Good morning. I'm happy to be here today.
As you just heard, my name is Carole Lévesque. I am an anthropologist and have mainly worked with Quebec's indigenous communities and governing bodies for more than 50 years. Throughout my long career, it has been my privilege to work together with indigenous leaders and knowledge-keepers and to explore numerous societal issues such as health, education, the status of women, the environment, urban realities and public policies targeting indigenous populations. Regardless of the concerns we have addressed, however, one common question has constantly emerged from the discussions we have had together, both then and now. And that question concerns the place and acknowledgement of indigenous knowledge systems within society, whether in universities, governments or the indigenous community world.
Nearly 25 years ago, a number of indigenous and non-indigenous colleagues and I established the Indigenous Peoples Research and Knowledge Network, commonly called the Dialog network. Within that framework, we have worked hard to build a new relationship between the university and indigenous worlds, striving together to build knowledge and take into consideration indigenous perspectives, aspirations, practices and competencies in research and the advancement of knowledge. We firmly believe that the key to reconciliation with indigenous peoples is to create ethical and shared engagement spaces, as we have done at the Dialog network.
Based on our joint contributions, we have identified three challenges inherent in the work of the Standing Committee on Science and Research.
The first challenge concerns the status of indigenous knowledge. References to the integration of indigenous knowledge, as here proposed, greatly restrict the scope of that knowledge, both scientific and otherwise. As is true of science, branches of indigenous knowledge must be understood as constituent parts of systems, that is to say, of bodies of organized, dynamic, organic and independent information. These systems consist of data, of course, but also of practices, devices, skills, intellectual operations and collective actions. Consequently, the objective of making room for knowledge in public policy development cannot be reduced to the mere integration of various types of information, as appropriate as they may be, in the body of scientific knowledge. It is more appropriate to build bridges of understanding between the sciences, which also operate as systems, on the one hand, and indigenous knowledge systems on the other. As you will agree, it has to be admitted here that science is far from unequivocal. For example, the explanatory methods of the natural sciences are very different from those of the social sciences and humanities.
The second challenge that I would like to discuss is the challenge of public policies per se. Are we just talking about environmental policies, or are we also discussing social policies? The question has to be asked because environmental science discourse dominates discussions of indigenous knowledge. There's a reason why people talk so freely about ecological knowledge. I—