People immediately assume that homelessness is the same for everyone. They don't think clearly enough about the various types of homelessness experienced by indigenous persons. Taking a closer look at it, you realize that the pathways of homeless indigenous persons are different enough to require specific solutions that reflect the common practices and the ways in which people are socialized in the indigenous world. Those practices and socialization methods are also an outgrowth of indigenous knowledge systems. In many respects, knowledge systems can eliminate the grey areas that exist in the sciences. Sometimes when we take those systems into account, we can have a very positive effect on the hierarchical and linear failings of the sciences, both social and natural.
The third and last challenge that I'd like to discuss here is the open and intersecting nature of the sciences. The issues that arise today aren't new. Thirty years ago, in the wake of the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, the federal government promoted a large number of initiatives designed to document and characterize indigenous ecological knowledge in a broad range of environmental fields. Apart from a [Technical difficulty—Editor] followed from it and that, in a vast majority of cases, remained confined to the scientific community, it is now obvious that very few lessons were learned from those projects. Too little information has circulated within indigenous communities and governing bodies, and too many studies have overlooked the social and cultural aspects of that knowledge.
So that's the situation—