Traditional Ecological Knowledge Workshop
Haudenosaunee
Environmental Task Force Facilitated at the International Joint Commission's
Biennial Forum on November 19, 2001, in Montreal, Canada
Transcript
DAVID ARQUETTE (Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment):
(GIVES THE THANKSGIVING ADDRESS IN MOHAWK)...
JAMES W. RANSOM (Director, Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force):
Thank you, Dave. Just to give you an explanation of what he said, whenever the Haudenosaunee or the Six Nation or Iroquois Confederacy has a gathering like this, particularly amongst our traditional people, we always open and close with the words that come before all else.
What it does is it gives us the chance to do a couple of things. One, it gives us a chance to pay our respects to the rest of the natural world. And then secondly, it reminds us of our own responsibilities.
You go through all the elements of Creation. It starts first with the people. We ask that the people that are gathered here, we send greetings and thanks to you and we send greetings and thanks to your families and we hope that they are healthy and in good spirits.
We also ask that you come of one mind as we have this discussion today.
We then send greetings and thanks to our Mother the Earth. Then we talk about the animals, the plants. We then start moving towards the sky world and we send greetings and thanks. I left off the waters and the fish and the water creatures.
But then we move into the sky world and start with the birds. For the birds, we say that their responsibility is to sing so that life will not know boredom. So we gather our minds as one and send greetings and thanks to them for fulfilling that responsibility.
We talk about our Grandfather, the thunders. And then we talk about the four winds. We say the sun is our eldest brother and then we talk about our Grandmother, the moon.
We then talk about the stars and the stars, we say have a responsibility. They bring the dew in the morning to help water the plants and that they also help to guide us at night.
It then talks about gathering our minds as one and giving greetings and thanks to the four messengers. Then it ends by saying that we gather our minds as one and send greeting and thanks to the Creator.
We say that the Creator made all things with nothing lacking and only asks of us that we live in peace and harmony with the natural world.
This is how we open our traditional meetings and how we close them. It helps to focus us and again reminds us of our responsibilities. I did want to share that with you.
Our agenda today, we are going to start with Mary Gusella, one of the IJC Commissioners, who will address you very shortly.
Then we have a panel here. I do want to introduce the panel members. Sitting right next to me on my immediate right is Henry Lickers, and he is the Director of the Environment Division in the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne.
Sitting next to him is Deb McGregor. Deb works for Environment Canada now, but she has been doing a lot of work with SOLEC, or the State of the Lakes Environment Conference.
Sitting next to her is Angie Reed. Angie is with the River Network.
And then finally, you have heard from Dave Arquette, and he is with the Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment.
After each presentation, we will allow a little bit of time for some questions. If you do have questions, we do ask that you use one of the two mikes on either side here. The only reason for that is it is being recorded and it will help the people recording the meeting if you speak into the mikes so that they can hear.
We did have two other speakers planned for the original session, but unfortunately, when we rescheduled, they weren't able to join us. So it does leave us a little bit of time for more questions and more of a dialogue. So we hope to have that part.
With that, Mary Gusella, the IJC Commissioner.
MARY GUSELLA (Chairperson, Canadian Section, International Joint Commission):
Well, thank you very much, James.
Let me welcome you and thank you all for coming to Montreal to share in the very first IJC forum to be held in Montreal.
The IJC and First Nations and tribes have been friends for a long time. It is a friendship that we value.
We invited you here today to work together to build bridges between traditional or indigenous knowledge and western science. As part of that process, we do need to build bridges, bridges between policies and programs being developed and the experiences of Aboriginal people, yesterday and today.
So we need your active involvement in making that happen. I'm hoping that today's workshop will help all of us move a little bit closer, both in terms of understanding and, of course, in terms of knowledge.
I'd like to take this opportunity to say a very special thank you to the presenters and the organizers of this session. A special mention, of course, to James Ransom of the Haudenosaunee in Akwesasne, for all of his hard work.
Thank you very much, James.
I would also like to thank all of the participants who are with us today because they have rearranged their schedules and they have shown an enormous amount of flexibility, as have all of you who are here today because of the fact that we had to postpone the previous session after the tragic events of September 11th.
So thank you once again, panelists and participants, for really moving around what are already overcrowded schedules to accommodate the revised dates of the forum.
So let me wish you a very good workshop.
JAMES RANSOM: Thank you.
Before we get started, I did want to put a little bit of context to the presentation by the speakers.
To do that, I have brought one of our treaty belts. This is the Kaswentha or the Two Row Wampum. Basically, it's a treaty belt between the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch dating back to I think the 1600s.
What it is and what you can see here is you see two purple rows on a white background. The two purple rows symbolize two vessels. One, a ship for the Dutch who later became the French, the English, the Americans and Canadians. And one, a canoe for the Haudenosaunee of which the Mohawk are one of them.
The meaning behind this treaty belt is that - and with all of our treaties, they are treaties of peace - as we travel this river together side by side, we are each in our own vessel and that from time to time we're to help each other because that's what people are meant to do.
The one thing I want to mention is that the two vessels are separated by three rows of white beads. The three rows symbolize for us peace, a good mind and the power of a good mind. It's really what makes this treaty.
For us, peace doesn't just happen. It takes action. You know, so we have to have good communication. You have to have a positive relationship.
A good mind means that you don't just do destructive criticism. You use constructive criticism. Yet you can criticize, but offer something else better.
Finally, the power of a good mind, when you exercise those first two principles, then the power of a good mind allows everyone to benefit.
The reason I like this treaty belt is that when you're talking about traditional knowledge, this helps to explain that in that if you were to look into each vessel, into the ship and into the canoe, what you see in there is what defines it as a society.
So you see that the laws that the people follow, how they govern themselves, how they educate their children and each other and their knowledge systems. When you talk about traditional knowledge, that's what you're talking about - the knowledge system.
If you're in the ship, you’re used to that knowledge system, which is based on western science; whereas if you're in the canoe, we're used to what is called by the ship traditional knowledge. Henry refers to it as naturalized knowledge systems.
I wanted to share that with you to help you frame that the discussion that you're going to hear today will be coming from the canoe's perspective.
A couple of final points is that if you are a non-native and you want to conduct research in a native community, you should understand that you bring a cultural bias with you.
That arises because you've been brought up within the ship and you are working with people that aren't in the same vessel. They're in the canoe.
For example, there are words in native languages that lose a lot of meaning in the translation. Or there are some words that don't translate into English or into French.
Secondly, many times how we make our decisions is different than how you're used to making decisions.
So if you're going to work in a community, we like to say you need to honor this treaty. And it's pretty simple. All we say is show respect to the community you're working with.
We say that they help you in your research, give them the credit for that help.
Finally, when you go to do research in a native community, give something back to the community. Don't just take from them. Show how your research will benefit them.
So with that, I will leave that here for the other speakers. I did want to introduce Henry Lickers as our first speaker. Henry is going to be talking naturalized knowledge systems.
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