W'loti Etuaptmumk as Cultural Foundations for Health Research in Mi'kma'ki

Good afternoon and welcome to today's health justice institute seminar lecture which is co-hosted today by the health justice institute and professor na metallic in her role as chancellor's chair in Aboriginal law and policy. I'm Sheila Wildman, director of the health justice institute. We meet today and throughout this series in the unseated territories of Migma, Wistiquay and Pasimati peoples, sovereign nations holding inherent rights as the original peoples of these lands. We can be in this lecture series with respect for those inherent rights, mindful of our collective obligations under the peace and friendship treaties and section 35 of the constitution act of 1982, which as you know recognizes and affirms Aboriginal treaty rights in Canada. We at the Health Justice Institute further recognize that African Nova Scotians are a distinct people whose histories, legacies, and contributions have enriched this part of McMahon known as Nova Scotia for over 400 years. the entrancent colonial roots, colonialist roots of ongoing health inequities endured by indigenous peoples and nations across Wabanaki territory and Turtle Island and the global health injustices of colonial capitalism driving our planet to the brink of extinction have been central to the conversations hosted through this seminar lecture series over the last many years. We have in the past welcomed indigenous justice warrior Cindy Blackstock and in the last three years we've learned from Dr. Nicole Reders director of indigenous planetary health at Western from UT's Dr. Jeff Jeffrey Ansloo on indigenous health insights on suicide, climate change, and health justice. Lawyer Alysa Lombard on using law to secure reproductive dignity in the lives of indigenous people and nations. Alumni David Taylor on this ongoing Jordan's principal legal advocacy. And of course, Delhauszy Law's own thought and advocacy leader, Professor Naomi Metallik on substantive equality in First Nations social development and self-governance. This past spring, Professor Metallic and the HJI co-hosted a law commission of Canada funded workshop at the Migma Native Friendship Center on indigenous community-led disability supports on Wabanaki lands with a report on that important conversation to be shared widely soon. Today it's a pleasure and an honor to welcome our speaker John Silo who is the now not so new uh indigenous uh sorry vice project my mouth is not working the not so new but new uh vice provice indigenous relations here at DA so I'm going to step back with that uh miss mouth work that I just did and invite professor metallic to say a few words about uh John Cro. Thank you. Thank you. Um Naomi Metallic Misty Butch. My name is Naomi Metallic and Sha said I'm a professor here. Um and uh it's my pleasure to uh introduce our speaker today, John Boy. Um John is um uh meaning Migma from the Milbrook Migma community in Nova Scotia. Um as Sheila mentioned, he is uh now in the vice provost indigenous relations role here at the university. Uh John's uh role is to enhance the housey's indigenous communities partnerships, develop pathways into meaningful learning opportunities on campus and expand on the work that indigenous programming provides to benefit students, faculty, and staff for learning, teaching, and research. John collaborates on various regional and national research at the IWK Health Center with the Aboriginal Children's Hurt and Healing Initiative. He is a co-reient of a focused research investment grant from the research Nova Scotia. Sorry, from research Nova Scotia to explore indigenous health and healing for only children through row two which I'll speak about more today as you'll see from the slide. Um John's other interests include advocating to build support for two spirit and indigenous LGBTQQIA plus and he is the co-founder and former executive director of the Wabanaki Two Spirit Alliance. Please uh join me in welcoming John. Thanks Naomi Naomi. Um for Milbrook justice. All right, everybody. Thank you for that. Um, I put my timer on. I have my Tims on a side and a water bottle from the faculty of uh law here. Thank you for the introduction and also for the opportunity to share some of our knowledge. And I say our knowledge because it's from Wabunaki from Ulnoo being indigenous or um first nations andor especially Migmau and and also because it's something that cross-sections with um what ownership looks like when it comes to our knowledge versus what I copyright is something that I could say it's John R. Um but those are some of the intersections that we'll talk about when it comes to um this presentation. I'll come to the image that you see up here with the left which are djamish djamishk are spirits and so when you have two spirits you put the two in there when you have more than two then you just multiply it so that's the rule of using petro explain that in a second means where I'm from or who I'm from or what community claims me and in this case I have my mom who was a basket maker and a long line of basket makers. That's my primary source of my knowledge is through that major lineal line of of where I understand my language to come from and how I think and how I speak is from my mother first and foremost. And then of course contributed to that is my dad and he's the one that's standing um with me in in in the photograph and he was chief of Esone in when he was only a young man at 26. So he's the youngest chief in Escasonone um was the youngest chief in Esone during that time but also the youngest chief in the 70s across Canada. And his greatgrandfather was Gabriel Silboy, the chief on the left. And uh he's he would be my great great-grandfather. And then the the gentleman on the left immediate me on my left here is uh the grand chief John Denny Jr. who was the gr last grand uh chief the hereditary sorry the last hereditary grand chief and when he passed away there was a morning period and then they selected a chief afterwards which was my great-grandpa. So it went from my mother's side to my grandfather's side. So I had no choice to be involved in justice andor advocacy andor in self-determination or in governance or in politics since I was a before my time. So that influence I recognize and acknowledge and I'm very proud of it. And I also am a product of Indian day school. I went to Esone um primary and I didn't realize it was a Indian day school. I we wouldn't know we we wouldn't know that then. I just went to school every day. I spoke Migma at school every day, but we didn't speak it inside the classroom often unless you were sneaking conversations with your colleagues in class. And um and so Marian who was our teach grade two teacher back then and my first cousin on the left, Sean, um we were taught by this woman who was a great leader and she became the director of education in Eskason at one point. So she was our grade two teacher. Um, I always said that I woke up gay again. Um, I had no choice. Look at the clothes my mother put on me. So, I always talk about the fact that, you know, there's my mother would have recognized some distinct qualities about being uh what we call a dujioo in Migma and uh and as a two-spirit person. The Wanaka Two Spirit Alliance has a unique story. We started as an organization back in 2010. We first got together because there were tragic incidents happening in our community in Escasoni First Nation. My friend and co-founder of the Wabanaki Twist Alliance is Dumay Young. And I had just recently come out to my family and my community just well I should just say my family and and I was working at Atlantic Policy Congress at the time. Um and I had a vast network of people culturally but also through work and and so um Dumma reaches out to me and says um I heard that you came out. You got to get to work now. And I said what are you talking about? So, we were aware of the incidents that were happening in our community with the loss of lives and and we we had to look at how we're going to address that because we also wanted to know why that was