only just my research, but also just in terms of my own relationships in the communities that I work with. Because it's, for me, as a Anishinaabek scholar, I don't, there's not a nice line between my research and who I am, it's always this constant interaction and negotiation and relationship. The sources of knowledge, a lot of my research over the years has been in relation to indigenous knowledge systems. So I wanna talk a little bit about the sources of it and why that might matter in thinking about climate change and what might be the solutions to that. The role of indigenous legal traditions or indigenous law in this, another area that I'm thinking about, what climate justice looks like, what climate injustice and what justice might look like. And then I wanted to reflect on an elders in youth gathering on climate change that I facilitated. At the time, I was just trying to get through the workshop on time and trying to herd the cats a lot of the times. But as I think back on it, it was extremely rich in terms and very influential in terms of how I think. When I actually had time to think about it, when you're just past trying to get through the event to like, now, what were the instructions that I was given from this particular gathering? And what that might mean in terms of self-determined futures. And there I think about climate change futures in relation to indigenous peoples, what a self-determined future might look like. So taking more of a desire-centered approach to things with indigenous peoples and indigenous researchers opposed to what people call the deficit or the damage-centered approach to research and what that might look like. So hopefully I'll be able to achieve this in the next 40 minutes. And then there'll be an opportunity for questions, which I'm happy to entertain and get people's ideas. So some of you I recognize. So hopefully some things that are at the core of my research don't bore you or anything, but it's all relevant. So why am I starting with this? What I find with public policy, what I find with law, particularly in how internationally with the Paris Accord and Canada, well, Ontario, I guess there's no climate change with this government is how they develop a policy. And I think about even environmental policy. So I also serve on the Assembly of First Nations Environment and Climate Change Committee. So constantly analyzing and looking to see what federal government's doing for provincial. And one of the things that I found is they don't account for the history of colonialism in Canada and the ongoing colonialism. And if it doesn't do that, then it's likely going to reinforce it. So this was for some of you who around back then, the main finding from the Royal Commission on Aboriginal people was that whatever Canada for the last 150 years, their policies in relation to indigenous people has been wrong. So let's not keep doing the same thing and having policy that doesn't consider the real lived experience perspective based on the knowledge of indigenous peoples. Otherwise you're just going to keep repeating this. So that was the main finding from Royal Commission. As I say, after a really long time, like years of public engagement and indigenous engagement, I always said they could have saved a lot of money and First Nations could have told them that for free. Right off the hop in five minutes. So to me, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reaffirmed that, basically said Canada had a policy of cultural genocide. And so it's important to think about colonization in terms of policy. If you're not accounting for it in some way, then it's probably gonna be a colonial policy really from indigenous perspective. That's just a picture of the residential school that my mother went to. So then we hear the same thing from Murdered, Missing and Indigenous Women's Report just released last week. Again, we have to account for this history and policy. Where I'm finding it, which I think probably public policy might do a better job of doing that. We talk about decolonizing policy, trying to decolonize a lot of these processes. At least you hear that narrative. Not so good at figuring out exactly what that looks like. But I've been on panels recently and I started to think about this and I would challenge my co-panelists. I had to be the one for the Shirk. They released the 16 challenge areas and I was on the carrying capacity one at Congress at UBC recently. And before that, at another conference on, I guess it was ecological economics. And people just like to show all these charts and all these figures and all these lines and they're good, especially the work in ecological economics and Professor Victor. But I say to them, how are you accounting for colonialism in that? Especially with the smart prosperity where the capitalist market system is the answer to everything. I'm like, you're not really accounting for human rights in that or indigenous rights in that or the history of colonialism and how you're gonna decolonize and that just draws blank stares. But to me, that's why it's important. Like you have to understand indigenous peoples were here for thousands of years. We had our own ways of doing everything. We weren't perfect, I'm not gonna say that. The difference was when we made mistakes we could solve it ourselves. Now it's hard to do that because we're having to deal with other people's laws, other people's policies, other people's constraints upon our lives and decision-making. So understanding the history of colonization is relevant and important when we're talking about laws, when we're talking about policy, when we're talking about knowledge and these two, the inquiry and the commission have said, not only is it historical, it's all still here. So we need to always remember that and think about that. So people, places and knowledge. So for me, I will have an Eschnaubik bias to a lot of this. Although I do look at indigenous peoples, the work that tends to be generated usually through environment sustainable development conferences, usually through the declarations. Cause I figure if indigenous peoples got together from all over the world, different languages, different places and decided on some things, which is pretty remarkable. Then I respect that, I respect that a great deal. But for me, a large part of what I know is people, places and knowledge. So this is just my parents and my children. And what this reminds me of is also my responsibilities to where I am and to my ancestors and to future generations. Cause despite this history of colonization, here I am. I mean, we know that certain prime minister wanted indigenous peoples to be gone after a hundred years, but here we are. And that has to do with my ancestors and what they were able to negotiate in the treaties. Actually, I guess I have multiple treaties that I have to enable me to be part of a nation. So I want to acknowledge that and it still lives within my family. I am not fluent in an Eschnaubik win, but this is another reason why family becomes really important because my parents are. And where I'm sort of trying to move with a lot of the work that I'm doing is trying to center things in language because it's a very different way of thinking about thinking about the world. And if I have time, I'll have a couple of examples. So this is where I try to ground my thinking. And I'm fortunate that I can just pick up the phone and ask questions that I know that a lot of other people, a lot of other scholars don't have. And my son's actually in a program and he's probably, well, it's a two year program probably at the end of it, he'll be fairly fluent in an Eschnaubik win. So I interrogate him on a regular basis. And again, this is again just a place that I come from and some of the knowledge that surrounds place that is going to be extremely relevant when we're thinking about a climate change future. Because to me, indigenous solid systems gives us that baseline that scientists are so desperately trying to achieve. I'm like, we got that, we know what that is. And so that's important. I wanted to acknowledge teachers. So primarily we're in an academic setting. I make my students do this too. When I write, I have to, we have to like cite, that's what we do, we read stuff and