Derek Armstrong (politician)

Transcription

(Music) (Okanagan) I'm giving you my greetings in my indigenous Okanagan language. I'm saying hello world, and I'm also saying in my language that everything that has gone on before this moment is as it is. That's what white means in our language. So we start a greeting that way meaning we have the opportunity for everything to change from here on and where that bridge between what already is and what could be. So this is a wonderful event, I think to talk about an idea that I think might be helpful. And I talk about it in terms of indigeneity rather than indigenousness which politically you could say I am part of the indigenous people of this area. So I have some rights and so on. But that's not what I'm going to be talking about. I'm going to be talking about this issue that David Suzuki talked about in this statement. We know that all of the things that have confronted us as human beings [have] caused us to create different ways of dealing with our comfort. Dealing with our understanding of how we could use our creativity to make things better for us. So that we might be able to survive in the way humans survive. Well, this is the outcome of that. We are human. And having said that, we are also part of the Earth, so what does that mean? That's one of the questions that I'm going to be looking at in this talk because I think the idea of indigeneity might have something to do with questioning our ethics as human beings. The idea that the kind of development that we've been engaged in is neither good or bad, it's human. It's who we are. It's what we were hardwired to do. It's the gift that we have. The gift that we have that pushes us to innovation, that pushes us to create the things that we have created to move the things that create our societies, that we become within our cultures. That we understand ourselves as in terms of how we shape our values and how we care about those values, how we maintain those values and how we move those values into the way that we live our daily lives. So, we end up with these kinds of things that we can see here in terms of the way that we have developed. One of the people that I studied toward my dissertation in environmental ethics was the green economist Herman Daly. Of course I also did a lot of studying of indigenous thought in terms of environmental ethics. But one of the things that he said, really made a lot of sense to me -- a lot of things he said, actually made a lot of sense to me -- was that the idea of wealth the idea of what we value, and why wealth is important to us. What is wealth and how important it is to us as human beings can mean a lot of different things in a lot of different ways but it comes down to the idea that he expressed in beyond growth that, that wealth is really just an idea. Wealth is something that we've constructed, it's not anything real. The capital that we've constructed that we use as wealth, that moves this kind of development is really a flawed model. When you think about capital, and others have said this, so I'm not new in saying this -- when you think about capital, the one thing you don't do, if you're a good economist, is spend your capital, because inevitably it's going to be gone. Every economist knows that, so if you think about the environment, the natural resources, nature's capital, everything that we use comes from nature, it is the capital, which fuels the wealth which, which we use and develop and create into these abstract ideas of wealth. It actually all comes from what is, what is there, what has been put there. And it becomes structured into the way we do things as dependencies. Socially structured dependencies, and for some of us individual dependencies, addictions, in other words. And in a lot of ways you can think about social dependencies as massive addiction. When I think about that I think about some of the things that [are] pushing that forward. And if you think about what we're confronted with, what we have been confronted with, globally, that indigenous peoples -- and I'm not talking about Native Americans -- I'm talking about indigenous peoples all over the world, including your ancestors. That the living ecosystems that have been subsumed as a result of the way that we've structured dependencies in the way that we live and the comfort things that we have devised for ourselves. Innovations that we've created as human beings come down to the things that we value, and how we value them. Jerry Mandarin, Paradigm Wars did a lot of work looking at that polarization, that sort of exemplifies what's happening today. And it isn't happening just to indigenous peoples, although that's where some of the most blatant injustices are taking place. But all communities, all people are affected by the things that are happening in terms of globalization, the global competition that's taking place. That swallowing up, not only the living ecosystems out there in the environment, but the living ecosystems within our bodies. In terms of the way that our bodies have to deal with health and the issues that [are] rampant in terms of the systems in our minds. The social psychosis that's in place now in many of our communities, that's eating up our people in addictions and in all kinds of dysfunctions in our community so that our jails and all of our social institutions are unable to deal with those things. We know about those things, that's in front of us, that's confronting us. But it comes down to this question, this question here: Can sustainable practices harmonize with trade and increase consumption? And I think that, to me, is a question that isn't being looked at in terms of what we need to broaden our scope out in looking at. When we simply look at development, when we look at these issues here that TED has outlined for instance, all of those matter. All of those, every one of those symbols in the acronym matter to us as people. So we have to earnestly deal with the question, we can't just deal with the idea that capitalization is the problem, capital growth is the problem. Everyone is the problem, and the way we do things is the problem. Being human is the problem. (Laughter) So, that's really what I'm getting at here is that earnestly moving beyond the idea of human-centric sustainability. Part of it is that we think about sustainability in terms of what we need as human beings to sustain us, at the expense of every other living thing. We can move other living things out of the way. In fact we can say goodbye to them forever, in terms of the biology on the planet. This area is a good example