Science and Research Committee on Feb. 6th, 2024

[Dr. Erika Dyck]

I think Michael Pollan has synthesized a lot of what people have been saying for a number of years and has put a mainstream gloss on it, which has further damaged or muted the contributions of indigenous people for centuries. He's put a veneer on it that has made it splash into the mainstream, but he does a disservice to the many people who have been working in this field for a long time across a variety of different cultures and backgrounds around the globe.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

I'll just close with this, Chair. In my time pre-politics and during politics, I've always found that the most expeditious way to get something done is to figure out how to get a man to think that it was his idea. I hope this committee can come up with a better recommendation on how to get indigenous knowledge into the mainstream.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you for the great insights.

Now we'll go over to Dr. Jaczek for three and a half minutes, please.

[Helena Jaczek, Liberal, Markham—Stouffville, ON]

Thank you so much, Chair.

We have a fascinating panel of witnesses today.

Like my colleague Mr. Turnbull, I would really like to commend Ms. Heller for her very clear articulation that a very artificial division seems to be made between what we call western science and indigenous knowledge, which, of course, is based on observational scientific methods as well.

Sometimes it is helpful to counter the discrimination that is clearly there in what is currently considered indigenous knowledge by telling stories. We've heard a bit about psychedelics today, but are there other examples?

Perhaps, Ms. Heller, you could give us some other examples where the weaving of indigenous observational science has been incorporated into research that has had a lasting effect with some sort of positive outcome that everyone can acknowledge. Is there any concrete example of that kind of research that has been published and is widely acknowledged to have advanced science in its full sense?

[Lindsay Heller]

Oh, my goodness. There are a number of actively used therapeutics and anti-cancer medicines that were “discovered” by western scientists but were directed to those researchers by indigenous people in the form of plants—Pacific yew, for example—that had been used since time immemorial to treat a number of ailments. Some of these anti-cancer drugs are the largest money-making drugs that big pharma is using, so just in drug discovery alone there are a number of examples.

The anti-cancer medicines are some that I would point to.

[Helena Jaczek, Liberal, Markham—Stouffville, ON]

I think that's very helpful.

[Lindsay Heller]

Quite frankly, the people—the indigenous communities—that offered that medicine were arguably not compensated for that sharing of knowledge. That's what has led to distrust and the hesitancy to share some of that knowledge now.

[Helena Jaczek, Liberal, Markham—Stouffville, ON]

Dr. Williams, as we are moving forward with weaving indigenous knowledge with western science, what about health outcomes? In terms of integration, have you observed or documented any positive results in the usual measures of successful outcome, such as decreased perinatal mortality in indigenous populations and increased longevity, life expectancy and quality of life? Can anything be pointed to as a successful outcome where integration or weaving has occurred?

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

I'm sorry, but we're at the end of your time. Maybe we can get a response in writing. If that that's available to us, that would help our study.

Now we'll go over to Maxime Blanchette-Joncas for one and a half minutes, please.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My question is for Dr. Williams.

Dr. Williams, you hold a Canada research chair in mental health disparities. The purpose of this chair is to provide enhanced and more equitable mental health care to indigenous peoples. I'd like you to help us determine how to go about making a distinction between scientific and traditional medicine.

Your research chair's position is that it's not simply a matter of applying science, but also to use inclusive and patient-centred practices that are sensitive to culture. One example is traditional knowledge. I'm going to give you a concrete but tragic example of something that actually happened. In November 2014, an indigenous judge from the Ontario Court of Justice recognized the right of parents in the New Credit indigenous community to refuse chemotherapy treatment for their 11-year-old daughter's leukemia. She underwent treatment based on traditional knowledge in keeping with ancestral rights. It's not hard to guess the outcome. The young girl who, if she had received chemotherapy treatment, would have had a 75% chance of being cured, died two months after the decision.

Based on your experience, how can one decide between the use of traditional and scientific knowledge?

[Monnica Williams]

Thank you for your question.

Ultimately, I am a scientist and I use the scientific method, so I would approach this by looking at outcomes and offering to patients what we know about this approach and what we know about the indigenous approach. We may not know anything about an indigenous approach and we would explain it using our own scientific methods, but that doesn't mean it's without value.