happening and what were the causes and also try to look at it from a um from a perspective that's strength-based andor um culture-based, not from a deficit perspective, which is often the case the way health Canada or government looks at things saying that's a tragedy it's loss of life it's suicide and so we want to understand more than what that is and take the power of the narrative and control that so we got together and had a gathering at the liskum lodge there were more than 50 people that came to there all the first nations around the region had sent somebody to attend and so we had a series of discussions and conversations and in those one of the convers ations um turned into a sharing circle and people shared their stories about coming out and during that time people shared their difficulties with their health, their wellness, acceptance, discrimination, but also most importantly why they survived and why they are here. And at that point, um, our elders that were there at this event told us, okay, if we're going to look at research through the lens of two-spirited people, we didn't have a word for it yet in Migma, we need to look at it from a place of love or tradition and wealth of who we are. And that way we can celebrate who we are as two spirit people. Let's study how we love and not how we suffer is what the elders said. So that's how we were born out of that um organization that way. We started as an organization without any funding. We this is our encatchment area being all of the Migmagi but also understanding that we had relationships with people from the northern Labrador community with the Enu and Ninuid as well. We also had understandings with the um woo uh sorry the pasmati ponopscot of the main area and crossing over to the border area that was our catchment area if you will and we always started looking at then why we are the way we are through our health and we we started understanding and I presented this slide in Portugal and Spain I said this is what we got from you almost got thrown out of the uh event But we just started to look at what what have western perspectives brought to our understanding as being noo and and how that's impacted how we think and how we feel and and some of those of course are constructs. They're contemporary. Of course, we know that, but we're just saying that a lot of the impacts from the western world have really did a number on our people in our area. And I'll I'll allude to some of that. But some of the historical aspects that we look at starting from the first settlers and the bapti um the baptizing of um SA member and then the of course the conflicts that took place. Um we did a timeline to understand how two spear people were impacted around the region and some of the policies that would have done that. We had for examples um we have things that would have happened right off saying when when Salom member 2 had negotiated baptism it was a negotiation. It was a process by which we had to understand that there's a danger of armaments and and influx of um modern warfare that these people brought and we had a different way of looking at um what warfare would look like. And in that negotiation um and there's conflicting views around the concord now have you seen it? Um, we were looking at how that would have been one of the outcomes was that the Holy Sea would have said that the Miwa were allowed to live the way they um, honor their spirituality, whether it be Catholicism or a combination of that or a hybrid of that. But what really happened back then and I spoke to Albert Marshall about this quite often. I call him Glamukist like uncle is the the first um birth of how we would understand to be. that would be the the the structure of eduoptim would have been born out of the hybrid of looking at our spirituality back then. So this is part of the ongoing conversations. Then we we started having adoptim as a word that we would use every day and I'll talk about that in a bit. But then integrated into a process by which we look at look at it as a foundation or principle for knowledge gathering whether it be for research or policy development or even looking at it from a legal perspective. It's a way in which we integrate our worldview into the you know the um outside of our worldview people. So it would be with French or English or with Canada or the federal government but it's part of that and I'll go into that. But what we do want to say is that during this time here we had the impact starting to come forward especially with the Indian residential schools um Indian day schools. We would have had for example the Indian act that brought the patriarchal laws and that would have impacted um the way in which two spirit people would have celebrated union or even how Migma would have celebrated union. it was institutionalized to be a binary construct where male and female had to be brought together. So these were official policies that happened. Another official policy that happened was the fact that we couldn't um celebrate our spirituality. We couldn't celebrate our traditional medicines for example. We weren't allowed to celebrate these things. So they had to go underground. And when that happened, of course, that impacted memory and the collective memory of our thought process when it came to all of those um practices which also erased into the language which erased into collective memory. Eventually those words that we may have had around two spirit people or similar were impacted. So systemic patriarchy and heteronormative policy started taking place. We saw the anti-spirituality loss. We talked about we talked about the Indian act residential schools Indian day schools they in fact the residential schools divided people according to male and female children and anyone who didn't fit that binary understanding were forced into those situations and of course we have the 60 school the children in care that you've worked quite a bit about and of course the whole justice system that's representative of um over representation of indigenous people. So these are some of the impacts that we have in the judicial system starting from this era. Then we also have how it impacted the two spirit health of people. So we know that we talked about the heteronormative laws already the patriarchal laws the forced settlements forced settlements that we had in Nova Scotia as well. We had centralization of Migmauo that were either taken to Cigane or Eskasoni and these were um they were impactful in the in the way that people were removed from their land and how they would celebrate who they are based on where they live. um we have Migmagi but we have districts of Migmagi that's divided into all of these districts and it's according to these districts we have systems and norms that are connected to the species and the land and the um and the waterways that we would have had back then. So it's different. We have different Migmagi of Unimagi than it is with um for example the Gaspay region, right? There's two different ecosystems within the larger ecosystem. But we would have had language that represented each ecosystem. So when you're forcibly moved from one to another, then you're bringing in all these things and you're removed from that system of knowledge as well. And so all of those had impacted how we look at our world view, how we um express ourselves through language and culture, and of course how we um impact our worldview when it comes to self-determination, self-governance, and anything else. Those treaty relations were starting to be affected. The kinship models that we would have had based on that ecosystem that we've been practicing for thousands of years were impacted because of these policies. So, our sense of spirituality was also impacted. I'll give you an example. Um, I I helped produce a movie that's going to be coming out in April or May. It's called Skuadik. Skuadik means um the place of spirits. It's like our place of spirit, like where our ancestors go. It's the Milky Way, for example. That's where our ancestors are all based at. And when I was working with the