cite things. But it's also important, especially for me in the work that I do that some of the teachers in where I've kind of had those big aha moments were with who I call teachers. And both these teachers, Josephine Mondalman and Robin Green have passed away, but they provided me with a completely different way of thinking about questions. So they're, because they thought in the language, they thought in Anishinaabe win. So they could take concepts that we were talking about and then see if it made any sense in Anishinaabe world view and ontology and then give a different explanation for what that was. And again, if there's time, I'll have opportunity to talk about that. But what that did was it influenced me to say, we're really limited in what we can talk about or from the research that I do, there's only so much I can learn from the written word. And I have to go back to community and talk to people who think in a completely different way to really kind of understand Anishinaabe way of thinking. Our teachers are also the land itself. Now this becomes very relevant to me in thinking about what climate change futures might look like because it may be that despite how brilliant people can be, that was one of our gifts, we're also extremely destructive. And maybe we don't have all the answers and maybe we need to look to other teachers and relatives for what some of those answers could be. So that requires a degree of humility in the approach that we take. And again, I won't have time to get into this, although I would have liked to and I hate saying I'm kind of teasing you with these things I'd like to tell you but I'm not going to is that in my view, a lot of Anishinaabe stories, for example, the pipe into eagle story or even the recreation story, speak, they're actually climate change stories. They actually enable us and provide the teachings that enable us to be able to survive a destruction. And a lot of that knowledge didn't come from people, it came from other sources, came from these other teachers and relatives that we have from the land itself. So this eased me into Indigenous knowledge systems. So the source of the knowledge comes from different places other than people. So this is just one slide of usually a whole course that I would teach on this. So one of the things I want to say about Indigenous knowledge systems that's important to, especially in the way the academy approaches it in the work that they do, asked to do sometimes very important work by Indigenous communities and organizations and government agencies is that the approach is to not acknowledge that the knowledge actually exists within systems. Just like we're at Carleton University, Carleton University is part of a larger education system, how it's funded, how programs are approved, provincially and otherwise, how they're run who's considered to be an expert. So Indigenous peoples have their own knowledge systems. Knowledge is governed in particular ways. And so often our knowledge is only thought of as being data or information to be extracted for the use of other people. The recognition that it's actually exists within systems that was intended to support the sustainability of Indigenous societies people don't think about. So unfortunately a lot of the methods is very extractive. Let's extract this knowledge from Indigenous communities and put them into these other frameworks whatever they might be, policy, environmental assessment, whatever, more models with lines and charts and things. And without recognizing it's actually part of a larger system of knowledge with its own way of governing what knowledge can be shared or not shared. So to me that's sort of one of the main things I wanted to say here. The other thing I wanted to say is that Indigenous knowledge systems requires responsibility that once you know something you're to act on it. It's actually a verb. In the Anishinaabe language that would be in Dosswin and it's a verb, it's a way of knowing. You do something. The way that we generally approach knowledge is more like a commodity and we collect it, we put it on the shelf, it's in libraries. But in an Anishinaabe system it's alive and you're expected to act on it. You're expected to, now that you know you're expected to be a responsible person, process it in some way. And other entities also have knowledge other than people. And again that's hard for, it requires humility again to be able to wrap one's head around this. And a lot of our knowledge was intended to support life and to understand what those responsibilities are and live up to them. And again those relationships and responsibilities were part of all our relatives and part of all entities. So it's not just confined to people. So a lot of my research is around water justice or previously, well actually I still work on it. And so the other entities, water which is considered to be alive and having its own being, also collects knowledge. So it's not just people who do that. So these other entities are collecting knowledge about what's going on, collecting knowledge about us, collecting knowledge as well. In indigenous research and methods we have ways of knowing what they know. So we had methods for doing that. So this isn't unusual in how we construct knowledge and how we would engage in research and what that looked like for thousands of years. Because of course we were seeking knowledge all the time to solve the challenges that we were facing. So that's just a tiny bit about the nature of what indigenous knowledge systems look like. And again, mine's very much informed by the Inishnabe tradition. And I've applied some of these in some of the work that I've done around water governance and policy. So hopefully that's kind of making sense so far. All right, so what is this? So then where do I go from here? So when I was trying to figure out what indigenous environmental justice was, I had to, I started to look to different places for it. Because when I looked at the literature I went, well this isn't really indigenous. It's like not that indigenous people don't experience all kinds of environmental injustices they do, but it was more from a different lens. And then indigenous peoples were like the analytical piece, the unit, that someone would apply the lens to to try to understand what's the nature of that injustice and how would we try to deal with that injustice. And I was trying to frame it from, what does it look like from an indigenous perspective? What does it look like when it's actually grounded in indigenous knowledge and laws and governance systems? So I started to look at what are indigenous legal traditions. So these are just, so two scholars whose work I like to use a lot, M.A. Kraft, actually at the University of Ottawa, does a lot of work around water law. And John Burroughs, who probably many of you have heard of just has a cool new book out. And Cecil King actually is an educator and he writes about natural law and indigenous law. But one of the points I wanted to make here is that laws read from the land. And that responsibilities is the heart of Inishinaabe legal traditions, like knowledge traditions. It doesn't mean anything unless you understand what your, if you understand what your obligations and responsibilities are to support life. And again, when you look at the language, they see it again as very much like a verb, which is consistent. A lot of Inishinaabe language anyway, I don't know if I can speak for all the others, is that 80% of it is verb-based. It's actually, you actually have to make an effort to make it into a noun. Like that's actually, like when you try to translate, you're taking something that's active and alive and verb-based and making it into a noun, when then it doesn't have the same life that it did before. So this makes sense from Inishinaabe language sort of anthology. So for example, so receiving a gift and wellbeing. So this is my family and our sugar bush. And here I was trying to understand the role of indigenous legal traditions or natural law in sustainability. So the story that I wanted to tell here is in my family, so I'm like one of nine. My mother was a principal and a teacher. Everyone's fairly well educated. I guess we have good jobs. And so I don't know who it was, but someone entertained the idea of that. Maybe we should like the pipeline approach to when people work in the sugar bush. Someone told me that's what it's called. And I said, how ironic. But for us, we still kind of do it, like the way that my family's been doing it for generations and generations. And my father said no. So there's a Inishinaabe legal principle where he said, so for us, the sap comes at a time for the Inishinaabe when we would have been experiencing major food security. So this is in the spring. You're not usually hunting. It's hard to hunt because the snow is really deep. So this comes right when we need it. And there's whole stories around how it came and it's considered to be a gift. It's considered to be medicine, medicine water. And it's very nutritious, full of minerals at this time. So when you cross that line, so when we go to all the trees and they're not all tapped every year, is that we understand it as receiving a gift from that tree. But when you do the pipeline system, then you start taking from that tree. And that's when you cross the line. There's a difference between receiving a gift and taking something. Then it becomes tempting to take too much. You start to take more than you need. So there's a principle that guides and you don't cross that line, even though you can, you don't. Because a common perception about Indigenous people was, oh, they're just too primitive to be really destructive. I'm like, well, we could have, but we didn't. Because we had our own principles, our own legal principles that would guide appropriate behavior to understand that that's receiving a gift and there's a way that you receive it. And you're not going to take because that leads to, you go down a slippery slope. And that's a support well-being, not just of people, but also the trees and all life that it would also support. So again, I look at our stories as also being illogical knowledge, but also climate change stories. So this, I just like the muskrat because I really like the recreation stories. But essentially to know Indigenous law, you have to know the land. You have to know the environment. You have to know ecology. And that's pretty well the, they really the only way to really understand it. It's not the kind of thing that you're going to pull from shelves, books on the shelf and think that you're going to know Indigenous legal traditions. So initial back, natural law. So Cecil King taught for many years at the University of Saskatchewan from Wiki from the community, my mother's from fluent speaker. So he thinks in the language. And what I wanted to emphasize in this particular quote is how we talked about our laws and our relationships wasn't just with us, but with other orders of beings. And that would be other entities, other beings in the world in creation. So it's not just about us. It's also recognizing that they have laws as well. And we have to respect them. So it's not just people who make laws. There's other kinds of laws. And we have to, and our laws would enable us to be responsible, to live in coexistence with other members of other orders. So I'm going to know Mazuin. So this is an issue of a concept of living a good life. This is what we strive for. And initially, this tended to be only talked about more in the health literature. So people talking about health, indigenous health, and Shabey health. And then you started to see it in the environment. It's usually starting, I find, with Winona LaDuke in some of her work. What is it? Why do we do what we do? And now starting to see it actually in some of the indigenous legal scholarship. But to me, one of the reasons why it's really important, because it's what we strive for. And what I found in the Indigenous Environmental Justice Scholarship is it's very diagnostic. Like it really likes to diagnose what the injustice is. And they're really good at that. So same with academics, we're really good at that. Not so good at the solutions. Like we're really good at diagnosing. This is like the problem. And there's all these scales and, you know, but we're not so good at figuring out like what is it that we're actually, what is it that we're trying to strive for? So in an agitabic thinking, what we're always striving for is Mino NaMozuin. So I started to think about that's what justice looks like. Like what does justice look like? It was always like, what does injustice look like? So I went, well, we already have these concepts. They already exist. So for us, it's Mino NaMozuin. And this is what we strive for. And our laws are meant to allow for those good relations. And again, these don't just apply to people. It always applies beyond the, it always applies beyond the human dimension. It always applies to other beings and other entities. Injustice. So these are some assumptions, I guess you could say. So what I've been, what I've been finding is that, you know, so we know about the IPCC report. Things aren't looking good, calling for 12 years. I guess it was released in the fall. I guess it's 11 and a half years now. And then the government of Canada report on changing climate is not looking good. You know, world health report, climate change being the biggest health issue that the planet, that people I guess on the planet are facing right now. But drawing on work from Zoe Todd, actually who's here at this university and Kyle White and others have said that, and it's true that Indigenous peoples have already faced what other people are just starting to face. This is why the genocide, the colonization is really important because we've already had to face our annihilation. We've already had 90% of our population decimated. We've already had to face major environmental change through relocation or the killing of the, we've already had to, we've already faced it. We've already had to do it. Western countries are just starting to wake up and smell the coffee and go, oh my God, this might happen. We go, we've been there, we've done that and here we are. So maybe we have something to say. Maybe there's something we can offer to this whole discussion because we have been severely disrupted by these processes that continue to threaten everybody now. But at the same time, our ability to be able to adapt like we've always done is constrained by colonial law policies and institutions. And that's why it's relevant to try to think about them is that colonization is still very much part of these processes. Yet we've adapted and we have survived. So to me, I think there's things to learn from indigenous peoples around this. Scum scholars write that, and I guess when you think about it, again, this history, this colonial history, when you think about what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was saying with the murdered, missing indigenous women and girls inquiry was saying is that indigenous peoples are already living in a dystopia already. Like we're already living in a world where all that is genocidal, has these genocidal tendencies toward you. And it's not like it's gone away either. So it's still very much here. And that we have to try to find solutions within this broader context that we live in, that other people are just starting to kind of face. All the dystopia novels and dystopia movies and things like that is sort of like, yeah, we've had to face a lot of that. One thing that we do, that we do often pay attention to, again, is that we always go beyond the human dimension. So we're always thinking about what is the impact on the non-human relatives and teachers. So a lot of it tends to be very focused on what's happening with people, but we always go beyond what's happening to people to think about what is happening to, what is happening to our relatives and what are they saying about climate change that we might have the inability to listen to. So to me, that's sort of some of the context. So environmental justice, what did I try to, after looking at stories, thinking about indigenous legal traditions, what does our knowledge say about this? What do our governance say about this? Environmental justice, from what I can tell, indigenous environmental justice is, recognizes the earth as a being and an entity with rights and responsibilities, which you're starting to see internationally with the rights of Mother Earth, constitutionally in Bolivia, in other places, the rights of the river in New Zealand, but we recognize the earth as being a being and entity with rights. The solutions and responses don't recognize this. So think about how the water crisis, First Nation water crisis is being dealt with right now. It doesn't recognize that at all. It tends to take a very technical, scientific kind of approach to fixing that. So it doesn't account for how indigenous peoples or First Nations people in Canada understand this. It doesn't deal with the damage already done, the historical trauma that's already been experienced by the environment or the other relatives. And then, again, trying to work through this and figure out how can justice then be achieved and how do we know? What does it look like? The other assumptions that I found with the environmental justice scholarship, and I'm gonna say that I still think it's really important. Like I would never say that it's not, it's really important. It's just that indigenous environmental justice is a lot broader. It considers different things, its assumptions are different. So what I found with the environmental justice literature, it tends to have binaries. So people, it automatically seems people are separate from the environment. Things are happening to people because of stuff happening to the environment. And that's not generally how indigenous peoples understand relationship to the environment. Humans' rights discourse is evoked. And I think, again, that's really important, but it's limited, because it's just focused on humans. And we always go beyond the human dimension in indigenous thinking. Relatives, water, forests are thought about as being resources or commodities or property. That's not how we think about those kind of things. So it's based on a number of assumptions that are different than what indigenous people think about as being the problem and what the solutions might be. How might we achieve environmental justice? I think part of it is renewing the covenant between people and the earth. This has been really disrupted. A lot of indigenous scholars, Valnepolean at University of Victoria says, people are breaking our laws all the time. Like, indigenous peoples get accused of breaking laws, provincial laws, we're like, but other people are breaking our laws. The laws that have been here for thousands of years all the time, this is how we've ended up kind of in the situation that we're in, that we need to start renewing this covenant and recognizing that you would have a covenant between people and earth, because we did. It's in some of the treaties where there's a specific treaty with the earth itself. Giving versus taking, part of legal principles and ethics, that's a very different way of being in the world. I like this idea, well, I actually don't like the idea. The way that Robin Kimmermer talks about when to goes in society that consume. Basically, they're this monster for lack of a better word in Anishinaabek stories that consumes, it takes more than it needs. And it basically threatens the whole community. So not a good thing. So again, we had stories for dealing with some of the things that we're facing now, people who are taking away too much and consuming. And she said that we have a choice between choosing the path that a wind ago or the path of the Mazuin, which is living well with all of the earth. So we do have a lot of these ideas and how we think about and how we navigate through these processes. So environmental justice, again, these are just some of the assumptions. How is it currently framed, the human nature divide? But then what does the self-determined future kind of look like? Like where do we kind of go from here? It's all kind of dreadful. Like it's quite depressing. It's like sometimes I don't wanna hear about it first thing in the morning, later on maybe later, but not first thing in the morning. So indigenous environmental justice, so these are just, when I was looking at it, so I call this more like the trying to indigenize environmental justice by recognizing indigenous peoples are unique, Aboriginal and treaty rights, or a particularly kind of indigenous state relations, whether that's fiduciary or reconciliation. So people did in the scholarship try to account for this, but it's still not framed within an indigenous way of indigenous way of thinking. To me, there's a certain logic that you apply to thinking in this way. So again, as I mentioned, I said, we already had concepts of justice and what this might look like. And again, we always extended to all our relations. We have to look at those kind of unjust relations as well and try to understand what appropriate and just relations look like. So what are again some of the limitations? The current dominant environmental governance frameworks and laws fail to provide environmental justice. They don't. I think we know that through just about every single report that's coming. I can't remember the name of it that came out in the spring on the number of species that are going to disappear, not looking good. So whatever the system is, it's not working. And so again, a lot of the policies, practices, they support ongoing colonial agenda, still very extractive and still very exploitive. So initial back logic, because I'm a researcher, I tend to think in terms of questions. So what might this look like? What are the kind of questions that you would ask yourself as an initial back that might lead us to adjust future? One is, are we honoring our relationship with our ancestors? And those include like your non-human ancestors, your relatives and teachers with each other and future generations. Am I a good ancestor? Am I like even a good descendant for my ancestors? Are our relationships doing justice with all our relations? Is that what we're thinking about all the time? What do our laws say about this? How do we ensure our relatives are living well? Again, because it's not just us. And our ultimate purpose is to sustain life for all relations. That's what our knowledge and our laws are to achieve. So there's a certain logic that we apply, a certain set of questions that we would ask ourselves. This isn't all of them. These are just the kind of questions that we would think about. So getting into what climate change, how does this then apply to climate change? And this is where my thinking is going. In my work, it's probably one of the top issues, well, probably priority issue in working with First Nation communities right now is how to respond to climate change. So again, a lot of what's happened in Turtle Island, North America wasn't really our idea. And we weren't responsible for a lot of what's happened, but at the same time we're in it, we have to deal with it. So how can we try to imagine a different kind of future? What can we draw on that we already know that we've had to deal with severe environmental change when we already have this experience? And this is where I talk about the Elder Youth Climate Change Workshop. So this was, we held it in Thunder Bay, probably 70 plus elders in youth attended it. And they're not people who are reading all the scholarship and they're just coming together to talk about this issue of climate change. And this was actually coordinated by youth through the Chiefs of Ontario Young People's Council. So they wanted to talk to elders. They said, we wanna understand elders' knowledge, we wanna know what it is that we need to know. And elders very much wanted to talk to youth because they recognize that they have different kind of knowledge that's very relevant to understanding how communities might be able to respond to climate change. And even what we understand climate change to be. And it's kind of interesting, like when I think about what the IPCC says about climate change, how it's being defined, very kind of scientific. When we asked to elders and they basically said, well, it's greed, people are consuming way too much, they're taking, like they had a very different idea about what it was. And I thought we're just sort of letting this other dialogue kind of dominate our thinking. And then you keep thinking, if we can only do these things, that's the solution without actually really giving thought to what is actually causing all of this. So they had very different ideas about, and of course they'd seen it through other environmental change that they had to face in their lives. So was trying to bring people together, youth and elders to talk about this. And what they said, so what is it that we are able to do that enabled us to be here? What is it that enabled the Nishnabek resilience? And really what it was is our knowledge and our language and being on the land. That's actually what enabled us to survive and to adapt and to still be here. It wasn't like other people's solutions, like Royal Commission Aboriginal people pointed out, it was like our own, it was our own knowledge, it was our own language, it was our own stuff that enabled us to be able to survive. So that was pointed out by elders and youth. And that's what enables our wellbeing. We can't rely on other people to decide what that is because it doesn't, that really hasn't worked out well for us in terms of not self-determining with that means for us. And that means being out there and it means being out on the land, it means being with elders. So one of the, one of the emphasis of the elders, like if I were to divide it because I actually had the right to report on this, so I did have to kind of try to analyze it, was elders were really focused on the healing of the earth, like healing of Mother Earth has to actually happen. That's what we need to do in relation to dealing with any major severe environmental change, including climate change, and youth were really wanting to connect with the earth. That's what, that was sort of their priority. So a lot of people talk about the generational difference, but actually they agreed. They all agreed that language being on the land, all of that was really important. They weren't often different tangents about where, what we needed to do. And this is just a quote from one of the elders. Again, so really not trusting provincial federal laws and saying that maybe our laws might work a little bit better. I love this quote from Dan Longboat for a couple of reasons. Some of you might know Dan Longboat from Trent University is, because this is where you never see this in any of the climate change. I actually had a student go through the IPCC reports, all of them, Environment Canada's work, others, and just said, where do you find love in there? Tell me if you find this principle, which is central to how Anishinaabek think, but it's part of the dialogue that elders and youth come together in. Like where we talk about different kind of things as being important in addressing this issue. And then we have an obligation to take care of our wellbeing which requires taking care of other entities and beings. This is just indigenous knowledge. And again, where elders have said, what's a priority? Priority is language. So the language act or the proposed, that's really important, believe it or not, to addressing climate change from indigenous or Anishinaabek perspective. Because you need to, again, because the language contains so much of the knowledge in the ontology and a different way of thinking. When I said my dad talked about that concept that we're sort of taking, like the gift and taking, it's a, I haven't, because I'm not very fluent and very clever in it, is it's actually Anishinaabek concept that I can never pronounce and that's what he said. So part of my work in the future, is to try to understand those a bit better so that you know what are those principles for when you know that you've crossed the line. So language is really important to that. So a lot of people don't link language to climate change work at all. Indigenous people do. So again, indigenous legal traditions and governance. So basically the current system isn't working. That governance and legal system is not serving the earth or people very well. And so what do we need? And it's not even like replacing anything. The way I would talk about it is indigenous law is out there. It exists, just as it has, it's just not recognized or enabled or facilitated to be part of broader discussions. UNDRIP UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People and Human Rights, again, they're exceedingly important but they're limited because they don't recognize the other beings that also have responsibilities and rights as well. So climate change futures, how to think about a climate change future? How to self-determination intersect with climate change? And again, you see this criticism of the current laws and processes and drawn away from our own laws. Often people will talk about natural law. But here is again where I thought it was really important is that when are we gonna stop taking and when are we gonna start giving back? So again, Anishinaabe, a concept that I learned from the elders that I showed in the first few slides is, our idea of sustainability isn't how do we keep up this completely unsustainable lifestyle that we have, which is a lot of what people get consumed with. It's like, Anishinaabe, get up every day and think about what's our gift going to be? How are we going to help the earth flourish? That's a very different way of thinking about how we relate to the planet and what sustainability is. And that's what they're saying here. Again, they're not reading all the literature. They didn't read anything I wrote on this, but they're hearing elders, elders talk about this. What are we gonna give? What's our gift going to be? As opposed to how are we gonna keep taking in a sustainable kind of way, which is sort of a conventional definition of sustainable development. Makes no sense in Anishinaabe win. And when people in the language go, that doesn't make any sense. That's not what we do. Then they say, we think about what our gift is going to be. How are we gonna enable the planet? How are we gonna be able the earth, mother earth to flourish? And again, the current, the way people are dealing with climate change is failing. It's getting worse, not better. What are our self-determined solutions? What did this group say about this? And again, I wanna take these up and try to figure it out, like what might this look like? It's all again about the land. That's where we're gonna draw our strength. That's what's gonna enable us to survive into the future. It's imagining what our future might be. And again, I like this slide because again, love comes up. And again, I'm like, it keeps coming up in the way that Anishinaabe think and the way, this wasn't just Anishinaabe either. This was all of Ontario. So it was Hono Nishoni and there are six nations. It was Mishkega-Witkri, Oji-kri and Anishinaabe. So all the different nations in Ontario where love came up from the youth saying that's what we need to think about. Do we love the earth enough? Like, do we think it's, are we important enough to live well with the earth? So these different values and ideas, ideologies come out from these conversations. So what is our future going to be? So this is just a shot of the youth that were there. And again, trying to think in terms of what's this future in light of the challenges? What did we learn from what we've already had to deal with? And here we are. What does that look like? What does that require for our future? Again, because all we're hearing is just how horrible everything are. And for indigenous people, it's true. People are vulnerable. See here all the vulnerability that we have to deal with indigenous people. They're so vulnerable, which is true, but that's because of a lot of the times that colonial constraints, you can't respond in the way that you'd like. So for example, in this gathering with the elders and youth, so a part of it was funded by Ministry of Environment and Climate Change because there was a Ministry of Environment Climate Change in Ontario at the time. There's no climate change. I don't even think there was an environment, Ministry of Environment anymore, it got lumped in with something else. And so they had their idea what the solution was, what the climate change solution was, and they had their climate action plan, I guess so does Canada. And they kept pushing the participants to saying, but don't you want a community garden? And don't you want like a greenhouse? Like they saw that as sort of the solution, the food security. And the people are like, no, we want to hunt and we want to fish and we want to collect our medicines, which means you can't approve the stupid mind because that's affecting the moose population. So they understood these connections. And then, and it was sort of like being in a room and listening to like, it was really weird because then they kept repeating it, but wouldn't a community garden be really helpful? And they're like, we want to be able to hunt moose. Like it was, like, so people had these ideas of what the solution was and people were saying something completely different that had to do with knowledge. It had to be on the land that had to, and so we have to imagine our own future without the constraints of what other people think the solution is, which tends to be, I mean, governments do this and they're trying to solve the problem through programs, but then you get limited by the nature of the programs of what they consider to be an appropriate project, which they can never all be funded anyway. And I am near the end. And so this slide just again speaks to what will our gifts be and it's not a concept of sustainability. We're not thinking about how can we keep taking so we can keep having this unsustainable, consumer-driven kind of existence. It's more about what are our gifts going to be, not what we can keep taking from the earth. And in our tradition, we had fasts. This was something I learned from the late Josephine Mondalman was people tend to think of it as a sacrifice because you're not eating or drinking for four days usually, maybe longer, sometimes shorter. But really what you're doing is you're giving the earth a break. You're not drinking anything, you're not taking anything. So it's your gift back to the earth. So it's a completely different way of thinking about that whole experience and practice and what its intentions are. Almost everything has all kinds of layers and I'm kind of limited in my layers because basically because of my limitations in language. Hence why I call home a lot and why I interrogate my son every time I see him. So I wanted to end with this. This is, so in Orville, more so painting and the reason I like it because it shows all the connections. And actually this is from Isadora Day, if any of you have ever heard him. He's like totally amazing storyteller. Sort of lived most of his life outside the system in many different ways. And what he talks about in relation to this story is he talks about the times that we're facing now as a sacred story. The things are unfolding in a certain way and we all have a role to play in the story. So we're all in this together. Like it's like having separations, like conflict, all like we're all in this together and we're gonna decide who we're gonna be in the story. Are we gonna be when to go? Are we gonna consume? Are we gonna take? Are we gonna give? Are we gonna be? Are we gonna support Namazuin? So we have a choice. We can and we can be bit players in this too. Are we gonna support when to go? Or are we gonna support a life of Namazuin? So he talks about that. We're all in this. It's all connected somehow. And to think about the times that we're in as being a type of story and we're in charge of how that story can unfold. So to me, Gwetch. Yes. I have no idea what people are seeing. So we have a perfect time. Do you wanna take questions now or? I think so because I finished I think on time. Yeah, okay. Thank you. I taught the environmental ethics classes a lot and to try to be brief and you talk about a lot of different concepts of moral theories all on a level. And I'm wondering how you would prioritize them because a lot of time in the non-indigenous philosophies and I have to say many of them did drawn indigenous ideas. There would be what would be called the masculinist theories that concentrated on rights individuals and justice. And then there would be ecofeminism that would concentrate on love and caring and relationships and community. And they would prioritize things somewhat differently. And I'm just wondering if you have ideas about how one would prioritize whether justice comes first or communities and caring. I guess because I don't really see those as being really terribly separate. And you're right, like there are problems with the compartmentalizing and creating hierarchies. And we're being an undergraduate student when the grads in psychology and looking at Maslow's theory going that so doesn't work for Anishinaabe thinking because it's like this hierarchy, right? This hierarchy of needs. And I'm thinking we think like in a circle and all of them would be central and important. So just as you were talking, I think what was going through my head was again that image that I always have in my head when Isidore Day is talking like everything's always connected. It's the way I also think about theory and practice because there's a hierarchy there too, right? World view, ontology, ethics and that because we're probably most of us in universities we think that theory is more important than practice, which is that's what colleges do and we do like theory. And but actually like our thinking isn't like that at all. Like the thinking and the theory are connected. Like I think of it, I don't really have the model in my head. I think of it more like a spiral that it could go either way. Like they're actually directly like they're the same entity but it doesn't mean you can't think theoretically separate from practice but it's impossible to have the philosophy without the practice and the practice without the philosophy because they're so directly connected. Then as academics come around and be analytical and wanna separate it all out and this is, so we're kind of like doing something unnatural to that kind of thousands of years of thinking and way of being that existed. So I guess, yeah, I think about it very differently. Like I don't see the care separate because that's, because the justice is also to ourselves. Like Dan Longboat's quote to me is so important because of the health problems particularly with youth. I don't even wanna say it but the, well, the high suicide rates. So part of it is like starting at that level to and people see that as being very symptomatic of everything that's going on that if you look at it from a strong mind's perspective or caring for yourself, you care for yourself like you would care for the earth. That's actually an obligation that we have. I'm starting to look at that as actually being our understanding of a legal obligation is actually to take care of yourself and then you're able to take care of others. I haven't gone there yet but that's kind of kind of where I'm sort of thinking in terms of that and working with youth to do that because they think about this very differently. They don't wanna think it like they don't like the other mental health issues are like, no, we wanna talk about strong minds and what does that mean from a Hunan Showni perspective or Anishinaabe perspective because that's actually how we thought, that's actually our, that's how we thought for thousands of years and that's what we supported in terms of how we approached supporting life, I guess you could say. So hopefully that made sense. It's hard to uncompartmentalize, I find, or an unhierarchy eyes thing, whatever it is. That makes a lot of sense, thank you so much. Hopefully that all made sense because some of this is new thinking like I was putting this together that I thought I really wanna talk about like where I'm kind of going with what I already know and all the stuff I don't know that I need to work with people who aren't as constrained by their thinking as I am in my day-to-day life in a university, yeah. Any other thoughts or questions? Yeah, I have a question. Nearly 50 years ago, I spent some time with the Stony Indian tribe of the Blackwood Nation in the foothills of Alberta's Rocky Mountain and the memory is still very fresh in my mind and very dear to me. I was immersed totally in their way of life and I realized how precious it is. We don't have to go to India to a mystic to realize there is another dimension to life. My question to you is that you mentioned some challenges that indigenous people faced before the white