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 Page Two

^{HENRY LICKERS (Director, Environment Division, Mohawk Council of Akwesasne):} 

^{I'm happy to be here and I see lots of my friends around. You probably have all heard bits and pieces of this talk. But I think I'm very happy to give it here to the people and especially with friends that I've known for a long time.}

^{About 25 years ago, when we started the Department of the Environment for the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne, one of the things that the Elders in Akwesasne were saying is that for years and years and years, our people have been trying to get the message across about environment and why environment is so important. It seemed to fall on deaf ears all the time.}

^{The best case I had of that is when I was a young researcher, I had a Master's degree in my hand when I came into the community and, of course, I knew absolutely everything.}

^{The Elders there said to me: “Oh Henry, what we’d like you to do is we’d like you to go do the research for us and write a report for us to tell us what all of the environmental impacts are on the St. Lawrence River from the dams that have been built there.”}

^{I'm a biologist. I can do that. God, I rushed out there and I researched, and I did papers and oh man, this is what I always wanted to do.}

^{I came home and I handed the paper to my Council and said that the bluestem grass meadows would be affected, the spawning grounds would be affected, the fishing grounds would be affected and I went through a list of them.}

^{They said: “Oh Henry, this is a fine report from a biologist, fine report. We’d like you to do a little bit of research for us in the archives.”}

^{Oh, I can do that, too. So up to Ottawa, I went, started digging through the archives and found that in 1834, the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne and the Mohawk National Council of Chiefs went to the British Crown.}

^{The reason they went to the British Crown was that at that time, there was a bunch of dams called the Beauharnois control structures that were going to be built.}

^{The Mohawks said to those people if you do this, the bluestem grass meadows are going to be impacted. The fishing grounds are going to be impacted. The spawning beds will be affected, and many other things. I wondered how in the hell they got my report in 1834.}

^{It's at that point I think sometimes in a biologist’s and a scientist’s life that you have an epiphany. You suddenly realize that there is something here.}

^{While I realized that yes, I had a lot of learning from the sciences and the people that I had learned from at universities, I also had a tremendous amount of knowledge that had been given to me by my ancestors.}

^{The number of times in ecology classes that I wanted to stand up and say this is not true was amazing. But you have to hold your tongue there at that point, especially if you want marks.}

^{And so I find now that many years later, I don't have to hold my tongue anymore and that there are many more people who want to know this.}

^{Dave gave us an opening address that talks about the world and the world around us, and Jimmy explained a little bit of it. But think about just how important that means.}

^{Think of the Security Council of the United Nations, every time it sat, were to open with these words: “We send thanks and greetings to the people of this world”.}

^{You notice that at one point in the opening, he would say to you: “Do you agree?” You always had the same sentence at the end where he said: “Do you agree that the people in the world are important to us?”}

^{Now, if you had been Haudenosaunee, you all would have gone “Yes, we agree with that”. It's hard to understand language sometimes.}

^{But as you go through all of these things and you agree with the speaker that it's important, it means that by the time you're finished and ready to begin your meeting, I know that all my friends agree with 21 different things.}

^{I watched this done at the United Nations level and watched people who understood and could do that and say yes when the speaker called for a firm affirmation.}

^{And what happened was that Boutros Ghali said it was the first time in his life that he saw the people of the Security Council agree on 21 things in such a short time.}

^{We also use it as a closing, and it's used as a closing because it's to reaffirm that we believe in these things.}

^{And so I put it up here and I would like you to keep it in mind as we begin to talk about naturalized knowledge systems and the way we look at the world because in every case, this type of thanksgiving is used not only by the Haudenosaunee, which is maybe formalized in one way, but by all of our peoples when we open meetings and close meetings.}

^{I'll give you the story for Canada in that in about 1978, 1980, I think it was '80, whatever it was, 80 something, that the Parliament people, Trudeau and his government, plus all the ministers from the provinces were meeting to discuss aboriginal affairs and aboriginal issues. They had a full week of this.}

^{And every morning, one of the Elders would stand up and give a thanksgiving or give a blessing.}

^{On about the third day, Trudeau got a little bit testy with this because it took up time every morning and said somewhat loudly: “Do we have to do this every morning?”}

^{The Elder who gave the opening that day went on for three and a half hours. Somebody else will ask me how long this can be. He went down and he was thanking great, great grand cousins for the things that they had done. When he got to the Earth, he was thanking every mountain that he could think of. When he got to the waters, the St. Lawrence and the rain, everything got thanked. He went on for three and a half hours. When he finished, he said: “Maybe some of you this morning have wondered why I have gone on for so long with this greeting and thanksgiving.” He said: “Some of us need it”.}

