Exploring Reconciliation through Renewable Energy in Indigenous Communities – Transcript

About This Episode

Porcupine (00:00): Professor Diana Lewis and Professor Heather Castleden are frustrated when First Nations get resistance from big power utilities when they want to build renewable energy projects. For them and the First Nations they work with Reconciliation is based on good energy.

Episode Introduction

Porcupine (00:18): How do porcupines hug? Very carefully. And such as the story of reconciliation, at least so far, I’m Merrell-Ann Phare. I’m Michael Miltenberger. This is Porcupine.

Porcupine (00:37): Welcome to Porcupine Podcast. Today we’re going to spend some time with a couple of very capable individuals. 

Professor Heather Castleden: Research Chair, Reconciling Relations For Health Environments And Communities; and Associate Professor at the Department of Geography at Queens University. I noticed her bio is like Merrell-Ann’s to-do list—learning how to play guitar. We also have with us, Diana Dee Lewis: Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies at the Department of Geography and Environment at Western University. They are Co-directors of A SHARED Future, achieving strength, health, and autonomy through renewable energy development for the future. I would be very interested to see your business cards because I don’t know how you’re going to get that honour. It’s very impressive.

Porcupine (01:36): And I just want to say, I have known Heather for a really long time. Oh, that makes us sound so old. It does—a really long time ago in an ancient land. Yeah, no. I mean, because I knew your father, of course. Your father Don was very instrumental in one of the very first programs that one of the organizations I work with, Centre for Indigenous Environmental Resources, did almost 25 years ago. And he’s since gone on to do other things, but, I was much younger and you were much younger at that time when I first met you. And now you both are doing such amazing work. So we’re so happy to have you here today. You’re welcome. And what we were wanting to start with, because we were going to ask you in a moment how you got together for your project, but just individually, can you tell us where you’re from and how you got into the path you’re on in terms of your work? I was going to say maybe Dee can go first. 

Dee (02:45): So I am from Tobago First Nation in Nova Scotia, Mi’kmaq, and I had worked for federal government and Tribal Councils and our Indigenous organizations and had decided later in life to do a master’s degree. And I started with resource and environmental management. And I can literally tell you that changed my life because it took me in directions I could never have anticipated when I started. But one of the most instrumental directions that I went in was being approached by Pictou Landing native women’s association after I’d finished my master’s degree in 2010. And they had asked me if I could help them with an issue that they had in the community because of my master’s degree. And then Heather and I can talk a little bit about what that involved and how that took me into a PhD, which I had never, ever planned in my life. And so here I am, and working with Heather on a number of projects, including Pictou Landing. So I’ll turn it over to you there.

Heather (04:09): Okay. Thanks, Dee. So I’m Heather. I’m a white settler researcher. My ancestral roots are Scottish and English. I’ve was born in Dene territory in Yellowknife. And I think it was my parents who have really been instrumental in influencing the things that matter to me: my values and real passion for justice, social justice, environmental justice, health equity, and my first career actually. I dropped out of university and said, university sucks. I went on to college instead and I trained to become an American Sign Language interpreter. And it was through that training and solidarity work with the deaf community, first out in Vancouver and then in Winnipeg, that I really learned a lot about what oppression means and what discrimination means—through the experiences of the deaf community that I was very much a part of. And it was in that period of my life that I was working full time.

And eventually my dad said, ‘You know, you should go back to university, but instead of doing anthropology, you should try a native studies course. I think you’ll really like it.’ And sure enough, I did. And my first teachers were often land-based teachers where we would be out on the land, and in ceremony. All of that was really influential for me. So eventually I decided to keep studying and keep learning about Indigenous ways of being and doing through my undergraduate degree. And then my master’s degree with Stan and Peggy Wilson, who are from Aspacuack First Nation. They were my supervisors for my PhD.