newcomers arrived. What were these challenges? How were they resolved? And are the same methods applicable in today's world? Yes, so it's hard, I mean with the time to get into the whole story but if you're, who's familiar with the Nishnabek recreation story? Oh, one person. Okay, a couple of people. So we have a number of different, so there's a couple I think that come to mind to answer your question. One is the creation and then the destruction and then the recreation story. And mind you, there's all kinds of different versions like it was reading that maybe there's at least 140 different ones, but the one that people probably find the most is the Muscat story where the Muscat dives down and gets to earth and brings it up and then we have a recreation. But that destruction comes because people are not following basically in English, I guess, natural law. We've been given everything that we need to survive or to like to be, I guess, to sustain ourselves as people with all of creation. We are given the laws. We are given how to behave properly, given the songs, given all the tools that we needed to do it, which is for us like the drum and the songs and the pipe and those kind of things. But we start to become arrogant. We start to not behave ourselves. We start to forget what our instructions are. We start to forget how to behave properly. And there has to be a destruction because we're not nice to each other. People get vain, people get arrogant. And in the recreation story, so the animals, so when there's the flood, and again, there's different versions of this, probably the one that people hear most as Sky Woman comes and lands on the turtle's back, so the turtle comes to help her. And then all the animals try to find the soil so that life can continue on on Turtle Island. But all the animals have to cooperate with one another. So there's actually a number of principles. To me, I see them as ecological principles. So I actually work at the story a lot and probably all my teaching. So in that story and how the animals help retrieve the soil and then create earth, there's actually a lot of ecological principles in that. There's a reason why the muskrat's the one that's able to do it. If you know the biology of the muskrat compared to the other animals, so it makes ecological, biological sense. So then the earth is created again and then we're given instructions for how to behave properly. So the reason why a destruction happens is when word one's not behaving. Everything else is doing what it should be doing, kind of like now. And it's humans who are the ones who are screwing up basically. So it's usually when we're not behaving, we're not conducting ourselves in the proper way with all of creation or with each other. In the pipe in the Eagle story, which is one that, so for many years I worked at the re-creation story, I've written about this in a much nicer way than I just said, because I have more time in the story to talk about it. But in the pipe in the Eagle story, to me that one's a little bit, it's a little bit different. But the root of the problem is still the same. We've been given everything that we need to be sovereign, I guess, like in the lands that we live in. And again, people were, so we're given, that's why it's called the pipe in the Eagle. So that we're given the pipe, we have the drum, we have our ceremonies, we have everything that we need to live in an appropriate, I guess, an environmental realm, we'll say sustainable way with all of creation. And then we start not to do that. We start to become arrogant, we start to become vain, we start to take more than we need, we start to basically break those laws. And that story, the creator or actually that's really not right, it's probably more like a verb creation that entity decides they've had enough because we're taking more deer, the other beings are not happy, ballless and they're being influenced because we were given will, like we were and we're smart, but we can also be extremely destructive about our smartness, I guess. And so the creator sends a being to basically destroy earth in like four days. And then the animals get together and say, we'd rather not have that happen again. And so the eagle's the one that petitions to the creation, I'll say, because it's probably more like a verb than a noun. And says that all they need to do is find one person who's still following the original instructions. That he's petitioning on behalf of future generations saying, yeah, these people are like kind of screwing up, but not all of them. I'm sure there's like somebody out there who's behaving themselves and still following, like still doing the ceremonies and still giving the offerings and still supporting life. So the creation creator says, okay, fine, go find them for me, you have four days to do it. And that's at dawn. So that's considered to be a sacred time when time stands still. And that's when the eagle is able to go up. So the eagle's really important. And so the eagle flies over four days it's starting to get desperate, it's starting to become dawn on the fourth day. But he finds, he does find one family who's still doing the ceremonies and following the instructions, even though there's all kinds of other people who are not starting to lose my voice. As it happens when you don't teach for a couple months. And so the eagle finds this and then flies to the creator and says, I found somebody. And then the creator holds back destruction. And so in that story, people are again, reminded to follow what those original instructions are to have the pipe, to have the drum, to have the songs, to have the ceremonies, to remember what our responsibilities are to not be arrogant, to be humble. And in the story, what it makes me think of and I've actually written about this because in the story, essentially, people don't like it when I say this but people, we're not smart enough. So we have to rely on the other relatives to help us out. And that's what our stories tell us. Like this is why it's important to say, knowledge is in these other places because we can get too arrogant. We can get too vain. We start not being, there was violence, like they're describing all this dysfunction that was happening in Anishinaabek communities. And we had to be reminded to be humble and to not to be vain and to not take and all those ceremonies and language and the gifts that were given to us to remind us, ensure that sustainability. So that's one story that I really like right now because a lot of the work that I wanna do is what are other entities telling us? So for example, if you have the chance and the Chiefs of Ontario website there's actually a short video from that Youth Elders Gathering and there's this one woman, young woman, Jade Willoughby, her name is, I couldn't, it's a five minute video, it wouldn't take too long so there's not even me trying to guess what the timestamp is. And she said, really what climate change is is the earth is trying to tell us something. That's how she understands it. The earth is trying to tell us what's going on and that we have to change. A completely again, different way of thinking about what's happening to the earth and how we should be responding appropriately to that. So she's not reading the IPCC reports. She's just coming from a community perspective listening to elders and understanding the stories. So to me, I'm starting to take that a lot more seriously and go what are those other laws? What is that other knowledge that's telling us what's happening with the earth and how it's people who have to basically be reined in. So in my mind we already have those stories where, and it's usually because we're not behaving appropriately and conducting ourselves appropriately and behaving in a way that supports life. And it's our traditions and it's our language and it's our ceremonies that remind us all the time to remember to conduct ourselves appropriately. And it doesn't take away from your will and it doesn't take away from your agency because we always have choices about how we want to be in the world. So those are only just a couple of examples because those are the ones I work with the most at the moment. But yeah, so hopefully that sort of gives you a sense of that. I didn't do justice