director of this movie and he came to me and he said, "Could we call this movie?" I said, "Yes, of course." But they were looking at it from the place of ghosts rather than a place of spirits. And it's in fact called place of ghosts in English. We've we've toured it around um internationally uh um in film festivals and people say what's the place of ghost? So the word muja which would have meant to us spirituality in a place of spirits we were told by Christianity and Christian leaders that we can't celebrate our own sense of spirituality and that the place of spirits really is a place of ghost. It's a ghoulish place. It's hellish. It's a place of destruction. It's it's almost like hell. And so that word that we would have had as a an esteemed way of looking at our afterlife now we've started adopting ways in which to look at is the place of bad place. So the connotation over years were impacted. And so that's an example of that. But we've we've had that take place with our bodies. We've had that take place within our land. We have that take place within our language. I'll explain further. But we had all of these impacts start taking place in our communities. And then we started adopting new norms and reject our ways of thinking what gender was, what sexuality was, even what sex is. And we started adopting binary notions and understandings of what that is. Then we had two spirit people, not only what we call two spirit people in Canada, but all over um the Americas. And based on my study, they were they were the first people targeted in the communities because of uh because they were the they were the cultural knowledge holders of the community. They were the ones that passed down the laws and the language and the belief systems. So erase them would mean that we're conquering a nation a lot easier. And that's what they did brutally over and over and over throughout throughout those years. So when I was introducing this topic to the Portuguese and the um the Spanish and of course to our French and English friends here um it was part of that narrative. It was very common and so this spiritual practices started going under underground and then or just erased andor just forgotten over time. So the the true spirit identity goes underground dormant or erased. Then we started excavating and saying okay well it's not it's not erased. we know that it's there because people are who they are. And then we started looking at then how that um we should resurface that when in our belief systems, contemporary belief systems started saying that two spirit people were not only taboo but they're also perverse and that's the narrative that's been created against our people. And then we had to do a lot of un um learning and reteing a lot of this um education. And what I did is use our knowledge to do that. So I I I went into our worldview and I started analyzing through education and research what it is to be as an identity as a collective and what it means for us to celebrate identity and traditional values that we've had to understand that each individual has a spiritual right but also an equal right to be who you are. And if it doesn't follow the collective, then we restrengthen our resource to provide the person with enough resource that they have to understand then who they are, which may be different to what we believe, but we send them on a quest to find out who they are. then if they're trans or if they're um by or gay or lesbian, whatever their story is during that time, an elder would have told them, "Well, I don't know what it is, but then find out what you are or who you are and then bring it back and help us understand." And so that's exactly what we've been doing. And so we hypothetically built what that would be pre-cont. But we also know from exercises and continuity of people's ways of celebrating who they are within our living memory and collective memory of identity. Then we know that people were not persecuted in our community. They may have been teased, bullied, but they weren't outrightly um ostracized by our community and our leadership. they were not celebrated, which is the other thing that we may have celebrated people before. And so we started looking at that and seeing how that affects people's mental health and wellness. How does it affect your cultural cultural well-being? Um Albert talks about cultural starvation or spiritual starvation. When you're hungry, you can eat. When you're thirsty, you can drink water. But when you're spiritually starved, where do you get the n the nutrition for that? You get it through language and land and commitments and kinship for our people. And so we have to rebuild that starvation back into a positive um strength-based process. And so we took part in the 2sgbtqia plus um subworking group and building the cost of justice. We started looking at out of the cost of justice. The four areas we the four realms we worked with were the rights to culture to justice to health and wellness and right to safety and security. For two spirit people it was specific to the to us that we would do that because in the two TRC calls to action we were omitted. We were not included in that process and there are no outlining calls to action to support two spirit people or people who are gender diverse or non-conforming. And so and we went back to Sinclair and said, "What happened? Your own daughter's too spirited. How could you have oversight like this?" And so they brought us in. Actually, I call it snuck us in as an addendum to the process and we had meetings in Toronto after the TRC was just drafted already and we were told, "Don't worry, we'll work with you." But to this day, there is no TRC calls to action for two spirit people. So they didn't want to make the same mistake when they did the um MMIWG2S cost of justice and we were included in that process. We were part of the authors and so in the abstract of what I was trying to do with this dissertation is to look at how we can use twight seeing to inform our way of understanding what gender and sexuality is and what sex is for one part. Um because there are no terms that existed in our language. Bernie Francis who's a linguist here I spoke to and I said Bernie and it was very surreal. I was coming from IWK and I was thinking I was putting my PhD proposal together for Miguel and there was one thing that I was still missing. I felt that I was missing something and so I went for a walk at lunchtime and I walked through the public gardens and it's a summer summer day and I'm going back to IWK still immersed in my own thoughts and who do I meet up with on spring garden world? Bernie Francis. I said gilded. Like I said, what are you doing here? And he says, "Oh, I'm just playing music." He plays music often down at the waterfront. He says, "Well, this is really surreal. I'm thinking about this process and this language thing that I want to do with Miguel, and I'm missing something." And he said, "You know what? We're missing language for sex." I said, "That sounds spicy. Tell me more." And he says, "No, really, we don't have language for terms for um body parts, for example. They're there, but they've been bastardized. They've been turned into perverse words. Now, the word for vagina, for example, is turned into the equal word for the sea in English. And and for men parts as well. And so those aren't those were actual words that we would have had. They were bastardized and they were turned into perver perverse words by the Catholic religion in our communities. And so people started using them in a contemporary way in like they would in English. and that we wouldn't have that before. So, and I said, "What's an example?" So, he tells me this. Um, he says, "Okay, imagine you're a man and you're bending down and you're like this. What do you see from behind? You see two things hanging down, right?" And I said, "Yeah, testicles." And he says, "Uh, yes, but what do they look like?" I don't know. Testicles. He says, "No, there is a word for it. They're called mistial." I said, "Oh, interesting. Manganel is lady slipper." And when you look at