Thank you, Mr. Chair, for this invitation to speak about the use of indigenous traditional knowledge in addition to western science in federal government policy.
I want to take this opportunity to recognize that I am speaking today on the unceded traditional territory of the Algonquin people.
I'm the director general of the wildlife and landscape sciences directorate within the science and technology branch of Environment and Climate Change Canada. The importance of conducting interdisciplinary research and considering different knowledge systems is increasingly seen as critical in science.
We are the largest scientific research organization on wildlife in Canada. Our team of scientists conducts research across the country on issues related to wildlife and their habitat, including drivers of population change, health, disease and contaminants, focusing on species of federal responsibility. We apply many novel approaches and methods to address urgent wildlife conservation questions, including genetic and genomics techniques, earth observation and remote sensing technologies, ecotoxicology methods, high-performance computing and machine learning, and modelling.
We also work with indigenous knowledge. Our teams collaborate with indigenous peoples across Canada on collection and interpretation.
I am pleased to be joined today by two of our accomplished researchers, Dominique Henri and Cheryl-Ann Johnson. They have spent much of their careers working with indigenous knowledge and its incorporation into science advice.
I would like to invite them to describe to you their work that demonstrates their commitment to co-developed research with indigenous partners, and the use of innovative and inclusive approaches that bridge, braid and weave indigenous knowledge into scientific research that leads to more comprehensive knowledge.
Ms. Henri undertakes research that addresses indigenous community priorities related to wildlife, climate change and cultural heritage. She leads an interdisciplinary research program aiming to mobilize indigenous and western knowledge systems on culturally significant species under federal jurisdiction, to support wildlife co-management and sustainable use, particularly in Arctic and northern Canada.
Ms. Johnson is an acknowledged national expert on caribou who has been instrumental in developing the identification of critical habitat requirements for the recovery of boreal caribou. She has spent 10 years co-generating knowledge with Arctic Inuit communities for the identification of critical habitat, including sea ice, for the threatened Peary caribou.
I will now turn it over to Ms. Henri.