And that was where I learned about doing community engaged research. And so I shifted gears again and became a human geographer, which is the study of people and the importance of place to where we live and how we relate to it to each other in place. That’s where I met Dee. I think it was in the first year of my first faculty appointment at Dalhousie University. 

Porcupine: I learned a fact I did not know. I didn’t know you were born in Yellowknife, which is a Northern connection. 

Heather: I’m very proud of that. 

Porcupine: Amazing because Michael’s obviously from there, right. He’s calling in from Fort Smith right now. 

Heather: Oh, cool. 

How A SHARED Future came to be:

Porcupine: Could you just tell us a bit more about how you connected the academic universe that you inhabit? It’s a big one. Then you manage to come together in the same place at the same time to become partners in A SHARED Future.

Dee (06:52): I had just finished my master’s in resource and environmental management in 2010, and I was approached a few months after I finished by the Pictou Landing native women’s group to come and talk to them about an issue in their community. And so I went up to meet with the women. They told me a story about being exposed to effluent from a local pulp and paper mill for almost 50 years, and how no one had investigated the health of the community. And they had been told not to worry—their health hadn’t been impacted. When I came away from that meeting I was really overwhelmed. And it’s about an hour and a half drive back to my home. And on my drive home, I was just thinking, you know, I have this master’s of resource environmental management, but am I trained to do what they asked me to do?

It was so frightening. I can’t tell you that responsibility, that weight on my shoulders. That they thought that I was capable of helping them. I went to talk to Heather and the moment we started to talk, we knew that there was a connection in terms of how she had worked with First Nation communities and that she would understand what it was that the community needed. And so for someone who was so frightened about what the women were asking to be able to lean on someone like Heather was really reassuring for me. And Heather I’ll let you take it from there. 

Heather (08:56): Thanks Dee. By then I had earned my PhD. I had amazing teachers from Lutselk’e Dene First Nation, where I did my master’s research and amazing teachers from Hoait First Nation a Nu’chalnath—a community on the west coast of Vancouver Island, where I had done my PhD research. They had really taught me how to engage in research in a good way. And by that, I mean in a respectful way, in a way that allows me to relinquish any control over the research process. Typically academics like to have the control but this was much more fitting with my values. To say, I’m here to support whatever is important to you in your research interests, but not to lead it. Rather to figure out how we could do something together, that’s meaningful and useful. So I arrived in N’gmagi in Halifax at Dalhousie University. And I want to give a shout out to my friend, Ken Paul who’s Maliseet from Tobique First Nation, and was one of my first key points of contact there. He really introduced me to sort of understanding the lay of the land when Dee arrived in my office that day. I just immediately liked her.

I connected with her energy right away, as Dee described. And so that first drive out to Pictou Landing, when she invited me to come and meet the women and the women to meet me, was kind of like a dream come true in the sense. Instead of it being the researcher going to look for research projects or inserting themselves in places that they’re not necessarily wanted, this was an invitation. Then we carried on and did that research together with Pictou Landing native women’s group, under the leadership of Sheila Francis, who was the president of it at the time. And Kim Strickland was our key collaborator, conspirator and comrade in all of this. So that project began in 2010 when Dee started her PhD, and we carried out that research.

And then to get to Michael’s question. It does take a while sometimes for us to get there, Michael, but here we go. We started doing a research project around Indigenous and Western knowledge systems in water research and management. We looked into the most promising practices for engaging Indigenous and Western research methods, ways of understanding the world and understanding water together. So that work was really meaningful to the group. We decided that we really loved working together as this water research group. We thought, well, where are we going to take our research next? And we put together A SHARED Future. It took about a year or so to build our team. Is there something about renewable energy that is different than your typical fossil fuel extractive industries out there that have brought more harm than good to the Indigenous Peoples and their territories? So that’s where we came up with A SHARED Future in achieving strength, health, and autonomy through renewable energy development for the future. 