the lady slipper from the side view, you see that there's a there's a mold that looks very much like testicles. And so we we look towards our surroundings, our land, and our environment to understand how our images and how we explain these images into body parts or anything else. They're not metaphors. they're real things that that we use to educate people. And so I started looking at this and they integrated that part into the um PhD proposal and voila, it worked. And so I've been working with our community to do that. And um and I'll explain some of the process. So as you know by now, edu the concept edu is more than a concept. It's the foundation of our way of thinking. We've always had it. It's adopt in this case is it looks it's it's a noun. They we turn it into a noun because that's how western science looks at things as if it's a theory then it should be a noun. But we would look at as educk it's an actionbased verb. How we look at things is what it is. And so what I'll be explaining from the indigenous side of this is we understand that western perspectives and indigenous knowledge work together respectfully, meaningfully to address an inquiry of some sort. Right? So that's the that's the research side of how we're looking at this in a contemporary way. That's how Mine and Elder Albert had prodded for brought it forward with Dr. Cheryl Bartlett coexistence of two knowledge sources in a co-learning journey putting two knowledges sources together and then we have an outcome more robust than what we came with but it's also a bridging of two worlds and this was critical for um as part of health justice that we would have a tool that validates our knowledge at the same level that you would have for western knowledge and science but the process I did the literature on all of the I don't know how many hundreds of articles that there are now around to seeing or edoptimum a lot of it had to say that it's a methodology it's a method it's a concept it's an abstract it's a foundation it's a theory it's a all of these things and talking to Albert over and over and over again he's been explaining Edwab Optimum is edoptim simple as it is. It is a theory. It is a method. It is both of them together and it is a collective of it and it should be respected as a whole. When western science starts looking at it as methodology and all this stuff, it's natural they do that because that's their training, right? And that doesn't make it wrong. it just doesn't make it right for us because it's supposed to be kept in its entirety as a as a wholeness of it. So once somebody speaks Migma when I say we understand it right away we don't have to explain it and we don't have to even um interpret it or translate it. When I'm working with Janine Metallic who is my supervisor at Miguel when we speak about Eduin Migma we exactly know what it is. We don't have to go through a whole literature review to explain this. And in fact, I didn't do a literature review because I explained it as a primary source of how I've integrated my work with elders and the work we've done in research as the literature to build that knowledge. Not in that traditional I'm going to, you know, have a chapter of literature review. I've integrated it and it's embedded into that. And so working with Albert, um I I've been working with Albert, well I've known Albert all my life because I grew up across the um Crane Cove Road in Esasoni and he like it's literally across the road where I grew up. Albert and Mina's family were there. I didn't look at him as an elder back then. I just looked at him as Glamus Albert and so is Medina, Auntie Mardina. And when I started working with them is when I was with um the Atlantic Policy Congress. And then when I started my masters, I started working with Mdina because she had offered to guide me along in using Twilight seeing in my my master's work to understand what is two spirit. That was the first, you know, part to that academic journey and having conversations with Mdina. Um, she had because I asked her back in 2010, could I be a two-spirited reh could I be a two-spirited research, but also could I do two scene research as a two-spirit person? And she had asked me, did you grow up picking berries? And I said, yeah. Do you speak Migma? And I said, yes. When you pick berries, did you follow instructions how to do that? You knew how to go into the morning rather than the afternoon, go pick berries. You knew where to go pick the berries. You knew what what time of the year to go pick these berries. You knew that you had to if you were going into someone's property, you were going to go talk to that person and seek per permission or or at least seek their approval after the fact. And then you've also um offered to whoever it is. And for example, I used to go pick berries in this u man's um berry patch. His name is Sulion Mosel. And Sulion used to love getting fish from us when we were fishing. I didn't like eating flatfish. So he said, "Bring them to me." Um he'd tell me if I go there in the morning, he was leave the berries over here or he'll tell me bring pie in the afternoon. So that was the protocol. These are processes that were established. And so Merdina's point was in her um Socratic way of asking me all these questions was to trigger that memory of protocols that I would have had to follow to pick berries. It wasn't just something that we did, but you knew how to do it. You knew the processes of doing it, and you knew that you weren't just picking berries to eat them, but you were picking berries for your family and for the elder that you're providing for. So she said, "That's research. That's a methodology. that's part of what you should be doing. So I wrote about it in this in this paper writing that we have to do for PhD and we started looking at it and expanding what two-eyed seeing is to understand coming out stories. Um and then I started expanding it in my research at our research I should say but I'm part of the um copiis for the pediatric pain research that we do at IWK. the word pain doesn't exist in our language in migma and um we had to explain and explore why that is so we had to understand why doesn't pain exist because we don't have that word we look at it from a verb- based word I ache I feel ache or my arm aches or my finger aches so through twitzing and edu we went back to the community and navigated that communication process and how that's influenced how pain is perceived Now, not only from a mental and a physical perspective, but also including emotional and spiritual aspects. So, we're expanding on these understandings based on our indigenous ways of looking at life on the way knowledge and expanding it for western frameworks. So the paper that I presented on what is two spirit is based on um a two I seeing account of that and going back to approximately 15 years of looking at what identity is from complex understandings from individual to collective and the continuation of what gender and sexuality and the continuity of what it means to be twospirited in their process. There's no static understanding of what identity is. the only static identity we have is that she's but everything else can be added to that and so that helped to understand that part and then I went back to eduum and I started looking at what the sources what are the primary sources of our knowledge and so people call them methods or or people call them methodology I don't call them that they're primary sources of how and who and where and the pro process in which we think the thinking process is an active that's individual and collective at the same time that thinking process that I speak in MIGMA is reflective of a journey of knowledge that's continuous and moving forward these are very philosophical foundations but we understand that our language is that that it's continuous when you're speaking it because it's action based it's moving in constant motion so therefore it's always nonlinear. It's it's cyclical and we go back to this source of that as we move forward. So when we're explaining the cultural foundations of our thought