Ultimately, it has to be the patient choosing what approach to use so that it's in line with their belief system, whether or not we can back it up with our western version of science.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you.

To wind this up, we'll have Mr. Cannings for one and a half minutes, please.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thank you.

I'm going to stick with Dr. Heller.

Dr. Heller, you're listed as an indigenous fellow at Simon Fraser University. I'm wondering if you could quickly comment on how you think the education system in Canada, especially the post-secondary education system, is adapting to this in creating new positions, such as chairs in indigenous knowledge. We've heard from my friend and colleague Dr. Jeannette Armstrong at UBC. I'm wondering if you could comment on how that trend is going and whether it could be going faster.

[Lindsay Heller]

I think, first of all, offering opportunities and scholarships for students is important for trying to eliminate some of the financial barriers they face.

It's about more than simply doing mass hires of indigenous teaching faculty. It's about hiring indigenous leaders for leadership positions and compensating them adequately, and having elders in residence, giving them the same value as tenured faculty and compensating them appropriately.

I think it's difficult for indigenous people to come into an institution when that institution isn't ready to receive the gifts they have, isn't ready to see the value in the community work that indigenous scholars have to put in simply because of the way we are and isn't ready to see the value we put into giving back to our community and making the path a bit easier for our children coming through.

I think it's about hiring more people but also establishing policy changes, changes in governance and changes in curriculum so that all levels of the institution go through a process of decolonization and we can bring our values to the institution.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Great. Thank you.

I wish this discussion could go on longer. We've had some terrific meetings, and this one certainly ranks among the top on this study.

Thank you, witnesses, for your insights, your input and your thoughtful answers.

If you have anything else you'd like to share, please do that in writing so we can include it in our study.

Thank you, Lindsay Heller, Dr. Erika Dyck and Dr. Monnica Williams, for everything you've done for our study to get a better knowledge on indigenous traditional knowledge and science in government policy development.

We're now going to suspend for a few minutes while we get our next witness dialed in. We only have one witness via Zoom in the next session. We'll be back in a couple of minutes, as soon as we've done our sound checks. I look forward to the next part of our meeting.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Welcome back.

We'll get going on the second part of our meeting. We've finished the sound checks. Thank you to our tech support for all of that.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(i) and the motion adopted by the committee on Monday, September 18, 2023, the committee is resuming its study on the integration of indigenous traditional knowledge and science in government policy development.

It's now my pleasure to welcome, via video conference, Dr. Kori Czuy, who is an indigenous science consultant. In person, we have Yves Gingras, professor of history and the sociology of science at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

You'll each have five minutes for your remarks, and then we will proceed to our rounds of questions.

If you're on video conference, you can choose the language of your choice at the bottom. There's English, French or floor.

We'll get started with Dr. Czuy for five minutes, please.

[Dr. Kori Czuy, Indigenous Science Consultant, As an Individual]

Tansi. Mihkopihêsiw nitisiyihkâson.

I'm Métis from the Jobin family. As mentioned, I have a Ph.D. in indigenous mathematics and science.

I want to get right to it. I'd like to start with what science is.

Really, it's how we understand, learn from and connect with the ever-changing world around us so that we can survive, thrive and interpret ancestral, land-based teachings and pass them on to the next generation to survive.

The relational definitions that make up science have been disconnected from the land, trees, willows and beavers. They have been disconnected from the human, from ourselves—our body, senses, memory and spirit—and from community. This is all because of the doctrine of discovery.

There has been a disconnect between the mind and the body through Descartes, the Indian Act, capitalism and the clout of the scientific method. This has led to a reductionist, objective, universal and standardized definition of science. Many people today are using it, which is great, but it's understood, passed on and used for scientific research. If these knowledges are the only way of knowing science and the world around us today, what are we missing?

What I like to do with my students is use a framework: How do we open minds and hearts to relational, ancestral or indigenous science? There are three ways I do this: through origins, methods and language.

For origins, what is the origin of scientific “discovery” or knowledge? If we look beyond what we are taught in school through the global or scientific lens, we see that these knowledges are connected in depth with indigenous people. If we look through a scientific lens, we can say that Niels Bohr was the founding father of quantum theory, or a French scientist discovered Aspirin. Really, this is knowledge of the spiritual and energetic connections to the land. Everyone for thousands of years has understood these causes and effects of frequencies of energy called “the spirit”. Now, many call this “quantum”. Women on Turtle Island have had ceremonial and spiritual connections with the healing medicines of willow. Many now know this as Aspirin.

