I first want to talk a little bit about ownership. Some indigenous knowledge is owned by an individual, by a clan, by a family, or it can be owned by the nation. But it's not all communal ownership. It's actually kind of a fallacy for people to think about communal ownership in that way because that's not appropriate.
Part of what I didn't have enough time to discuss was indigenous legal and governance systems in our indigenous laws and the funding to be able to make these happen. One of the reasons why the recommendation was as it was, after we put our heads together, and after years of of my own research, is that I wanted to propose some kind of a solution rather than coming with problems all the time. I felt that a generic statement respecting, affirming, and acknowledging indigenous ownership would be appropriate.
One of the reasons is that we hold what we call a Tahtlan in my community, a knowledge agreement, when we're working with other communities or with government to share knowledge. It lays out whether knowledge is sacred, and what we need to do with certain types of knowledge. It's going to be different with every nation across Canada. Here, in Treaty 1 territory, they don't tell stories until the snow is on the ground. That wouldn't be what is happening in my community when we're telling stories around the campfire when the salmon is flowing in the river. We tell stories in our feast house all year round. It's not going to be the same thing for every community, and we're not going to be able to find a one-size-fits-all solution across Canada with the diversity of so many different nations across this great country that we live in. Part of it is that we would do Tahtlan knowledge agreements, and we see these traditional protocol agreements.... I believe in calling it indigenous knowledge because our knowledge is still living, it's dynamic, it's still breathing, and we still breathe life into it.
You see these protocols, and I remember signing them with mining companies because that's where, in our community, we benefited from that employment and economic opportunity, but we also shared traditional use with them so they could avoid our sacred areas. They would act like it was a gift, because indigenous or traditional knowledge wasn't covered under the Canadian Copyright Act.
The reason why I felt passionate about it is that we see this knowledge leaving our communities, and it's not being shared in a culturally appropriate way. It needs to be shared in the cultural context from that originating community. There is some knowledge that women can't see when they are on their moon. It's not because that's derogatory to women, but because we honour our women, and we think that they are more powerful at that time. There is also knowledge that can't be seen. I can't tell a Ch’ioyone or wolf story in my community. I can't tell a story that belongs to another family. That's where it becomes that cultural context, so it needs to be shared in that culturally appropriate way. The only way that I feel that that could happen is through a generic statement of respect, for affirmation, and that indigenous people own that knowledge, and then work with the indigenous communities to provide funding for their indigenous legal systems to create those protocols.
We're already doing this in universities. We're having informed consent. We're having libraries or archives or museums work with people. There are many examples across the country. There are reciprocal research agreements. There are things that we do at the University of Manitoba that we can take advantage of to be able to create those for communities. That's part of why I would say that. Some knowledge isn't appropriate to be shared. Even as a Tahtlan person, my uncle would say....