processes, we have to understand the fact that what I'm sharing right now is just an atom of a continuity of a system of knowledge breakdowns that we have and norms and those norms build into a collective framework of thought. And so I explained that in this paper and then remember I said earlier there was indigenous knowledge and the western perspectives. So I went back and started looking at this since 2018 working with our elders and our knowledge carriers, our linguists, our practitioners, clinicians, researchers, educators. Everybody's provided a source to come up with this model which is the the source of our knowledge. So deopg means how we look at it. This is the strength of what being is this is the strength of being migma. This is our cultural knowledge if you will put into this model. So we have which is language is how I am um migma de is how we are acting as migma and how we think in migma and then it works outwards. So we have our you know the seven sacred teachings for example we have here um how we transmit knowledge is how we speak it in collectives um in is the way we um understand the ability to understand our language and transform it into codes of thought and we got we got we got is how I write it or how I transmit it in communication Those are examples how we do it. And it goes to the you know the next part how one speaks it out that means how one questions things and it goes on and so we're speaking it outwards as well what we're communicating. So these are all the processes in which we communicate and build knowledge and those are the strengths of where our knowledge comes from. And so part of it can be elders, wisdom holders. Part of it is through ceremonies and cultural activities. Other things are things that we do as in you know you specify knowledge like we do in um here like you're all lawyers or maybe studying law. But then you have specifications of law. And so we have people with those specifications. people that know about water, about fishes, about land, about forests. So we have those distinctions of knowledge. Not every, not one person has all this knowledge. And it's the same in society. There's no one person that has all the knowledge of everything. So we have divisions of that. And so then we have the outer layers which is our understanding of what Migma is. is not only the land that we live on. It includes our belief systems through our creator which is over here what I said earlier our spiritual world which is our earth and migmagi is our land is our sun is our moon it's all of it is migmagi and it's the sources of that that we understand it's interrelated and so I explained this in this paper took forever But um because it's so much easier if I did it in Migma and I did it with in Migma. The difficulty was trying to get it and put it into words that are foreign to our language. And so as an action verb I could say is the first line how I see it from a two-eyed seeing part. That's the action of how I see two seeing right. But then let's say I'm going all the way down. Gilo edopimo how you see it how you see twit seeing. And so in the paper I do expand on how that is. We have edoptim as a common everyday word that we would have seen and when I would have said um I'm seeing two things. I'm seeing your perspective on something and your perspective on something. That's aduptum. That's me looking at it from two angles. Right? But I could also go and what Merdina and and and Albert had gifted us is to use this f um foundation of knowledge to understand that we as Nigma have also the ability to understand through our world view our science and integrate other world views to understand that at the same time it can also be applied in a way that myself as Migma or I can apply it with wooig which are which is our nation next door and I'm seeing it from two seeing as well from two nations that are different it could be two nations that are even different from Canada it could be us with the lakota down south so it's two seeing um but in the pure sense of what Merdina and Albert had thought about was the signs that we use as the western science and migma signs and we're looking at it that way But it can be applied many different ways and that's the point that I you know we expand on the understanding for that. So how do we make um pathways into addressing cost to justice using what we've learned twice seeing and of course the research that we've gotten um into looking at. We started having like through culture I won't go through every single one but let's say for culture we started looking at hosting regional gatherings. We needed place, space, and time to celebrate who we are as two spirit people. Reconnect people to the actual ceremony. When people say, "How do you develop two spirit ceremonies?" I said, "Well, if you're two spirit and if you're doing a ceremony, that's it. It doesn't have to be something that you do a whole recipe card around and you have to do it this way and follow all these protocols." No, you could be the two spirit person leading that ceremony that becomes two-spirited. Um and so you know people often trip up against um too much process and protocol when it comes to different things. But with your own and you have the ability to apply this knowledge and transmitted and transfer it into other knowledge sources then you're making that happen. Right? The problem really is people getting stuck with who did what? How do I copyright that? And how do I turn that into something that I own? Um, that image that I produced is I produced the image because I use the diagrams and the knowledge to put into it. But it's not my knowledge. It's our knowledge. I can't copyright that. I can copyright the image and the colors that I use on it and the the font that I use on the image. I can do that, but I can't copyright that knowledge. It's ours. So those are some of the examples we're looking at. So making pathways um for cost to justice the actioning of calls to justice again we trip on the prescriptive process because government wants us to do it this way and check off that you've done that we put money into it the resources into it and the um and the explanation of that through a proposal. Then there's an evaluative process with that checked off. No, we just live it. We have to live cost of justice and then and make sure that we implement those in every way possible. So looking at this image again the two spirits um when I was looking at what identity is and identity can be very complex. We're looking at identity from an indigenous identity. We are exploring a proposal here to build a policy on what is indigenous and making sure that we get it right in the best way possible. But when we're looking at identity again, we're looking at identity from a very linear approach quite often and a very um static approach. Identity is always in flux. According to MiGMA, you're MIGMA first. That's the most important thing. If you can get that right, then you're fine. Everything else comes into you know understanding your identity is in flux, your gender in flux, your sexuality is in flux, combination of those and your sex is in flux. There's no one person that when you're 20, you're going to be the exact same person when you're 40. There's no such thing physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. And if you can tell me and proved me wrong, please do so because we've never seen it. And uh if we can come up with that magic pill, be great. Be great. We want to look 20 forever. Um so we have this way of doing writing system called gongujigo and gongujigo is sucker fish um you know sucker fish that are on the um floor bed of the ocean and they move around and they lead these symbols or pathways and all that. That's kuji that's suckerfish writing. And so Michelle Siloy from UG Alma talks about how we used um this system of writing on birch barks or etching on different trees or rocks or different things and it was to leave messages to the to the next person you know this is the resource here for example um so that's one way of explanation so I started looking at two um spirited