Porcupine (12:28): I can hear the connection between the two of you just in the way you relay your stories. I like your illustration of community-driven research. With Pictou Landing for example, that’s such a clear way to show the difference between academic researchers, going out to communities with an idea, and often very well-intentioned and really good ideas, but they’re not community driven ideas.

Making renewable energy the focus of A SHARED Future:   

Heather: I think we chose renewable energy because we wanted to focus on stories that were strength-based. Instead of looking at the things that are going wrong, like the fossil fuel extractive types of industries, and instead of thinking about resource development, that has a negative history already, we figure renewable energy was a direction people are thinking about. We just need to transition to sustainability, and renewable energy is going to be a part of that. So we were really interested in bringing forward stories of strength; stories of Indigenous leadership in the renewable energy sector to showcase the work Indigenous communities are doing that reflects their values and ways of being in relationship with the land.

Porcupine (14:05): The title of your project, A SHARED Future, is really lovely. I’m just wondering if you can explain where that title came from.

Heather (14:14): We knew that we wanted to look at reconciliation. We knew we wanted to look at renewable energy. We knew we wanted it to be forward or future-forward thinking. It really is thinking about, well, settlers are here to stay. And if we are going to have a shared future together, how can we do it in a good way? How can it be done in a way that authentically respects different knowledge systems and not place one as more privileged than the other, which has been the case since settlers first arrived. So that was the idea of, you know, how do we see our future? How do we move towards healing, in our relationships with each other and with the land? How do we work towards the truth-telling first, and then move into the healing so that we can reconcile these differences? How can we work towards a common goal of a shared future for the seven generations to come and beyond? How do we think about living more gently with mother earth? Those were all the questions that came into the title of A SHARED Future.

Reconciliation, self-determination and energy security:

Porcupine: I was looking at your update and I noticed an interesting line that ties into our podcast. Of course, there’s a reference to reconciliation, self-determination and energy security as being goals that you have. I was wondering if you could just connect those three keywords, reconciliation, self-determination and energy security. I’d just be interested if you could expand on that a bit.

Heather (15:59): I think the way I linked these three ideas together is that self-determination needs to come before reconciliation. For example, one of our projects is looking at the Off-Diesel Initiative funded by Natural Resources Canada and we’re looking at funding opportunities for remote, off grid communities. How does that, or does it even, support self-determination? And I think our critique of it is that, in coming up with even the title Off-Diesel Initiative implies that this is what communities want. But if you don’t know for sure, if you haven’t asked, or if it hasn’t been communicated, then you’re already one step too far out of the gate. And I think that speaks back to the idea of the work that we did with Pictou Landing.

They knew what they wanted to do, they approached Dee and then I came into the equation as well, to do that work together. To link that to one of the other projects that we have under A SHARED Future I want to mention Nunatuvik community council. When they joined the research program, one of the things they said talking with our communities was, ‘It’s not so much that we want to be off diesel entirely. We want sustainability.’ And so sustainability may involve some diesel. It may involve some renewables, but we want to determine for ourselves what makes sense. So to immediately align with the title off-diesel doesn’t allow them to embody a self-determining approach to how that all plays out. And when you think about energy security, it’s also about energy sovereignty.

Defining energy security and energy sovereignty:  

Heather: So yes, a lot of diesel dependent communities are energy insecure because of the high cost of diesel, the weather, getting diesel delivered to communities, and the different problems with diesel in terms of contributing to climate change in a negative way. So to having a steady source of energy is energy security. Energy sovereignty is that maybe you’re not necessarily relying on the utilities that exist because utilities have the monopoly on energy supply. So energy sovereignty is being able. And self-determination, for me anyways, is the ability to determine how we want to live and what our energy needs are and how would we like to determine how those energy needs are provided. Whether it’s through a partnership with a utility, self-sufficiency and maintaining an off-grid status using renewables, or a combination of renewables and say, diesel. Dee, do you want to jump in and add some more?

