Increasingly, fisheries researchers and managers seek or are compelled to “bridge” Indigenous knowledge systems with Western scientific approaches to understanding and governing fisheries. Here, we will move beyond the all-too-common narrative about integrating or incorporating (too often used as euphemisms for assimilating) other knowledge systems into Western science, instead building an ethic of knowledge coexistence and complementarity in knowledge generation using Two-Eyed Seeing as a guiding framework.
Two-Eyed Seeing (Etuaptmumk in Mi’kmaw) embraces “learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, and from the other eye with the strengths of mainstream knowledges and ways of knowing, and to use both these eyes together, for the benefit of all”, as envisaged by Mi’kmaw Elder Dr. Albert Marshall.
Speaker
Dr. Andrea Reid, incoming Assistant Professor, Indigenous Fisheries, UBC Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries