It's really important for the public—and, of course, the elected officials are part of the public—to appreciate what indigenous knowledge is. I'm not certain that it is well understood by many people. I think we need a lot of engagement and some sensitization or education, if I can say that.
I will give the examples of the use of indigenous knowledge in the north to predict migration of animal species, weather events or production of food and other things. I think these are most definitely things that follow what we refer to as the scientific method, in the sense that they are observations that lead to conclusions and they are verifiable and have been repeated over and over. I think it is really important to do this. We need to engage in ongoing, continuous dialogue with different communities.
We're also doing this in our international engagement with other countries—sensitizing them to the fact that we do need to incorporate and be conscious of indigenous knowledge and indigenous community perspectives in much of our research. I think Canada can also be a leader internationally on this.