as meaning the we found the the image for spirit which is the the images that you see on here are like three spirits in that case, but we turn it into this image, more modern um which really is the same thing. Uh it's the ungendered realm of a of an entity that doesn't have a me female or male entity. It's just is. It's a it's an identity and there's a center because we all believe in a center of yourself. But then we have the stem going down that connects to the land or the water. And then the you know this is the current part of the entity. And then we have these antenna we call them that reach out to the to the world beyond us. And our understanding of spirit from a two spirit perspective is to look at the symbol as an entity. It's unseen if it's gendered. Therefore, we understand it's ungendered and it's non-binary. We also know it's a cultural image with a body, but also a spirit understanding there's a realm to the outer world. And this maintains the sense of identity of who we are as spirits. So the Catholic, the Catholic view of spirit was like the mind, body, spirit. and they started using and adopted our view of that and implemented into Catholicism and into the writings of that. Um, that's fine. But we say we know that that's still a spirit image of an entity that's that what we would understand as the realm of the spirit inside you. How does that lead to what we're talking about here? See these images here? You know what they are. Remember I was talking to you about Bernie saying we don't have language around body parts. Part of health justice is to understand the self-determination of our body. So we're doing work to understand language and bring it back to what the terms of the body are. And so there was a there was really a fun way of looking at using twowit seeing to understand this because in two-ight seeing we have the western way of looking at these body parts and we have the absolute way that we have with the naked eye of looking at the body parts. So through our science we would have understood that bodies would have had names and organs would have had names visible to the eye but we wouldn't have known these parts of the body at the molecular level until we saw um microbiology take place and from that we know that there are names that were brought forward that's why we have the word uh fallopian we that's not a word in migm it wouldn't have existed And so then we use our contemporary signs and look at what that means. So I went to the elders and I said, "Okay, help me with these uh images." And it was really shy. Oh, I was shy talking to the elders. Give me an explanation what the vagina is and the parts of the vagina. I was very uncomfortable, but we had to make it as normal as possible. And they said, "If you can make the language be respectful for an 80year-old and for a four-year-old, then you're on good terms." And so that that's the way we looked at it. And so for the word fallopian tubes for example, we started using twighting saying okay we don't have a word for it from our old language because we would have seen this in the naked eye but we know what the function is and through that we can name it now. And so when you look at it it says don way sabas that just means can anyone guess what that may mean? It's where the eggs go by literally is what it means. And so we were looking at it that way and that's how they they explained it. The uterus for examp or the cervix for example um the cervix they call it enkodigan that means the part that plugs that area. So the cervix acts as a a a canal for birth but during pregnancy it prevents the baby from falling through. So it plugs that area and so they used ink again in that sense to keep the baby in in in the the womb. And so that's how we came up with these words through edu. We did the same thing for um the parts of the body as well like for prostate for the seminal vesicles. Those are the words that we looked at and what they did for so we know the word for um for example is sperm that's something visual you could see. So when you look at the word for seminal vesicle it's where the sperm comes from and so that's how they translated and that's how we were able to use it and introduce it. So we had elders look at these words. It was exciting for me to come up with these words again because we're reintroducing all this language back to the uh community and that's an opportunity for us to rebuild what is sexual education. What we can introduce um sexual health to our young people and to elders. We can also look at um sexual health and prevention of STDIS for example through our understanding through language. And we're looking at all of these thanks to Esson Health Center and the elders in Escason that have been providing us with guidance and we came up with these um terms. So that's my I need to defend this thesis. Um I already defended with our community. That's that's as far as I'm concerned that's the most important thing to me. The bonus would be to get to PhD. The frameworks of hope we use for justice for us right now for two spirit people are the current treaties we have the friendship treaties that we have here the peace and friendship treaty here in Migmagi but we also have the other treaties that exist we have the truth truth and reconciliate calls to action they're still important documents because it gives frameworks for others to act on even though there's an omission for two spirit people and the United Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous also is a main framework of thought and and it's a human's rightsbased process that we can go back and look at and of course the MMIWG2 West calls to justice. So those those are the big frameworks we're working with when it comes to this and I and I um use those frameworks in response to the work I'm doing for my research is to look at how we can do that. And of course, the other outcome for this is to have new terms for two spirit, lesbian, gay, and bisexual. The word rolls right off your tongue. See that? Repeat it. Let's Let's break it down and practice it. >> Edi. So, I'll do it in three, two, one. Edi, I'll have you practice. Um, so we have that word and we introduced it big and boldly at the Junos. So at the Junos um Anita Lambbeach who's a medical student here and myself had done the opening ceremony at the um at the Junos and we stood up there and said we are two spirit people. We said and we did it we did it very bold and very large and people in our community said I've never heard that word but we had already the blessing of the community that we could use from the elders. They said the process was that almost done. The the process was to introduce it. It has to be verified by validated by three or four elders language experts and then we consult with our two spirit community if it was okay to use that word. It made sense to them. Then we throw it right to the junos and introduce it then. So it's out there. Um the other the other word would be for all of the terms for two spirit, lesbian, gay and bisexual like that be the term but our language is rich and we could further break it down to mean bisexual, gay and lesbian. And so Bernie Francis and other elders had helped me do that. So for example, lesbian is in English. You often hear men who have sex with men or women who have sex with women. Well, in this case, it's not like that. We're saying that women who have relationships with women or women who love women. We didn't base it on we're not basing it on what they do in the bedroom. We're basing it on how they should be loving each other is basically what the relationship is. The ideal is to love each other. The ideal is not to have sex with each other, which in English says men who have sex with men. That's the ideal. I don't know. But that's one identifier. And of course, we have ediex very similar. Edui is the plural plural part of understanding what that means. And um but it doesn't mean dual. it can mean more than two right so I asked the elder can I use that term for pansexual as well and they said sure but they said just use aduji jinug in that