to these stories at all by the way. There's different versions and they're way more elaborate but those are sort of the lessons that come from them that it's always beyond us. That's why I always say that it's always beyond people and we kind of have to get over ourselves a bit collectively as humans to really try to face the challenges that we're facing. So hopefully that answered the question. Well, actually it didn't. Oh really? I'm sorry to say it didn't but you refer to it in your answer in some subtle ways. You said that we people have created this problem and we need to be reined in. Do you suppose that one of the things that we can do to this planet is not to have as many children as we're having today? Would it be fair to say that- That every woman is entitled to be pregnant but not to produce a whole tribe all by herself? We have other questions over here as well. Yeah, I was gonna say that, that's just disturbing. But anyway. So I'm in the Northern Studies program at Carleton University. The reason why I came into this program is because in 2016 I'm from Northwestern Ontario and we experienced a short winter or winter road season and it was about two weeks and so we couldn't, our communities that are flying and rely heavily on a winter road season couldn't get like fuel and things like that that we need for our First Nations community. So that's the reason why I came into the Northern Studies program because our program looks at the Canada's Arctic so I wanted to see how, I wanted to find out how communities in the Arctic were responding to climate change and the impacts of climate change. So that was the reason why I came into this program and then it started to, my interest started to go more into indigenous rights of climate change because First Nations communities, there's little employment, we got social issues and stuff like that. So I, with your youth and elders gathering, I was wondering if they shared the same interest of what indigenous rights in the policy context of First Nations communities if there were concerns on that about say like the lack of employment where, because this time there was like little time to get materials and personal items that we would normally travel 11, like number of hours to go and kind of get the materials that we need for the whole year until the next winter road season because it's cheaper and it's more cost effective for shipping instead of air shipping and then in the summertime, shipping price costs go higher. So that's the type of stuff that I wanted to see find out in this program. So I was wondering if that was a similar concern that at your gathering was shared. Yes, I just focused on, I guess the parts I wanted to focus on, but they did, they talked about treaty rights a lot. And this was in 2017. So a lot of the people who are from Northwestern Ontario who were in it would have experienced just what you talked about. So a big part of it was identifying like the impacts that people are feeling from or the experiences that people are getting from climate change, but they did, they did talk about Aboriginal and treaty rights not being recognized as being part of the problem. Cause it constrains people from doing what they want to do. Even you can think about the reserve system, that system constrains people. Cause now people's movement is affected because people are now dependent on when winter roads are to move goods in and out of communities. So no, that was a big thing. Cause a lot of the people were actually, were like X, like grand chiefs of the PTOs kind of thing. So they did, they did talk about that and how rights are being impacted by decisions that people are making that. And again, a lot of the conversation around, but we really actually want to hunt moose cause that's related to Aboriginal and treaty rights. And I think about like the response from M O E C C at the time is, but what about community gardens and greenhouses? That keeps people off the land, right? Like, you know, like to me I started to see, that's kind of, I started to see it as being more insidious than I, first I thought it was just like ignorance, like aren't you hearing up here? Then I started to think actually you don't want people out there on the land, like exercising Aboriginal and treaty rights. You just want them to just like have a greenhouse and that's like food security. So the report is actually on the chiefs of Ontario website and it'll talk more about Aboriginal and treaty rights and there was a separate section on food sovereignty cause it's not just food security, it's also sovereignty. Like people want to eat what they want to eat. They don't down long, what calls it colonization in the cupboard, like you want to eat like, you know, I mean, not like, it's not that people didn't like the idea of greenhouses or community gardens. People have gardens. They just didn't think that's the answer to climate change or, you know, they just kind of thought there's a bit more to it than that. But no, they did talk about that. That was really important as part of the conversation and the youth just is concerned about that as the older folks. The older folks had seen it throughout their whole lives, like, you know, what's happened and the youth were really able to draw on their experience and trying to figure out how they want to deal with it. Time for one more question if that's okay. So I was just wondering if there was a key takeaway you wanted us to like get from this and not able to just pass on to other people who might not be as interested in indigenous knowledge but also towards like our future generations like to our children and our children's children that we can give to them in order to help spread indigenous knowledge and important information. Oh, that's like really hard question. To me, I think I would say it's always asking yourself a certain set of questions. And one of them I think is, and to me, I always tie it back again to the land acknowledgement and acknowledgement that people were here for thousands of years, had knowledge and laws and everything else is, is to ask yourself what kind of ancestor you are? Like, what are you gonna leave your descendants? Like all of us are gonna be ancestors, right? So it's like, what kind of ancestor am I gonna be? And that once you know something, like you then act responsibly based on that knowledge. It's not good enough just to take some notes and go, yeah, that was kind of neat. And then forget about it, like you actually have to... Which is not how we teach people at all, of course, but we wait for the exam or the paper. So I guess that's actually two take home messages. But to me, I think the main thing is what kind of ancestor am I gonna be for future generations? And future generations, not just people, future generations, but all life. That's a good question, actually. Thank you for that. The other hard question we got at the can't see one, the ecological economics was with someone who says, I'm an office worker, what can I do? And we're just like, I'll stump the panel. Like, what? I don't even know how to, yeah. So another hard question. But thank you for that. That was actually easier than, what should I do? I'm an office worker. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Small gift from the Faculty of Public Affairs and the University. Thank you. Everyone's comfortable knowing that we're like the dumbest of all the entities on the planet, but everyone's okay with that. Most people are like, what? Some days it's not a big surprise. Yeah, I just wanna reiterate what I said just now. Wanted to thank Deborah for an excellent lecture and on a really important issue. And as a neoclassical or liberal economist, it makes me think a little bit about issues and I think you've raised a lot of important issues that I think can be integrated into our way of thinking about the world. So I appreciate that on a personal level. And I think the size of the audience and the enthusiasm demonstrates that we as a society are very interested in your work and learning more. And maybe I'll just give a quick plug that don't forget where we are. We will have lots of events next year and please look at our website. We look forward to seeing many of you back again. Thank you. Thank you. Cool.