Indigenous Knowledge included in Bill C 69

Indigenous Knowledge

Indigenous peoples have built up an understanding of their environment over the generations, over the millennia.  I expect most of this is simply passed on as sound advice that must be heeded.  What I mean by that is that the detailed explanations as to why this advice is critical to success, to life in the environment, and what experiences generated that knowledge might well be lost.  Nonetheless, the advice is taken seriously today by indigenous peoples still living in that same environment.

Newcomers to the environment might think of this advice as legend, myth, fairy tale folklore and discount its relevance and usefulness in the current age.  I think it’s quite likely indigenous knowledge is ignored until and perhaps even after some damaging or life-threatening event has taken place, which peril might have been avoided by heeding the advice found in indigenous knowledge.

Further complicating the situation might be the communication of the knowledge in the language of the indigenous peoples holding that knowledge.  There is, I suspect, a tendency to use the ten second sound bite or elevator pitch approach we are familiar with.  The imagery is probably strong in the culture of the indigenous peoples expressing it.  That imagery may be meaningless to the newcomer not having experienced this cultural vernacular, especially not having had to depend on that knowledge as the difference between life and death.  We are all familiar with people having trouble communicating even when they grew up in the same community, the same culture with a common language.

In the case of indigenous knowledge, when the newcomer is a colonist with an assumed right of ownership of the indigenous resources lying before him, especially resources not being exploited by the indigenous peoples, there is an even stronger predilection to ignore the communication from the indigenous peoples because the colonist thinks they might be at best naive but most likely simply stupid and uncivilized, therefore with nothing useful to say.

I think the newcomer, even the colonist, would be well advised to first of all think of his own experience within his own social milieu.  How often does a professional or any occupation with a special skill set run into situations wherein lay people do not understand what the pro is saying and often simply accepts the pro’s statements as learned?  Today we actually are finding the exact opposite to be true where the lay person refuses to believe anything the pro says because of suspicion of manipulation for the pro’s own purposes, possibly nefarious.

All that being said, we do ourselves a dangerous disservice by dismissing indigenous knowledge as non-knowledge.

We might recall the stories of the first colonists arriving on the Atlantic coast and trying to survive the North American winter which was not the same as what they were used to in the British Isles or France and other points in western Europe.  Without the advantage of indigenous knowledge, all would surely have perished.

That advantage was used repeatedly as colonists spread across North America, where the winters were surely even more difficult than those of the Atlantic coast.

Yet somehow, the colonists forgot that they brought what should have been their own indigenous knowledge to the new land in the form of deadly diseases.  I’m afraid the life-saving education received from the indigenous peoples was not repaid in kind.

More recently, we had major fires:
the Slave Lake, Alberta fire of 2011   
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/fire-destroys-40-of-slave-lake-1.981352 ;

the Fort McMurray fire of 2016 
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/fort-mcmurray-wildfire-remains-out-of-control-after-city-evacuated-1.3563977 ;

the British Columbia wildfires of 2018
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/state-emergency-bc-wildfires-1.4803546 .

All this fire devastation within the context of indigenous knowledge not applied over the decades.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/fire-fighting-first-nations-firekeepers-annie-kruger-penticton-bc-wildfire-mega-fire-1.4205506 .

Before all that current fire devastation, we had the Frank Slide.  https://www.mysteriesofcanada.com/alberta/frank-slide/   Interestingly we had indigenous knowledge about Turtle Mountain : “The Indians of the area avoided Turtle Mountain. To them, it was the “Mountain that Walked”. Their legend would soon become all too real.”   In the face of our reaction to this knowledge we had the reaction, “Lol”.  Whatever. Mountains don’t walk.” and “In a brief 100 ear-shattering, bone-jarring seconds, 76 people lost their lives, 23 were injured and 17 miners were trapped inside a mine shaft behind over 100 feet of rubble and stone . 

It seems to me we should know by now that indigenous knowledge cannot be dismissed.  I think we need a change of attitude about indigenous knowledge.  I think we need to accept that it is real.  If we don’t understand it, then we are well advised to learn what it means and what its impact on any given initiative could and in fact almost certainly will be.  To achieve this level of understanding, we must engage the indigenous peoples themselves to help us understand what it is and how to interpret it into our current situation.

Michael Klein