The second thing I'd like to talk about is method. This is how we know science. I want to chat about quantum a bit. They've had difficulty understanding quantum through this western scientific method because it's too universal, standardized and objective. Through an indigenous scientific lens, it is subjective and relational and includes observation, experience and spirit. It's understanding that we learn not just through objective knowledge or the written word but also through apprenticeship, story, ceremony and spirit.

For example, celestial knowledge passed on for thousands of years has been connected to specific locations and star phenomena, such as wolf eyes or thunderbird eggs. Only recently have western scientists claimed to have discovered this knowledge, such as Sagittarius A* or the supermassive black hole in the middle of the universe. This knowledge has been known and gifted through relationality and the ceremony of indigenous peoples for thousands of years.

The third thing I'd like to mention is language. How do we talk about science? It's by using indigenous languages that are relational, connected with the spirit and speaker and verb-based. They're alive. They have a past, present and future. This allows relationality to come to the forefront.

There's a depth of science within indigenous languages. I'd like to give you an example. Naamóó is the word for “bee”. The Blackfoot word for “bee” was taught to me by Reg Crowshoe from the Piikani Nation. It means the changes in frequency of the sounds of the bee coming towards you and moving away from you. This is the relational Doppler effect. It denotes a deep understanding of scientific knowledge of movement, relationality, frequencies and quantum, all within this one little Blackfoot word.

I'm not saying that one or the other way of knowing, being or doing science is right or wrong, but there's harm when significant scientific knowledge is discredited and only western, global or scientific methods, methodologies and policies are understood, validated and passed on.

I have three recommendations I'd like to give you.

One, do your work first. Help us and work on this parallel path with us. Reconciliation is the work of non-indigenous people. This was told to me by Casey Eaglespeaker from Kainai. Read the TRC. Read the missing and murdered indigenous women report. Read UNDRIP. Understand those testimonies. Understand what free, prior and informed consent is. Read books by Cajete, Kimmerer, Yellow Bird and Vine Deloria. Listen to podcasts like Ancestral Science and Native Stories. Most importantly, get some tobacco, offer it to an elder and just listen.

My second recommendation is that the sovereignty of this process must start with and stay with indigenous communities. We have to hand over the decision-making power to communities. It will allow for this to be done in a good way through protocols, with this parallel path and with respect, and will mitigate cultural appropriation, which has been brought up a few times before.

Lastly, we really need to—

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

I'm sorry. Unfortunately, we're at time.

Maybe we can get the third one in an answer or you can provide it in writing.

[Dr. Kori Czuy]

That was my last one: Take time for this.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Very good. It's my bad on that. Thank you very much.

Time is the one thing that we always run out of in this committee.

We'll move on to Yves Gingras for five minutes, please.

[Yves Gingras, Professor of History and Sociology of Science, Université du Québec à Montréal, As an Individual]

Thank you for your invitation.

This is probably the first time a committee like yours has addressed science and research. The impact of incorporating traditional knowledge into science-based government policies rests on a proper understanding of what ultimately amounts to the philosophy of science and epistemology. One must not, as is all too often the case, think that epistemology is philosophy disconnected from politics.

I am going to try to demonstrate that the problem before you is poorly designed and incorrectly named. As the writer Albert Camus said, incorrectly naming something adds to the world's adversity. The goal is for all government science-based policies to be built on as much openness and consultation as possible. However, "consulting", is not the same thing as "accepting".

What we are hearing at the moment is confused because we are jumping from one word to the next without defining terms and without making distinctions between them. If we are talking about a chair, it should not be called "a table". It's important to use the right words.

In my brief address, I am therefore going to remind you of the key words that run through our entire discussion.

To begin with, there is the word "belief". People can have beliefs, but a belief is something held by someone who believes in something. Someone can have an opinion, which amounts to a hypothesis, but actual knowledge is also possible.

So what is knowledge? It's a statement about the world that has been theoretically validated by generally accepted methods that are accessible to any reasonable person with appropriate training. So if I suggest that there are bears in a given location, I need to verify it for it to become knowledge. Once it has been determined that there really are bears in a specific location, it becomes universal knowledge.

