Thank you very much for the opportunity to say a few words. I hope to introduce something new to the conversation, as you've been listening to a number of witnesses over the course of the development of this process.

I'm with an organization called Indspire. We are an indigenous organization that funds indigenous college, university and trade students by raising money from the private sector and government. For 32 years now, we've been doing this kind of work—identifying excellence in our community—and we have funded some 125,000 students. After three decades of this, we know a bit about what students are moving towards, what they're studying in the post-secondary environment and how often they encounter indigenous knowledge over the course of that process.

As a current professor at the University of Toronto and a former university administrator, I think this process of somehow integrating western science and indigenous knowledge, of having them come together, is analogous to the decade-long struggle for institutions to “indigenize”, especially institutions of higher learning. I've been talking about indigenization now for quite some time, both in terms of how institutions can become more indigenous in practice and in terms of the people who attend them.

These institutions are very good at a couple of things.

The first thing they're very good at is attracting more people who are indigenous to what is essentially a western network of institutions. There has been a significant increase in indigenous people in the post-secondary environment. You'll also find that we are increasing, albeit slowly, the number of professors in the environment, but it's still at a very low number.

The other thing institutions are very good at is place-making in cultural supports. There are indigenous centres in every university and college. I think this is a very comfortable, tried and true way of expressing a desire to attract indigenous people and make them feel welcome in a western institution.

One thing we are not good at is integrating curricula. I think this is probably most germane to the work you're doing. What we are attempting to do, in my view, in the university and college system is to take what are essentially western methodologies in science programs and arts programs and sprinkle them with indigenous stories and points of view, rather than see a full coming together of two completely different systems.

I would emphasize three points in this process.

The first is the importance of partnership development versus integration into what is already a western process. I'm sure this is the number one point you've heard since you began to see witnesses. The idea here is not to simply take what you perceive to be—or what communities have given to you as—indigenous knowledge and make it fit within a western construct. What we're saying here is that there are two parallel lenses. It's not necessarily two different types of knowledge, at the end of the day, but two different lenses through which this knowledge is seen and developed. These two types of knowledge should form a partnership, rather than us sprinkling one amidst the other.

The second is institution building. There's an old saying that when indigenous people have troubles, we get programs, and when non-indigenous people have troubles, they get institutions. Institutions have a way of becoming places where we can gain a better understanding of fundamental knowledge and information and where we can create advocacy programs for that knowledge. I would recommend that if you are to look seriously at indigenous knowledges and where they stand within the scientific world, help create institutions run by and for indigenous people that allow our understanding of those indigenous knowledges to flourish.

Lastly, language—

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