Thank you, committee members, for taking the time to hear from me and many others on this important topic.
I am first nations with deep family ties to Carcross/Tagish First Nation and Taku River Tlingit, with relations from Fort Liard to Whitehorse. My status is with Taku River Tlingit.
I am a Ph.D. candidate studying how conservation issues may justly walk with indigenous knowledge. In many ways, I consider how indigenous knowledge systems may bring in sciences.
Context matters. For example, your work falls in line with a path we are all on for reconciliation, though we indigenous nations seek a resurgence of our own knowledge systems. In reconciliation is an acknowledgement of the truth, such as my own grandmothers both having gone to residential school, and my mother. One was in a school for 14 years.
As Ernestine Hayes, a Tlingit author, writes:
The original people were told they must speak the new language. They were told they must wear the new clothes. They were told they must gather from the ocean for profit and not for balance, and they must look upon fish as things and not as salmon-people.
Because of the recent past, trust is an issue in sharing our knowledge. To help with trust, I recommend that each indigenous nation be supported to share their knowledge in a way that leaves it protected through their laws and stored safely for and with them from the grassroots level, as one of my elder mentors, Norma Kassi, reminds me.
Direct comparison of indigenous knowledge to science will create challenges, indigenous knowledge being a diverse system of philosophies, ethics, laws and ways of relating with our non-human relations. Our knowledge-holders exist within this system and may guide a person to use science in a more indigenous way.
I recommend that indigenous knowledge be seen as a system that must be uplifted through an indigenous nation’s place-based authority. Policy and legislation must support elders to be advisers, have their wisdom recognized, and, as Kyle was just recognizing, support the space for the creation of the next generation of knowledge-holders, as mentor Mark Wedge, an elder of the Deisheetaan clan in Carcross/Tagish reminds me. Land guardians and indigenous conserved and protected areas are important steps.
Many indigenous nations come from a differing world view, so the terms we use are important. For example, in many parts of the Yukon, we have begun relationship planning rather than management planning. This helps to maintain our connections to our non-human relatives on emotional, spiritual, mental and physical levels. Here in the southern Yukon, we must maintain these relationships out of the laws that require respect, sharing and caring. This is a part of a systemic change that is required to allow more indigenous knowledge to come into policy.
Consider the words of Edna Helm, matriarch of the Ishkahittaan clan in Carcross/Tagish, when thinking of a more Inland Tlingit world view: “We must recognize that Caribou are our protectors, not the other way around.” Another example of first nation world views in action is Joe Copper Jack’s championing of the voiceless, where, for example, caribou may be given a seat at the table when decisions are made about them, future generations or anything under discussion.
Indigenous peoples often see the world through a holistic lens where we are equal members of a vast web of life that has spiritual and feeling parts that we must honour, as late Daḵlʼaweidí elder Norman James often reminded me, and as is written in “Together Today for Our Children Tomorrow", a document presented to Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1973, which started the treaty process in the Yukon. I recommend that policy consider how it may be written with love and pay homage to a great equity of us with all other parts of the lands and waters.
As one of our late Yukon elders, Virginia Smarch, noted, “We are part of the land and part of the water.” Many of us see this as literally true, that the destruction of the lands and waters is the destruction of indigenous knowledge and us. We fight to teach others how to walk with the land and water, as an initiative in the Yukon is named. Hence, I recommend that indigenous sovereignty over lands and waters be acknowledged and that true decision-making authority through co-management or co-relationships be intertwined with how indigenous knowledge walks with and informs government policy.
In reconciliation is healing, so that Tlingit haa kusteeyi, southern and northern Tutchone dan’ke, Han and Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in tr’ehude, Kaska dene k’éh survive and exist in the future. All these are different names for indigenous knowledge in the Yukon and parts of B.C. This knowledge and many others throughout Canada must inform policy to create a more just and lasting society.
Thank you.
Thank you.