How policy advances reconciliation (or doesn’t):

Dee (19:19): I do. When I think of the three terms, reconciliation, self-determination and energy security, I think about what we’re doing with Tobique First Nation and in New Brunswick. New Brunswick had a community set aside for wind energy projects. And the set aside for First Nations required a take an all-or-none approach. So it pitted First Nations against each other, which had the potential to not reconcile, but instead create more barriers between communities. So in this project, we’re really looking at how policy does or does not facilitate reconciliation.

Porcupine: I just want to clarify one thing for the rest of your example. When you say it pitted an all-or-none approach, was the community saying you could only go in it by yourself and you had to sort of dominate that energy field? That you couldn’t do it in partnership, is that what you mean by that?

Dee: So at the time that there was this set aside, there were only two communities, I think in New Brunswick who are two First Nation communities who were prepared to bid on the set aside. And so it was either or community, right? It was either Tobique First Nation, or it was another First Nation, but it didn’t facilitate a partnership approach to splitting the set aside in the eyes of the First Nation communities. That policy didn’t work for them. It worked for Tobique—they got the full 20 megawatt set aside, but they’ve been having to focus on rebuilding those relationships that were harmed in the process. And then when I think of self-determination, I think about the name of the project at Tana Perry Wilson, who is my community project lead, came into the partnership with that title already in mind. The name of our project is, We’ve Lived This Way Before. So it’s getting back to living off the air, the land, the water, and the sun. They have the 20 megawatt wind farm, they’re getting into solar, they’re getting into biomass. They have the hydro development that’s been beside their community for a number of years already, but they’re negotiating a portion of the energy coming from the hydro development. And this community is working towards becoming a net zero community, and potentially they envision where they see enough revenue generated from these projects that they can reinvest it into the communities and other projects. Their vision is just so big. It’s a really interesting project I must say.

How has your interaction been with utilities? 

Porcupine (22:53): I wanted to follow up a little on some of the very interesting detail. When you talk energy, Heather, you mentioned you’re dealing with utilities. Usually implies monopoly institutions that are already set and very powerful. I’m just curious to know how your interaction has been with those utilities. As you look at trying to do these energy projects, if you’re going to be putting power back into the grid and you need to negotiate contract costs, for example, how does that battle go?

Heather: It’s not going very well. I would say we actually haven’t begun too much conversation yet with utilities. We’re hoping to be able to engage with them through this one project. We’re just working on our ethics application to begin getting permission to get consent to bring both the territorial governments, provincial governments and the utilities to participate in some interviews with us about these questions. But we’ll speak to a paper that we’ve just published in a journal on organizational management. Our post-doc Chad Walker interviewed people who identified themselves as being partners with Indigenous people. So non-Indigenous partners working with Indigenous people on renewable energy projects, to ask them particularly about Call to Action 92, which is about the call to action for the corporate sector. 

Colonial mentality in the renewable sector:

One of the important findings about this, and it is so contrary to reconciliation, is one of the Individuals that was interviewed said, ‘yeah, we engage in impact benefit agreements, and we have some joint ventures—and there are set asides like Dee mentioned—but at the end of the day, we still have them by the balls, was the quote in this interview. And that to me is so disappointing. I guess when we started out A SHARED Future, we really thought, oh, renewable energy. These are going to be people who really care about our planet and really want to reconcile the damage we’ve done. And maybe they also were thinking about how to reconcile our relations as settlers and Indigenous peoples thinking forward. But what we’re seeing in many instances is it’s just another form of a colonial mentality in the renewable sector. Where is the next big thing, right? It was fossil fuels, now it’s renewable energies. And where can we put our wind farm? Where can we put our solar farm? How can we take advantage knowing that there is that monopoly out there with utilities? And consultants will bring funding opportunities to communities and say, ‘Hey, I’ll work with you on this,’ but is there actually anything there that really reflects what the calls to action are asking us settlers to be doing? 

