A new series of free online courses from the Prairie Climate Center at the University of Winnipeg are connecting indigenous knowledge with Western science to tackle the problem of climate change.
“We have developed some courses that try to highlight adaptation planning for the future of climate change, finding solutions that we can use to adapt as a society,” Brett Huson, associate researcher at the Prairie Climate Center, told Global News.
“But (we are) also trying to integrate indigenous knowledge into research and development because that is knowledge that spanned thousands of years on this earth.
“One of the things that we have been doing is that we have been working with a concept called vision with two eyes…. This focuses on trying to see indigenous knowledge in a different light and helping it to integrate with Western science.
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On November 10, Mi’kmaw elder Albert Marshall of the Eskasoni First Nation in Unama’ki (Cape Breton), who coined the term ‘two-eyed vision’, will lead a conversation together with Huson and the director from the PCC, Ian Mauro.
“This helps people to understand the perspective of indigenous knowledge systems, but also how they can be better integrated and how to be able to take information from indigenous knowledge and translate it so that it can be used in research,” Huson said.
“We definitely orient the program in general to indigenous communities, but also to benefit non-indigenous communities, because the important thing here is to learn to develop meaningful and reciprocal relationships between indigenous communities and non-indigenous institutions, communities and individuals.”
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Reference-globalnews.ca