sense so that's how we came up with these terms and this is where we are with this process why is this important because it really brings back what reconciliation of language and our culture beliefs are and how we celebrate what continuity is and we introduce this back to Esasononia with these kids for example who are celebrating their identity in in the way that they look at it and so they adopt ways in which um pride colors can be uh integrated into that but they also celebrated it in the ways in which they did you know on that day they were beading they were drumming they were doing ceremony and dancing not just wearing these colors but actually celebrating what two spirit identity would be and that's where we are with this idea thank Thank you. >> Thank you so much, John. We have time at least 10 minutes for questions and discussion. >> Sure, >> feel free. >> Is there anything that confused you? First of all, what do you think? Did it make sense what we're talking about? Do you have a bigger understanding or a wider understanding what Edui is and what edu is? So the idea is that we take adoptim and we apply to social justice. We apply to legal frameworks. We apply it to human rights. Somebody had asked me the other day, how can we expand on the understanding what human rights is? And I said, well, first of all, we are very naive to think that human rights should only be human. It should be um more universal and inclusive of we won't exist as humans if we didn't have the rights protected of our forests and our waters and our animals and our plants. So it's our sense of arrogance and entitlement that we use human as the main frame of thought when it comes to rights. That's only one component and we can't exist without the other components. So we have to look at human rights from that spiritual, mental, physical and emotional views. But not only from a human perspective, we have to look at it from a kinship perspective. It should be kinship of rights really and how we celebrate the rights of everything around us that'll determine the well-being of our own existence. We have the um privilege of having language and all these ways of um communicating this. But if we listen hard enough to people around us, to our land around us, to our waters around us, and to the plants around us, then we should be able to better represent in kinship their rights as well. When it comes to social justice and and and that is where we need to move towards when it comes to looking at this. >> I had a question. Um earlier in the presentation, you had there was an acronym. It was like MM2 and couple of I was just wondering if you could go back to that explain what that was. It was quite earlier on. >> Yes. >> Which one? The MMIWG2S LGBTQQIA plus. >> I was just wondering what that meant. >> Um the MMIWG is missing and murdered women and two spirited folks. Right. That's that part. The two SLGBTQIA+ is something that um is represent the acronym. So the two-spirited, lesbian, gay, um by trans, queer, questioning, interex, and asexual plus represents others. I'll share something really quickly. 2S, the the 2S at the beginning of the acronym is because of me and our organization here in in Atlantic, Canada. Um, back in 2015, we hosted the uh, Interp Pride here in Halifax. And at Inter Pride here, they had LGBTQ2 at the end. And we often said historically um, we've been here since time in memorial. And we understood and respect the fact that LGBTQL at the beginning was to honor lesbians that have protected gay people during HIV and the process by which they were the caretakers in a time that was so atrocious. But we also were there as two spirit people. And so I I presented it to the enterprise here and I said we should move the two to the front of the um acronym. And so at that time, Halifax Pride said yes. The Pride organizations around here said yes. And um and we started doing it from here in Nova Scotia, from here in Halifax, 2S LGBTQ. And then we lobbyed all those years since 2015 until 2023 when finally government, federal government puts officially at the beginning of the acronym. And it's at the beginning of the acronym now. So that whole acronym is MMI, MMIWG, like the missing and murdered women and girls, twospirited, and then the rest is the acronym for the two spirit community. I sometimes just call it 2SQ. In some of the writing, I just put 2SQ plus instead of going through the whole um acronym part. But that's the part that we always get confused about. And we say edu is the word that represents all of the 2S LGBTQQIA plus. We say, but we also say this because it's it'd be almost redundant to explain it in every single context, but we also understand that people need that. Um, and and for us, we of course for the two spirit community, we understand that people have ways in which they um present themselves. And so, uh, people have been impacted in their language capacity. I speak Migma and I'll always protect that. That's the best way to protect our our um our protocols and our data and our knowledge sources is to keep it in our language in our own body rather than putting it in here where it can be breached. And so we tell our people we have to really you know protect our languages to do that and then make sure that people understand that our through our languages is the best way to you know express who you are. Um, and those terms, gay, lesbian, by they're static. And people often take those on as their identity first rather than take on their identity as as indigenous. And so we say, no, it's indigenous first. It's first, it's Migma first, then the other parts are components to who your identity is. Mhm. >> So, just want to start by saying how uh how moved I am as well as instructed I am by the by both the content and the way that you've presented today. I think it's just been fabulous and an illustration of what uh what you are describing to us as to seeing. Um and one thing I take away from your uh presentation is this idea of love. And I don't want to be reductive in saying that. Uh but there's a couple questions that I have uh around kind of the challenges and the opportunities of advancing the the work that you have like presented to us. And the first is around your your own involvement in health research. And I know you have this, you know, big grant that you're involved in with other people from Nova Scotia Research Research Nova Scotia. Uh, and the thing that really stuck with me earlier, you were talking about pain and also all kinds of different forms of pain. Uh, but you mentioned that pain was like understood through the words I ache, something like that. >> And then, uh, and then I was thinking how, you know, like you've been trying to do this constructive this strengthbased research. So something like pain is obvious, you know, it's like not a great place to be often. Uh but I ache makes me also think of desire like you know the I ache has those two resonances at least in the English uh translations and I just put that as kind of like a background to invite you to to say a little bit about that research that you're doing the Nova Scotia research and how you met maybe challenges as well as opportunities to make that strength spaced in the way that you want. So maybe I'll pause with that one. Had another one, but I want to go on. >> Weld the title that we had before and you said explain what is and I didn't want to like just translated. Weldi is wellness, well-being. It's about the integrated um understanding of of being at a good place within your own space, within your own time. Weldi is is achievable. And so we always had welloi and we still have Wordi. Um but the narrative around indigenous health and indigenous wellness has been taken over by first nation inwood health. It's been taken over by health Canada, stewarded by federal government and to a certain degree by provincial. And so they've always looked at our wellness from a negative deficit perspective. What's wrong with the levels of mental health? What's with the levels of diabetes? The cancer rates are growing in the indigenous population. the