Thank you.
Traditional knowledge is at the heart of everything we do. It is very key to our work and understanding who we are as a people. We still practise a lot of land-based activities. We still go hunting.
I just came back from hunting this past weekend. We try to make sure that we only take what we need for our family and our friends and elders. We still practise being respectful to our elders. We always ensure that if there is an elder in the room who's older than us, they are provided with the utmost respect, because their knowledge and experience are their higher education, and it goes back much longer than ours.
Our communities are really grounded in the fact that they live in the area where their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents have lived. We think of traditional knowledge as ongoing. The only reason we say “traditional” is that it comes from way back, but it's still moving forward and it's still very much alive. Our people have always been able to adapt different elements into our everyday living.
Boiling it down, it's respect for the land because the land feeds us; respect for the animals that give their lives so we can live, and trying to treat everybody with respect.
My grandfather always said that when he travels, he has friends in all the communities. What he is saying is that all this respect for one another is the key to traditional knowledge.