^{Many times when you're working with First Nations communities or native communities - and we found this quite a bit, and I refer to it - so often, I've heard this concept of TEK. The concept of TEK seems to be coming to mean that if you have a nice brown face like mine and long hair, then only I can have it. You people out there are deficient in this.}

^{It also means that when your scientists come into my community, they can talk to three Elders and they can have all of the TEK of the Mohawks. They put it in a book and they keep it there and there is the TEK again.}

^{It also says that this TEK stuff is static. Once I got it, it never changes. It doesn't have any ability to adapt or do anything like this. Also, that it has some type of spiritual component that we can never analyze or understand - therefore, not very big and significant. These types of things we're beginning to see time and time again.}

^{Also another one that I hear is that it's like Pan-TEK. If you're a Mohawk, you have TEK, so therefore you can live in the Arctic. You know, it's transferable. It's like a degree from one university to another.}

^{So we found it - from the Mohawk Council and from our Mohawk people's point of view - not tasteful and not good because it doesn't allow for the differences. So we started to use the concept of naturalized knowledge system.}

^{What we say is that people naturalize or adapt to a given area or country the same way you could become a naturalized citizen. It means that as the people of Akwesasne have lived in the St. Lawrence River Valley for thousands of years, they have adapted to that area and know that area well.}

^{As they adapt, they gain knowledge, intense knowledge of that system. And then, they have methods to transfer that knowledge from one person to another, from one group to another and from one generation to another.}

^{And so, what we see here in this concept is the ability to adapt, understand, know, gain knowledge as we go along. The Hopi, when they interpret this, said that there are no new ideas. Everything that's out there is known. And Jim said it this morning - the Creator created this Earth with everything here that we could possibly need.}

^{And this idea also is captured in here in that all the knowledge is here. It's that we have to look hard, as a child does, to grow to understand that system around us and we have many aunties and uncles to help us. Some of them are the turtles. Some of them are the birds. Some of them are the winds. And by observing those, we can understand the world and how to live in harmony.}

^{Again, like I said, you gain knowledge. And that knowledge is different from place to place. If you take the Haudenosaunee, as humble as we are, take us north and drop us into the Arctic, when we're up there, I have no clue of how to live there. If it's the middle of a blizzard, I'm going to die.}

^{I need the knowledge of my brothers and sisters up there, the Inuit people, in order to survive in that environment. I need to humble myself and say that I don't know like a child and live with those people in order to be able to understand how to survive in that area.}

^{But that's no different than, for example, if an Inuit came from the north and lived with the Haudenosaunee. We live in a completely different area, a completely different way of life. There are much different things in the way that we look at the world.}

^{One of the classic examples I have with teaching all the time and one of the ones I used to want to jump up in school with is standard little things that people used to say to me. How many seasons are there in a year?}

^{The Anishinabe and non-native people say there are four seasons in the year. Everybody knows that! However, to the Haudenosaunee, who are farming people, there are six seasons. And the moons of our calendar reflect that, from the times in which we plant to the times in which we watch these things grow, to the times that we harvest, to the mid-winter when we give thanks for those things and our traditions that are there}

^{We see six seasons in those moons that go across the years for us. That's a lot different than, for example, people who are Anishinabe or others that may only see four seasons.}

^{If I go to the Inuit, there is no four seasons up there. One is with snow, or one is with darkness and snow and one is with light and the summer, depending on what is going to happen there. They think of the year differently than we do.}

^{So we have to acknowledge those differences.}

^{The other thing that comes up with this all the time is the concept of complexity. The number of times that I've heard from the Elders that when we talk about a cause-and-effect equation that's on the board there, is that what I've heard from scientists is that there is a cause and an effect.}

^{We reduce that down to the simplest standard, standard temperature and pressure. That's how we can measure cause and effect.}

^{The problem with naturalized knowledge systems is that we look at much bigger impacts. So an Elder will talk to you and say that it's like doing something like dropping a pebble into a pool of water that will ripple out, all of the different effects being those ripples.}

^{What we have done in many cases is looked at this type of cause-and-effect equation to see how it stacks up and have talked many times, as far as Akwesasne is concerned and other communities, to find out how this thing works and what it means to our people, and where the difficulties lie.}

^{What we found is that when you're talking to native people, one of the biggest problems we have with western sciences and western people is you change scale so often. You change scale in order to make your point.}

