The reason I was mentioning the En’owkin Centre as an institute of higher learning is that it's mandated by the chiefs of the Okanagan to make sure that our knowledge and our language and our ways of knowing on the land are included in everything that they're working on, particularly the environment.
One of the issues that I was wanting to point out was that there does need to be recognition of the institutions of higher learning that are convened by the nations themselves, by the indigenous peoples themselves, in this work. That may be a provincial policy, but I think the federal government needs to really rethink what first nation lands and jurisdictions are about. I think that when we're talking about our language and our continued use of our land, we are talking about first nations that have been there for thousands of years and speak that language and are using it every year.
I'm in my seventies. I've been out harvesting; my brothers have been out hunting and fishing every year of their lives. That kind of in situ understanding and science of our land is not duplicated in universities or by any experts, even if they're indigenous externally. That really needs to be given policy.