Researcher aims to return knowledge
Jan 9th, 2006 by cmenzies
UBC anthropologist Charles Menzies collaborates with researchers from a variety of disciplines to learn how traditional ecological knowledge in the Gitxaala Nation can contribute to education and resource management
BY LEAH MARCHUK[First published in Arts Beat]
Researcher Charles Menzies investigates how First Nations ecological knowledge can contribute to sustainable futures (Michelle Mayne Photo).
Dec 02, 2005 | For thousands of years, the members of the Gitxaala (pronounced Kit-Kat-tla) Nation, located on the north coast of British Columbia, have relied on their intimate knowledge of local ecology to survive on their land.
In the Forests and Oceans for the Future Project, UBC anthropologist Charles Menzies has initiated research that seeks to understand traditional ecological knowledge and feed it back into the Gitxaala community.
“Researchers will often go to a community, study it, survey it, ask questions, write reports in the university, and then they’ll mail the report back,” says Menzies, who has a background of both Gitxaala and non-indigenous family members.“What we’re trying to say — and many First Nations scholars, many indigenous scholars and people working in indigenous communities are trying to say — is how do we actually maintain the information in communities, while practicing as researchers at universities.”
With the goal of sharing findings with the Gitxaala community in mind, Menzies set out to investigate how local understanding of the unique ecology of the Gitxaala territory, or traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), could contribute both to the development of resource management policies, and also to the development of education materials.
“Traditional ecological knowledge is about how you touch the environment, how you touch that world around you,” says Menzies. “When you’re fishing, and you’re using halibut groundline, and you’re hauling the line back on the boat, you’ll always have your hand on the line,” he adds, “and you can tell what kind of bottom it is by the touch.”
With his research funded by Forest Renewal B.C., an organization working to regenerate the province’s forests, and the Forest Investment Account of British Columbia, a governmental organization working to maintain sustainable practices in forestry, Menzies hoped to find ways to integrate this traditional ecological knowledge into the present Gitxaala community.
“There are two focal points,” says Menzies. “One is community-focused, and so we’re doing a research that, as best as we can establish, meets local level community needs,” he says. “The other major goal is looking outside the community and trying to communicate and make understandable to non-indigenous people, to non-Gitxaa_a, the wealth, the dignity, and the intrinsic worth of the indigenous framework.”
Menzies believes that using TEK is the best way to accomplish these goals: “There’s a big debate about whether you can actually integrate or translate [TEK] into scientific or resource management programs, and I take the position that, at least on an operational level, one can understand the environment better by listening to people who are directly in it, listening to it, interacting with it, engaging in it.”
To conduct his research, Menzies collaborated across several disciplines. Researchers from education, health sciences, and social work, as well as graduate students, community members, and even independent filmmaker Jennifer Rashleigh, who has directed two films on the project and has made several videos documenting it, combined their knowledge and talents to produce a holistic understanding of the investigated issues.
“I’m really a strong advocate of the notion that we each look at the world from a particular angle, a particular perspective, and to really get an actual full picture, you need to have a number of vantage points,” says Menzies.
“While I have an individual role to play in shaping and doing all this, it is a collective endeavor, and I think more and more anthropology is recognizing the extent to which our work is by definition collaborative.”
Menzies recognizes leaders in the Gitxaala community as key to the success of the project.
“Nothing we’ve done would be possible with the support of Sm’ooygit Hale,” said Menzies, referring the hereditary chief of the Gitxaala Nation.
Part of what has emerged from Menzies’ research is Rashleigh’s films, which document his research. View from Gitxaala describes the research process and protocol from the point of view of Gitxaala community members, while the second film, Returning to Gitxaala, looks more specifically at the return of research materials to the Gitxaala community.
Caroline Butler, who now teaches at the University of Northern BC and worked with Menzies on the project, explains in View From Gitxaala how the research is returned to the community: “We agreed… once the research project was done, the information would come back to the community, and that Charles and the research team would be the only other ones privileged to that information, and Gitxaala members would also be privileged to that information as per our protocols.”
The research team has produced a collection of educational materials divided into seven unit plans, which integrate traditional ecological knowledge into public education in a user-friendly manner. For instance, lessons include using TEK for plant classification, a comparison between TEK and contemporary science using case studies such as the Smallpox Epidemic of 1862, and an examination of the changing economy of the Oona River coastal community.
“We tried to design these, so you could print them out, read the explanatory notes, have the student overhead notes, and actually slot them right into the course,” says Menzies. “We’ve said, ‘Here’s all the lessons, provincially mandated lessons, lets identify the objectives set up in the provincial curriculum, let’s plug in content.’”
In addition, Ken Campbell wrote a textbook for the First Nations 12 course, with Menzies stepping in as the secondary author. The course, which focuses on the languages, culture, and history of BC’s First Nations, was designed for all BC students.
Gitxaala community member John Lewis describes what he believes to be the benefit of these education materials for students in View from Gitxaa_a: “Students will be able to read in a few thousand years down the road how we survived all these millennia throughout this land, basically on the same laws of the resources sustaining us and us sustaining the resources,” says Lewis. “Our people have known that the animals, such as the whales, the birds, the spiders, everything on this earth has communication.”
For Menzies, this idea of returning knowledge to the community he’s studying is a key component of his research: “We’ve really worked hard to maintain relations of respect with our researching community. And I think all First Nations communities, all indigenous communities, feel overwhelmed by researchers, and so we’ve attempted to focus on things that are more useful in the community,” he says. “I won’t claim to have the perfect solution, but I certainly think we’re heading in that direction.”