^{When we look at the world, we see those concentric circles and we see the scales in which things operate. So if you look here, you see that there is a sub-cellular, cellular individual level, group, community, nation, confederacy, spiritual realm that enfolds the whole thing.}

^{Each of those have characteristics; and if you come down to the characteristics, you can see some, for example, action times at the sub-cellular level are in microseconds.}

^{The cellular level may be seconds required for something to take place. Minutes for an individual to decide how to do something.}

^{In a family or group, we know that it can take sometimes hours, even if you are deciding to go to the beach that Sunday, you still spend time thinking about it. At community level, it takes days, weeks, years. And then to change the spiritual direction of a people can take decades.}

^{Some of our problems we find are in those time periods. But among the Haudenosaunee, we see that not as a hindrance, but as a dynamic. Each of those time periods set up a dynamic or social tension that allows for us to change, to evaluate, to criticize, to look at, to see, to find solutions and to do those things. But if you forget that they exist, that's when you can run into real trouble.}

^{This one here is based on the numbers of individuals, but it's strictly a Haudenosaunee look at the world. You'll notice that the group, or family level is about a hundred people.}

^{And this goes because Iroquois kinship systems are quite different. I have actually 13 mothers and fathers because all my aunties and uncles on my mother's side are all my mothers and fathers. I have 73 brothers and sisters. It means that we can have really good lacrosse games, and not have to go outside of the family.}

^{At the bottom one here is the size of the reaction area, for example, an individual or whatever. I've been told by my daughter, who is now a marine biologist, that I'm going to have to take the ten-meter size up a little bit bigger to encompass blue whales, which are a lot bigger than that.}

^{But again, how big are these things are really determined upon how we look at the world.}

^{To bring it into modern theory, we talk about the concepts of certainty and the concepts of chaos. We know as we go up the hierarchies, certainty decreases and chaos increases. That's known now as we look at the world.}

^{But it's interesting to me that when I first went to university, this concept of chaos I understood very well from my grandfather, but it wasn't understood very well by my professors.}

^{It wasn't until years later when the whole catastrophe theory, chaos theory came into effect that we began to understand how these things are done.}

^{This center one was given to me by Ernie Benedict, who is a good friend and Elder in our community. I once asked him, I said: “Ernie, how do these hierarchies affect me as an individual?” And he said: “Well, Henry, you start out as an egg and sperm at the sub-cellular level and they come together and when they come together, they create an embryo. And that embryo then develops up into an individual. When that individual is born, there is that individual. As you grow in your family, you're really inside your family and you're a child. As you move out into your community, you're an adolescent. As you work more and more within the Mohawk nation, you now become an adult.”}

^{The Haudenosaunee have a concept of aunties and uncles, and we work between nations. We try to facilitate understanding.}

^{Lastly, when your hair gets a lot whiter than mine, I hope you begin to have that knowledge and experience that can be used by many people.}

^{We don't really have a term for Elder, but it's that person who knows and is experienced that can be called on by many different people and is looked at being belonged to by all of the community.}

^{So when we look at this type of system, again, if you take that thanksgiving address, you apply it to this, you end up with a very complex system of the way in which to look at the world and how we would look at the world.}

^{You also have a Seneca speaking, so I can go on for three hours. Jim promised me he would throw a brick at me if I go too long.}

^{We have looked - and this is the most startling thing for myself - we have looked all over the world at different cultures in different places to see if there were basic principles that could be assigned or themes that could be assigned to this naturalized knowledge system.}

^{What we found is any place where the people live close to the land these types of themes or principles exist. They are not rocket science. They are very easily stated, but have profound effects on the communities that live there.}

^{We say that the Earth is our Mother. That sets up a whole dynamic between the relationship of men and women, between the relationship of land and women, between the relationship of how we live together and how we view that Earth.}

^{It's interesting to me that when we went to Europe and were in Germany which talks about the land being the father land - you know, this is the father land - but the father land exists on the Mother Earth.}

^{And we found that in almost every place that we went where the people lived very close to the land for a long period of time, this concept of the Mother Earth was very important.}

^{In French, “la terre”. It's not le terre, you know, the masculine form, it's the feminine form.}

^{In Scotland, we found people who talked about the bonnie land as a feminine thing. They talked about male castles, but the feminine land.}

^{So it has a profound effect on how you look at the world.}

^{Cooperation is the way to survive. In the world of sciences, I was told that competition is the way you survive.}

^{But what I was always taught was that as brothers and sisters to those animals and those things that live around us, even the predator depends upon the prey in order to exist and live in this world.}

^{There are many stories that we tell in the Haudenosaunee that could show you that relationship and almost that the predator and the prey are an intricate dance together that allow both of them to survive.}