we're the hot spot in Canada, as Brian has mentioned. That is a microcosm of all the things that are going on in the rest of the world in terms of all kinds of species that are endangered or that have already been wiped out. And so if we think about our social ethic we cannot just think about the human in that equation, and we have to think about how our values are structured that way, in terms of human-centric values in these acronyms here. So the idea in my mind that I want to talk about mostly today, or make a point about today, is re-indigenization. That re-indigenization isn't really about anything except place. When we think about place, what does indigenous mean? What does it mean beyond the political frameworks that everybody situated around it? Indigenous means adaption over a long period to the realities of that place, the conditions of that place. So, everything that lives in that place adapts itself. In other words, learns how to get along with each other and becomes interdependent with every other living thing, reciprocity happens. So when we're talking about indigenizing the peoples of the planet -- if you take the political stuff out of it, I was going to use another acronym there. If you take the political stuff out of the equation then -- and that's also a big part of the problem -- then we can talk about what we need to think about in terms of the human as a perfectly integrated part of nature. How could we achieve that? Well we have the most wonderful tool. We have the most wonderful tool that everyone here has been displaying and showing and what's created the problem in the first place. That wonderful tool. We have that! So, but it requires knowledge, not knowledge in every specific place. That's what indigenous means, every specific place is different than every other place and each specific place has to have its own understanding of how we have to live in that place, how we have to adapt to that place. So our life practices have to be situated toward what that specific place means. We as indigenous peoples have been around to figure that out, for a bit. It doesn't mean, like she said, we don't have to go back to our Tepees or our underground houses. But the principles and some of the knowledges in terms of systems thinking, in terms of applications as well as in terms of how community and society can embed those values and transfer those values to each succeeding generation, needs to be rethought. How we might shape that in each other? How we might foster that? How we might build those practices in each place? Diversity is one of the strongest things that we have to depend on in terms of survival. We're not practicing that, we're trying to create a big monoculture that's devouring everything. Diversity is important, and we're just beginning to see the edge of how important that diversity is in terms of knowledge. The collaborations with indigenous peoples, collaboration that this institute is engaged in. The development of programming that will engage traditional ecological knowledge, for instance, is an area that we're exploring, much needed and is being looked at all over the world as a way to be able to indigenize the way that we do things to local communities to be able to shift education, social institutions, shift laws and shift management and political structures the way that they need to be in order to fit that specific area is really for me an exciting idea. The idea if we could move on here, in my mind is looking at the indigeneity as a guide if we are looking at a specific area, a local area then if we think about, what is indigenous to this area? What are the things that we need to do to maintain the indigenous life forms that are here? How do we need to behave? So in our traditional Okinagan way of dialoguing the onus is on us to understand and to have knowledge. If you ask me, we don't have a lot of knowledge. We're pretty ignorant, in all of our education systems in that aspect. So we need to develop knowledge systems that look at how we manage things at the local level, at the very specific places we're occupying and we're living. It doesn't mean that you have to stay here but it means that each place should form it's own understanding of how we should be there. So that means all those living things, all those things that have life there, that we have to have reverence toward, that we have to have respect toward. That we have to look at in a different way, rather than being afraid of them. Shooing them out of the way. So that we can put concrete there. All of those things are beautiful. All of those things are wonderful. All of those things are what gave every one of us, the lifeblood that we have over those 3.8 billion years to be here. We carry everything that they have inside of them in our own genes, in our own blood systems, in our breath. Everything we breathe, everything that we see is a result of all those living things. To have that reverence, to understand that in each local place is necessary or we're not going to be able to do this. But society doesn't change because you tell people to stop. People don't stop doing things just because they know they need to stop doing it, if they don't have a way to stop doing it. So these kinds of talks, these talks, in this institution are critically important at this time. We need to be able to dream what can be done, given the mind, given the technology, given the wonderful tools that we have. We need to be able to change back to restoring it without throwing the things away that are wonderful. The things that we as human beings require for our being. But we also need to be able to build and restore what we've destroyed, because our lives are on that same edge. Looking at some of the work that we have accomplished, this is an example here, all kinds of technology, all kinds of academia, all kinds of engineering went into this project to restore the Okanagan saki into the upper part up to Okanagan Falls. Collaborations between the US, between the Public Utilities Department in Washington State, between the Okanagan Nation, between all the academics in this area and Department of Fisheries and Oceans, all of those fancy technologies and things can work together, can collaborate together. It came with one idea, one of our chiefs said, "Well, what's the matter with us putting them back into the river? Aren't we smart enough to do that?" I think we are. I think we're smart enough to do anything. And I think we can restore that kind of value. I think we need to just restore that kind of value into all of our lives. Thank you all. (Applause)