Thank you. It's a great honour to be here.
I was just discussing with my colleague that I couldn't imagine anything like this happening in the U.S. It's very impressive to me.
As a disclaimer, if you've seen some of the notes that I put forward, I am certainly not a specialist in Canada. I have been to the Yukon and to the Arctic, but as a researcher, I focused mostly on the tropics. I have extensive experience from Honduras, Mexico and particularly Australia.
I'll cover things you've probably heard before. I do a lot in philosophy as well as geography.
One of my major concerns is that we do a lot in indigenous knowledge with talking about what we should do. We've been doing this for a long time as academics: How should we incorporate and bring together these two different systems? Each country has different experiences.
I do have some ideas about that. Without further ado, let me go through and hit a few of my points.
I will say that I don't think indigenous traditional knowledge and western science are monolithic knowledge systems per se—western science particularly. I'm a geographer, both a social scientist and a natural scientist. We don't agree on the fundamentals, even in geography, of basic issues like time and space and what they are. The idea that science is this one thing definitely needs to be examined. Indigenous knowledge is obviously not one thing either. We always want to look at the nuances of that.
We want it to be something truthful. It often ends up being very political, so we need to be realists about what we're trying to achieve when we try to figure out how to bring these different ways of knowing together.
I've written down some reflections on indigenous traditional knowledge. One thing that I am insistent on is that although we do see it as a corpus of knowledge that extends back through time with different ways of gathering information, it does get field-tested. There's an experimental nature to it. It's not just something you learn out there from your elders. Many of us probably know that.
It's also eclectic. I've worked, for example, with a shaman in Mexico. He's learned a lot of this himself. He didn't inherit it from someone else. He's part of an indigenous group, but a lot of what he's done has been done with his family. He's accumulated this knowledge. It's not something that is only back in the past. It's very dynamic, wherever we are and whatever group we may be working with.
I'm interested in a synthesis, I guess. A hybrid, truly humanity-centred science would synthesize disparate knowledge systems in service to the abiding questions and problems faced by our societies. What I mean is that, with climate change and a lot of these issues, for example, we should not be bringing in indigenous voices. We should have many different voices coming together to create some sort of new science, instead of constantly saying we need people to inform our science. This happens a lot in conservation, but I think there are also much deeper ways to think about what indigenous knowledge involves.
It's all very general here. I have a very brief example.
I wrote some of these things about the Northern Territory in Australia. That's one place that has really made a lot of headway. The indigenous groups there own the land. They bring scientists in to work for them—they hire them. We were brought into that arena to document fire-spreading by raptors. This then goes into fire management and restoration of the land. It's also this incredible chance to.... It's like a hybrid space where everybody comes together to create new knowledge. It went beyond what we had coming out of our different disciplines.
I had a lot of things to say, but five minutes is a very short time.
In closing, I will say that one thing to think about is interspecies communication in birds. This is one of my biggest issues right now. It has been known that birds talk to each other in their own species and across species. They have languages. People also talk to birds—we know that and we have specific examples. This is what we're doing in Australia. This is now becoming something that ornithologists themselves are studying and learning about.
Thank you.