Then there is the word "science". Knowledge is not the same thing as science. I can know that 2 + 2 = 4, or that a² + b² = c². That's knowledge, but it doesn't mean that I can demonstrate what it is. In epistemology, science is defined solely by the fact of explaining phenomena in terms of natural causes. That's what science has been since the 17th century.

We have a lot of knowledge, and others are also aware of the science underpinning this knowledge. We can know, for example, that the Thuja occidentalis, which the Iroquois call annedda, is a tree whose leaves can cure scurvy. This discovery was made by the local Iroquois in the 16th century, and later attributed in the 17th century to Jacques Cartier. However, it is just knowledge. It was only in the 19th century or later that it became science. It was discovered that it cured scurvy because it contains vitamin C. We no longer need to gather leaves from Thuja occidentalis trees because we can produce vitamin C. That's the science that explains why this tree has these properties that we already knew about.

So it's important to distinguish between "belief", "knowledge" and "science". I'm not about to give a history lecture here, but you all know that science is potentially universal. There is no western science, eastern science or indigenous science. These do not exist. There are individuals who made discoveries. The Iroquois knew how to cure scurvy. It's not because of yin and yang that the Chinese have been able to land on the moon, but rather because of their universal knowledge of Newton's laws. Even though Newton was British, it's not British science. The electromagnetic waves that were discovered as a result of the work of James Clerk Maxwell, a Scotsman, doesn't make it Scottish science. A German by the name of Hertz used Maxwell's equations and discovered electromagnetic waves.

Knowledge is therefore potentially universal. Otherwise, it's belief. If I were to tell you that I know God exists, you will no doubt tell me that what I have is a belief, because no accepted approach or methodology available to everyone can demonstrate the existence of God. But people can personally believe that God exists.

In short, I'm telling you right off the bat that there is confusion. If you mix up all kinds of words, you will not achieve anything.

Before describing something as "knowledge", you have to be able to say that it has indeed been verified independently just about everywhere.

In the Middle Ages, the Arab world contributed to science. That doesn't make it Arabic science, but rather algebra, which everyone uses. And yet, algebra is an Arabic word.

Potentially universal science is what scientists in every country work at. Terms should not be mixed up.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lloyd Longfield]

Thank you. I'm sorry to cut you short.

It's a really good start to the discussion. I look forward to the questions on both presentations.

We'll start with Mr. Soroka for six minutes, please.

[Gerald Soroka, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, for that.

Thank you to the witnesses for coming today.

I'll start with Dr. Czuy.

You've already alluded to how indigenous stories have helped understanding. Can you deepen our understanding of these stories within mathematical and scientific concepts, especially in the context of your work on children and treaties?

[Dr. Kori Czuy]

Stories are knowledge. When we tell a story, we're teaching—whatever that may be.

For me and for my research, I never connected with math when I was in school. It didn't connect with my body, my culture, my spirit or the land until I realized, when I was doing my master's degree, that there is a way of doing, being and knowing in mathematics that's very standardized. There's nothing wrong with that. It creates a disconnect between humans and cultures and how people have done math for many years.

Think about the significance of trigonometry and how much communities that have navigated the ocean did it in their heads to navigate through the zenith, the horizon and whatnot. It's significant. That is connected to the body and senses. When those ways of understanding, knowing, being and doing mathematics are removed through a way of understanding it that is about memorization, is very standardized and is done in a classroom on a piece of paper, there isn't that connection.

Once I realized there are ways of understanding math that have relationality, I began to connect with it more. That's how I work with children. How do you see the math around you? How do you understand how different angles create different seasons? How do you measure using your body and not necessarily using a standardized ruler? We are our own standardized measurement.

When I was doing my master's degree, I did some work in Papua New Guinea with different number systems. There are different base systems between different communities, from base 32 to base 27. They are all significant and different. I realized how much they would help in understanding mathematics, because these communities, as they're trading between these different number systems, have to interpret and change different systems. That's what we are doing every day. That helps us every day, from telling the time to coding a computer. These are all connected and based in our bodies and in our methods of understanding the world around us. When we learn mathematics in school that is very standardized and disconnected from our body, our culture and our experiences, we don't have that same connection.

Does that answer your question?