Porcupine (26:40): So Heather let me give you a specific example in the community that you did work with, Lutselk’e. They put in a solar array with Bullfrog Power and then negotiated a power purchase agreement with NWT Power Corp for a number, which I questioned. I think it was like 30 cents a kilowatt, very low. You could not survive on it. The NTPC folks told me it could never provide power for that cost, but that was all they were going to offer. They say it’s the replacement cost for diesel. That’s it. So the issue of pushing monopolies into the 21st century bring proactive is a challenge. Even in the Northwest Territories there’s only one shareholder of the power corporation that’s a territorial government. Which means every citizen in the territory is a shareholder. And like BC Power, they have enormous influence. And they’re not the most proactive institutions when it comes to energy.

Heather: No, absolutely not. And I was aware of Lutselk’e and its solar array, and those issues that you bring up are not just in Lutselk’e. I think it’s everywhere. It’s just that it has made the news, I suppose. For example, out in BC when Site C got approved for the big hydro, all of these early-starting, small-scale river hydro projects that First Nations were already in negotiations for years in the making suddenly got canceled. Site C was happening and is being touted as renewable energy. It’s clean, and it’s so not clean. 

The destruction of the land and destruction of people’s ways of life is enormous. 

And I mean, all we have to do is look at the Northern Flood Agreement and the damage done in Northern Manitoba from the flooding with Manitoba Hydro. Or over in James Bay, with the flooding there in the seventies and how that has disrupted as just another form of colonization.

Dee: Heather, do you remember early in the relationship with Tobique First Nation, they had visions of being able to sell their energy to New England, putting it into the international market.

Heather (29:22): Yep.

Dee: And then Trump gets elected and that complicates things. 

Heather: Yeah.

Dee: And then Hydro-Quebec signs an agreement with New Brunswick power to supply energy from Quebec through the New Brunswick transmission system. And so those are things they have no control over. 

Heather:  And I get the impression too that while some of the utilities are private, others are public. And if they are crown corporations, they have the same federal mandate to engage in reconciliation. And it’s just not on the radar. 

What needs to change?

Porcupine: If you look back at all of your projects and some of the sort of key lessons that you’ve seen and experienced as you’ve worked with these projects, what would be the main thing that you think would have to change in order to be able to make better progress and to deal with some of these major challenges.

Heather (30:26): I’ve got a thought. Do you have a thought, Dee?

Dee: You go first, Heather, because I find it hard to narrow it down just to renewable energy.

Porcupine: It doesn’t have to be just renewable energy. It can be general. I mean, you folks have focused on one piece because of this lovely project you have together, A SHARED Future, but, you’ve been in this for a while, even more broadly with all of your other research. So you have invaluable lessons. 

Heather: What makes a shared future sustainable, I suppose, is our governance structure. If the governance structures could be revolutionized.

Porcupine: And how do you mean governance? Like a First Nation comes up with the idea for a project and they know what they want, and it’s a good idea, and that all that goes forward. How are the decisions made? Because it inevitably involves outsiders as we know, like the big monopoly is the governance of that. We have to find the reform to find some way to have communities in the driver’s seat, or at least collaboratively in the driver’s seat with other players, opposed to having virtually no real decision-making as Dee said. Is that what you were getting at? Or am I just completely putting words in your mouth?

Heather: No, I think there’s a few parts to what I mean by governance, absolutely. Communities being in the driver’s seat is essential for a project to succeed anyways. But I was also thinking about utilities, for example, or even the federal government. But who holds the power here and who has the decision-making power? So who is on a utilities board? Does it have Indigenous representation and not just your token representation? If there was any sort of organizational governance structure that had 50% or more Indigenous representation, and then gender diversity. 

When you look at who are in the driver’s seats and in the power seats, these are still generally older white men. And they just are largely out of touch. 

