Thank you so much.
I want to start with a quote from Myles Pedersen, an Inuk harvester from Kugluktuk, Nunavut. We were in a caribou health workshop last week, and I asked him and other participants if there was anything they'd like me to bring to this meeting today. Myles' response was that it's difficult to find common ground between traditional knowledge and policy, because traditional knowledge is passed down over generations and it's how we live, whereas policy is something that is imposed on us.
I was born and raised in Calgary on Treaty No. 7 territory. I'm a descendant of white settlers to Canada of German and Hungarian heritage.
I'm a veterinarian. I have a graduate degree in wildlife health, and I am a professor at the University of Calgary. I have worked with Dene and Inuit communities in the Arctic and subarctic on domestic and wild animal health for over 30 years. I do not, however, suppose to represent these communities today. Rather, I'm presenting my views and perspectives from my own personal and research experience in the Canadian north, and I am thrilled to see my co-panellists today, who I know will represent those indigenous perspectives.
My research program has centred on working with indigenous communities to understand the impacts of climate change on the health and sustainability of important wildlife species, such as caribou and muskoxen.
Healthy wildlife are really critical for not only the health of Arctic ecosystems but also for the food security of communities across the north. For example, in Nunavut, up to 70% of the population is food insecure. Wildlife helped to combat this food insecurity. In fact, the historic value of the subsistence harvest of wildlife is estimated to be about $198 million a year. That's its food replacement value. This figure doesn't include the additional economic value through tourism, the sale of handicrafts, the use for clothing and tools or the spiritual and cultural importance to the communities.
In our research, what we try to do is bring together indigenous, local and western scientific knowledge and ways of knowing and doing to better understand the health of these subsistence wildlife species and the threats to them. We try to answer questions such as, “Will they be there for generations to come?” or “Is it safe to eat?” To do this, we are equally partnered with local indigenous wildlife co-management organizations in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, as well as government employees in wildlife, and we have a community-based wildlife health program.
A key goal of this program is to ensure that the indigenous voice is meaningfully represented in wildlife management policy.
We have a three-pronged approach. It includes documentation of traditional knowledge, hunter-based surveillance and western science. I'll focus on the traditional knowledge and how that has been used as examples of how it can be put into policy.
We have documented traditional knowledge through narratives, which is storytelling, and participatory epidemiology methods. This work has generated new knowledge through traditional knowledge, including the identification of major muskox epidemics and population declines and new disease syndromes in caribou and muskoxen, including diseases that are a threat to people.
The TK, or traditional knowledge, has contributed directly to policy through guiding practices for icebreaking in the Arctic sea ice, where icebreaking patterns have to abide by the needs of the Dolphin and Union caribou that use that sea ice to cross on their annual migrations. The traditional knowledge has redrawn the range maps for caribou. The traditional knowledge has designed new population census protocols for counting caribou. It's a really important resource. It's also informing public health policy around the zoonotic or disease risks from handling and consuming wildlife species.
All of this has taken people sitting down around the table together, talking to, listening to and trusting one another. That's something you can do on a small scale, but it's difficult to scale up.
I have one minute. Okay.
Quickly, on traditional knowledge and western knowledge, we've been asked about conflicts and what to do about them. I think this is something that we shouldn't be afraid of. It happens within the scientific community. It happens in the traditional knowledge community. When we see conflicts, we shouldn't be afraid of them; we should embrace them, because they allow us to dig deeper into what might be going on there.
What do we need to do to ethically and effectively use traditional knowledge in policy development? We need to think about this. It is fundamentally a western colonial construct and it's a power relationship. We really need to think of a paradigm shift—a system shift.
There are excellent examples of how it can be done, and these are from indigenous scholars. Mi'kmaq elder Albert Marshall talked about the two-eyed seeing principle: learning to see from one eye with the strengths of indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing and from the other eye with the strengths of western knowledge and ways of knowing. It's learning to use both eyes together for the benefit of all.
I'll stop there.