^{So we have to begin to understand that.}

^{We say that knowledge is powerful in the western society. In the Haudenosaunee and the native communities, we say knowledge is powerful only if it's shared. When we share that information among each other, we all become more powerful, more strong and able to carry out our responsibilities to the Earth.}

^{The spiritual world is not distant from us. Our Creator did not have to come from some place here to visit us. The spiritual world is here, always with us. We are the ones that generate that spirit. And when we forget it, that's when we lead ourselves into some of the greatest damage that we can do.}

^{Responsibility is the best practice. I know right now in Canada and the United States that we have many, many courts going on about land claims and aboriginal rights.}

^{But I'll tell you what. When the British came here and when the Americans came here, when all of these people came, they were flabbergasted that in North America, there were no police. There were no courts. There were no armies. They couldn't understand how that was established.}

^{The reason why was that the teaching of responsibility was the most important thing. Not your right. When you teach responsibilities, you do not need a lawyer to tell you what they are.}

^{When I'm sleeping on the couch at home not washing the dishes, I know so. I know that I'm doing the wrong thing and that I should go help my wife do this. I don't need any police to make sure that I go do that and I don't need any armies to make sure that everyone does that.}

^{And so what we say is that the teaching of responsibility should become our most important thing. And yet, what I find now is that we probably put millions of dollars into teaching rights. We have to get back to that.}

^{The last one is the ecological one, which is everything is connected to everything. We found that in every society that we've been able to go to, that always, the stories, the lessons, things they're talking about, how one thing impacts on everything else around you.}

^{The closer the people are to the land, the closer that these beliefs are there, or these principles. We found that as people pull themselves away from the earth and their societies become unstable, these are some of the first things that they forget.}

^{So if we have anything from First Nations people and native people to do is maybe help people to remember these principles.}

^{It is complex. I like graphs. I like pictures. Whenever we decide something among the Haudenosaunee, we have to think carefully about the thanksgiving address.}

^{We have to think carefully about the hierarchy, and we have to think carefully about seven generations into the future. If I even simplify the thanksgiving address down into these few things and keep the hierarchy and pass it out seven generations, what it means is that any decision I make has 906 small squares that I have to consider.}

^{To give you an example of that, when National Geographic asked the Haudenosaunee if they could photograph in the Long House, one of our places in the community, it took the Haudenosaunee two and a half years to decide that they could.}

^{Every one of those squares had to be decided and discussed and talked about and seen was that okay, was that, no. The decision that finally came up was that yes, they could photograph in the Long House, but they couldn't use a flash. I know one of those squares in there made a difference some place.}

^{However, to set up the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force, a task force that would coordinate, look at scientific research across all 22 communities of the Haudenosaunee, it took them 20 minutes. Why? Because we understood what each of the squares and boxes were and needed very little discussion on it.}

^{So again, this type of complexity is something that we deal with on a daily basis.}

^{Jim also talked about what is known as the three great words, and it's interpreted in many different ways. We use this for community development and community things. We talk about the zeal to deal. It's to give a little bit of Hollywood in here so that people remember it. It's not hard to remember.}

^{We have talked to many different government departments about it, but we say if you wish to work in a community, then these are the three major things that you need. You need respect, you need equity, you need empowerment. Those don't generate the deal. What they generate is the enthusiasm to work together, the enthusiasm to do things.}

^{One of the things that we at Akwesasne have liked about the IJC is that over the years, we have been able to generate a lot of respect. We have good communication with many people in the IJC. On the Science Advisory Board, we have people sitting on various committees. I myself sat on the Science Advisory Board and a couple of others as well.}

^{We communicate well. We talk among ourselves about what the issues are, and they are not afraid to allow us to speak in a forum to speak. Consensus mediation and honor are built out of those communications.}

^{Under equity, yes, equity is important. How we get our people to these meetings, how we take part in them is important and requires finance and requires things to be done. But we bring knowledge with us, as well as your people bring knowledge as well. We bring networks. We bring personnel, people who know. We have political and social power within both Canada and the United States.}

^{Lastly, we have empowerment. We empower ourselves to do things. When we first arrived, for example, at the IJC, myself, many, many years ago and brought up issues about native people, they weren't pushed aside.}

^{They said “Let's deal with these, let's start working on them”. And while it has taken a long time to do that, we still are moving forward with that. Remember what I said about moving governments and societies taking decades. Here we are working with two big countries. It takes a little bit of effort and time.}