I reflect that because for A SHARED Future, we created a governance structure where we have at least 50% of our programmatic steering committee. Our international advisory committee members are Indigenous. Whether they’re First Nations, Inuit or Metis. And for the international side, Indigenous from other jurisdictions. We’ve also ensured all of our projects at the programmatic level have gender diversity. So at least 50% who identify as women or gender nonconforming. It can’t just be a collaboration where we bring an idea somewhere for approval. It needs to be a blank page and say, what might we do together and how might we do that? It builds on each other’s strengths. But that supports self-determination. And to me, that is about actually decolonizing the governance structures across the country. And I remember years ago looking at a map of the watersheds across this country and thinking, that’s where we need to draw our jurisdictional lines. Not these artificial straight lines between provinces, but around watersheds. And then you can govern a watershed in a way that really reflects a sustainable approach to a healthier planet and can reduce some of the dramatic impacts we’ve seen from climate change. Anthropogenic climate change.

Dee (34:37): Yeah. So if I could just add to that. As the Indigenous voice on A SHARED Future, I think when government utilities used these words of reconciliation and decolonization, initially we were really hopeful. It sounded really promising that government was engaged and was committed. And what has become more obvious over the last five or six years is any of these set asides sort of seem to allow government to say, ‘Okay, well we’ve done our bit,’ and they move on and there’s no real substantive re-engagement with the community to say, ‘Okay, what should we do next?’ And I think that’s something that has to change because the communities are learning so much about what having energy autonomy can mean and what benefits it will bring to the community. I think that piece is missing. 

Porcupine: Yeah, we’ve been talking to a number of people on our podcast, for example, and others come to see reconciliation as a commitment to a shared relationship over time. Not to say you don’t have individual relationships with individual paths also, but there’s, it’s view, engage and you commit to reducing silos and learning about each other and continuing to break down and clarify misunderstandings and just continue to work together and to see that there is actually truly a shared future, the idea of being. What do we do though? We know what we’re trying to build together, and the question then becomes, but what are we going to actually do? And that goes on forever.

Porcupine (36:51): My key takeaway, having been in politics for a long time, is if you want to deal with water, you want to deal with the energy economy and you want to deal with social issues as a collective. The way to get to that is through governance. 

You have to have governments—Indigenous governments, public governments—working together to create the conditions that will allow the good things to happen. 

On the energy side, those utilities are all owned by governments. It is the elected politicians that answer to the people that have to build a table, a common table with seats for all the governments. Indigenous public Canada, provinces, territories, to start talking about these issues of common interest so that the entrenched bureaucracies and institutions know that the political climate is changing to be able to allow the communities to be able to move on and not get stonewalled by the status quo.

Heather (37:59): If I could just add to that, Michael, I think about one of the other projects we’re supporting through A SHARED Future. And it’s the work out in Unimogi, Cape Breton Island, where the collaborative environmental planning initiative, or Sepi, has been around for probably almost 20 years now. And Mary Beth Doucet, who is Mi’kmaw as well, is doing the research with the Unimogi Institute of Natural Resources, that supports Sepi and that’s their governance structure. They have everybody at the table. It was the chiefs of the five Mi’kmaw nations on the Island that brought people together. From the provincial government, the municipal governments, the federal government, or other stakeholders around the Bras D’or Lakes, (which is a really unique ecosystem) and around the world. You won’t see anything quite like it. They came together to create a governance structure around how we care for the Lake, listen to the spirit of the lake and what the spirit of the lakes is telling the people to do to be better caretakers around the lake.

Two-eyed seeing:

It’s really quite an exciting initiative. And it’s where Elder Albert Marshall and Dr. Cheryl Bartlett worked together coming up with this idea of two-eyed seeing or Etuaptmumk, which means bringing together the strengths of multiple ways of seeing the world to work together, to come up with creative solutions that are more holistic in nature and not just for one purpose or another.