suicide rates are this and this and this. It's a constant of that. And so when we look at Welodi and we're looking at changing the narrative that what we have to look at is how we are well and understand what wellness is from our perspective. Language connection to land, landbased our our collective kinship relationships that we have that make us survive and not only survive but thrive. That's us switching the narrative and making sure that we dictate how that is. I can get money really easily by government by identifying um the cancer rates in Nova Scotia are very high in the Nova Scotia community. Our white savior aspect of Canada is to address that by saying let's throw resources to it so we can address that issue. They will never give us money if we said we're doing really well in Eskason with our language. Therefore, I need $10 million to continue preserving that. I'll never get the money if I said there's people committing suicide in my community because language has been impacted because of TRC because of Indian residential schools and mental health is increasing then they'll throw the money in. That's how it operates. And so we've been conditioned to do that. Why does law even exist? Because of the mental deficit narrative that exists of what's wrong with our world rather than what's just in our world. And that is part of the process that we're trying to do is build a narrative of healing and a narrative of wellness that we can achieve healing if we implement these actions by which MIGMA show us what the way it is and use our clinical ways of doing it at the same time. We've seen many many years and decades throwing pharmaceutical products to our community hasn't helped right. it hasn't helped even our mainstream Canadian population. So, we have to look at different ways of addressing these and but it really starts with resetting how we think about what wellness is. And this is a long systemic undercurrent because it's we're designed to look at what's wrong with our world and that's the same thing that's wrong with Nova Scotia. What's wrong with our justice system? What's wrong with our educational system? It's all of those. And then we could look at it from welloi perspective and look at the ideal and work towards it. That's how we should be looking at it. That's why we look at it that way. >> Thank you so much. I know we're coming near the end of our time, but there was a question. Do do you want to just say what? >> Sure. >> Thank you. This was fantastic. Um really great. I'm curious. I And you found the word that I was looking for. You started off talking and how your approach to things were in a constructive way where it's not bad and negative the way things have been changed into. Yet I found it interesting on your uh slide where you looked at the four parts of it was health and culture and whatnot. you had education on anti-gay, anti- anti why anti why not the positive like put that in a positive context because again by talking and I education is part of what I do um and training I find the words are so important in the mindset and as soon as you see ante it's reinforcing either the pain and the angst and the whatnot that it caused by being inflicted and and a part of the the target of that or those who maybe don't appreciate what they're doing get hostile because you're you're inflicting something on negative terms. >> Yeah. And those terms are not reflective of us. It's reflective of models that are out there. >> Um and so we were just using those models because of what >> what pays for the programming. Um, and even here at Dal, I'm I'm one of the authors of the current cultural safety course that is done through health. And um, and when I was having these conversations here at Dal and I had been working with our elders and our clinicians across the region to understand what cultural safety is, it was really hard and I had a lot of resistance from Delhausy leadership to even say the word racist. They said we can't look at racism in the um in the coursework because it'll I don't know people would be shocked by it or whatever. There was a there's an institutional barrier here to even look at racism to your wording. And so I said to folks, I said, "Okay, well, I'll go back to our leaders and I'll say Dalhausy doesn't want to look at racism because it's too hard to have that conversation. The fragility we have institutionally, systemically, and nationally is very real. And how do we work with that? Like it's language. It's powerful. But we also can have power through education to change that. And we have to confront it. Somebody said to me, well, why are you looking at pain then for research? We were not looking at pain as in you know the the the the the needles and the the the causes of pain for children. We were trying to build a knowledge and and and an awareness and a language around what pain is so we can make communication a lot better. And so we have to use the same language and flip it around. And so it is part of the process and it is very challenging to you know change mindsets around it takes a while. It's very systemic and it's very long long long process and thankfully we've seen we're doing the um there we we have a pre-licenture course here at Dal but we've designed a post-licensure course that we developed for IWK and now we've expanded across the province to include physicians and other areas and so we're looking at the behavioral changes that are happening for health care uh clinicians to understand what indigenous And no health is and once we have that once we start saying those words and not be afraid to say those words then it it becomes easier to have that communication and part of that problem to be addressed but if we can't say the word how are we going to address it that was some of the challenges we had before all right thank you very much EVERYBODY >> I'm just going to say a couple couple words Um, thank you. I really can't say enough. And I'm I'm hoping that this is just the start of uh more conversations. And it's true. When when you gave me your title originally, I got back back to John and said, "I don't know. Do you should we put a you know, you have a word and then you have a colon and then you have kind of like more on the word." And John was kind of like, "Nope, this is my title." And I just love how it's like an invitation, right, to come and engage and be uh educated uh around so that we can start to engage in two-eyed seeing in a way that is more um like legitimately open and engaging as opposed to expecting you know all the work to be done on the other side. So, uh, again, I just want to be, uh, uh, I speak also for my colleague Naomi, who had an unavoidable other thing that she delayed as long as possible before having to go, uh, for that. But I know that both the chancellor's chair and us at the Health Justice Institute, you know, are so grateful um, for this start of a conversation. I want to also just mention that uh, our next uh, seminar lecture is two weeks from now, which is pretty quick because we have reading week just coming up. It's February 27th and it's uh Canada's federal housing advocate Marie Jose P who is I mean this is a big deal that we have the federal housing advocate coming to speak to us. You might know that it's a position created under legislation and they make recommendations to the federal government around the right to housing uh and they do sort of very specific issues based uh and thematic reports each year and they're spending some time here in Atlantic Canada to kind of talk to people and look around and and learn uh and give this lecture to us. So, I encourage you to really talk it up and bring people out because uh we want to make sure that um the many voices of folks differentially impacted by homelessness and uh and in you know, search of the right to housing here in Atlantic Canada uh that those voices are are represented. Um and again, that'll be the start of our conversation. So, that's February 27th. Please come on out and uh without further ado, please join me once again in a warm thank you to John. >> Thank you.