^{For the universities, we talk about authorship. So often, intellectual mining occurs in our communities where we have people who come down and want to talk to our Elders and mine them for their intelligence and then go away and they're not even mentioned as part of the authorship. That can't continue.}

^{We build credibility, we build partnerships, we accept responsibility for what we do. When we have done that, that builds more respect for each other. When we build more respect, we get more equity. When we get more equity, we get more empowerment. And so the cycle continues and grows, and harmony is created within this world.}

^{That's the simple process of working with the Haudenosaunee and with many of the native peoples in the Great Lakes.}

^{I'll show you another example, one last example. I know that we were talking this morning about indicators and social indicators. One of the things that we did with the Eagle Project and a number of projects was to sit down and talk with Elders about how they would look at the world.}

^{What they told us was that if you use the center of that point as the plate on which a community rests and that point becomes the health of the community, then you can develop indicators quite easily from this wheel.}

^{The wheel is divided off into a number of different sections. What I find interesting is how they spaced the things around it. They said that because we're scientists, we always like to measure things and have a denominator. We always like rates. And this one here is the way that you would develop rates.}

^{The one I'll use for you is a real simple one which we call the picnic indicator which uses environment and morale as the two indicators within a community. It's called the picnic indicator because the first thing the Elders asked us was: “Can you scientists measure sunlight in a community?”}

^{We said: “Yes, we can measure sunlight. Sunlight is easy to do.”}

^{Then they turned to the sociologists and they said: “Okay, tell us, can you measure the number of picnics in a community?”}

^{Well, there was a big debate how many sandwiches you needed and whether mice were there, and who was there and what has to happen. But they said, yes, they could measure them.}

^{They said: “That's fine. Then, you take the number of picnics a community has and you put it over the number of hours of sunlight. So now, you have an index of picnics per hour of sunlight.}

^{And what you'll find is that if you have a community that has high amounts of sunlight and high amounts of picnics, don't worry about that community. They're having so much fun - no problem with them.}

^{But if you find a community that has low amounts of sunlight and low numbers of picnics, I would worry about that community. I’d be out there trying to help them to see what we could do.”}

^{The first place that springs to mind is Davis Inlet and all of the problems they have.}

^{The other thing that it says is it helps you find out who should help that community.}

^{Well, you don't go to the people who have high sunlight, high picnics because they don't even know what low light levels are like. But you would go to people who have low sunlight and high picnics - Tuktoyaktuk, for example - and some of the people from there would be good people to teach each other how to have more picnics and have a better community.}

^{The other thing that the indicator does is it shows you the way out. It gives you hope.}

^{And so with the picnic indicator, for example, at Davis Inlet, one of the first things that happened was that the people of Davis Inlet said: “We want a huge recreation center, big recreation center”.}

^{According to the index and the Elders, they said what they wanted was more sunlight, a place where they could go, well lit. They had a whole bunch of playthings they could do, much more sunlight. And by the way, also you can have a lot more picnics there as well.}

^{And so that is what they were looking for and how to modify the community.}

^{Around that wheel, there were many other things that we looked. And they said that by using the life indicator is not the whole story because you should also unite your life indicator with all of those death indicators on the other side, the death indicators being mortality, morbidity, all of those things that we normally measure in epidemiology.}

^{And so with something simple as - we used one, for example, on environment and morale with the Opaskwayak which looked at moose populations and on the other side, how many hunters there were.}

^{What we found was that when moose populations fell to a low level, criminal activities in the community increased amazingly. When they were able to bring in the management scheme that allowed for the moose numbers to go up and got to a point where even the worst hunter could get a moose, suddenly crime rates fell off dramatically in that community.}

^{The sociologists that were with us went: “Wow, what a connection!” You know, moose are connected to crime. Again, this is not the normal way of looking at the world, but to us, that complexity of the issue is.}

^{At Akwesasne, I can seriously tell you - and I believe this firmly- is that when you look at the community of Akwesasne and all of the problems that we've had there in the past, one of those underpinning things is the environment.}

^{You see that what has happened now at Akwesasne is since 1990, the Canadian and the U.S. governments have spent well over a billion dollars in policing our community. Well over a billion dollars. This is good money thrown after bad.}

^{If we would have taken that million dollars and used it to clean up the St. Lawrence, support the IJC, support all of the government initiatives and the private initiatives to clean up that river, you would never have had 1990. You would never have had Oka.}

^{So what I say to you as a native person is that we have a lot of knowledge. We have ways of looking at this world that may be useful. But we need to be able to combine them with the knowledge that the people have on the outside. I think it's about time we start to do it.}

^{Thank you.}

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