Porcupine: And one of our other guests this season actually was, I believe a chair or a co-chair of Sepi, who’s now a Senator, Dan Christmas. It was instrumental in the beginning of that. One of the first examples I’ve seen in Canada of that kind of an initiative 20 years ago. So, in the last few minutes we have remaining, is there anything in particular that you wanted to say that you would like to add that you feel you haven’t been able to cover?

Positive models For collaboration: 

Dee: Do you know what Heather, I think one of the really promising things about A SHARED Future is the mentoring of the youth. In the project that I’ve worked on with Tobique First Nation, We have an Indigenous student who is doing her master’s degree in geography, looking at renewable energy and working with Tobique First Nation to explore whether or not energy improves the health of the community. And this is based on an interest of Simon Brascoupé, who’s on our International Advisory Committee. [The student] is working with two youth in the community to develop an educational program where they’re going to have renewable energy camps for the children when Covid is over and then inviting youth onto the mentoring that happens in the summer Institute. And it’s making sure that Indigenous students are engaged. And I think that’s so important if this is our future going forward, I think we’ve been very successful in contributing towards that.

Heather (41:52): Yeah. I’m glad you brought up the youth Dee, I was thinking the same thing. The youth that have been involved in A SHARED Future from the beginning and as we continue to grow. As much as we provide mentorship, they’re also amazing teachers. And the International Advisory Committee was very excited that we were bringing in a youth. They’re just fantastic people and active contributors to our discussions. And the other person I also wanted to acknowledge that has been instrumental in bringing our hearts and minds together is our team’s Elder, Elder Barbara Dumont Hill who’s Algonquin from Kitigan Zibi. Elder Barbara has just been so supportive of our work and of us. When we need help, they’re there, she’s there to help us. And I’m just full of gratitude for the people that have committed to A SHARED Future. Shout out to all of the different project co-leads and their own advisory committees. I can’t believe we’re three or four years in and I just want to continue to work together. I feel I get a lot of inspiration from the people who come together and feel we’re doing this for the right reasons. 

Following A SHARED Future:

Porcupine: Well, lots of information and lots of inspiration from your talking about this. Amazing. I’m so grateful to both of you for taking the time to talk to us today. If people want to follow and find out about your projects and sort of follow them, can they go somewhere or is there a website or a newsletter they can sign up for or something if they want to track these amazing projects you’re working with people on? 

Heather: Absolutely. We have a website, asharedfuture.ca, we have bi-monthly newsletters and you can reach out to either Dee or I by email and we can add you to the list, or you can also download them. We post them once they’re published on our website. We have a couple of videos on our website as well, one from our inaugural gathering out at South Nation. And then we did a summer Institute two summers ago. We didn’t do it last summer because of Covid. But we have a short film from that work as well. And there’ll be more films coming down the road. So we’d love to have people reach out for sure.

Porcupine (44:47): I’d like to thank you both for your time and your commitment, and I want to wish you nothing but good fortune in the years ahead, as you go through what are going to continue to be very challenging times for all of us, but there are opportunities as you show us time and time again. So thank you. Thank you, both. 

Listen to the Episode

Episode 1: Reconciliation Through Conservation: Mining, the Environment, and Development that Conflicts with the Rights and Values of Indigenous Peoples
Episode 2: The Human Right to a Healthy Environment: How It Can Transform Society and Achieve Reconciliation
Episode 3: Addressing the Indigenous Health Gap: Reconciliation Through Bridging Western and Indigenous Medicines
Episode 4: Finding Healing After Surviving Residential Schools in Canada
Episode 5: Reconciliation: Redefined by an Indigenous Spiritual Leader
Episode 6: Reconciliation and Serving the World Through Sustainable Engineering
Episode 7: How Housing Could Save the Lives of MMIWG
Episode 8: Exploring Reconciliation through Clean Energy in Indigenous Communities
Episode 9: Reconciliation and Climate Change: Indigenous Peoples Taking Action
Episode 10: Indigenous Economic Reconciliation: The Way to a Strong Canadian Economy

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