Nuanced. - 49. Dr. Dara Kelly: Indigenous Economics, Money & Potlatches

Episode Date: March 28, 2022

Aaron and Dr. Dara Kelly delve into the functioning of Indigenous finance prior to colonization, with a specific focus on the economic and leadership aspects of potlatches. Dr. Kelly enlightens the listeners on the intricate relationship between Indigenous culture and the concept of money.Dara Kelly is an Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University's Beedie School of Business. She is from the Leq’á:mel First Nation, part of the Stó:lō Coast Salish. Dara earned her Doctor of Philosophy in Commerce from The University of Auckland Business School in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Her doctoral research focused on the Coast Salish economy of affection, examining concepts of freedom, unfreedom, wealth, and reciprocity within Coast Salish philosophy. She conducted the research using methodologies derived from Coast Salish philosophy, protocols, and worldview.Dara also holds a Master of Commerce from The University of Auckland Business School, where her thesis explored feminine ancestral leadership with Māori business leaders. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts from the University of British Columbia (UBC). Dara has worked as a researcher at the Mira Szászy Research Centre for Māori and Pacific Economic Development at The University of Auckland Business School and has professional experience in leadership development programming.This episode is sponsored by the Real Estate Foundation of BC. Learn more about the REFBC by visiting: https://www.refbc.com/Send us a textSupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

This episode is sponsored by the Real Estate Foundation of BC. REFBC is a philanthropic organization that supports sustainable, equitable, and socially just relationships with land and water. Learn more about the foundation's grants and initiatives at REFBC.com. So, Aesweil, Tolitzil, Kuala Kamel, Talitsilkawai-A-A-A-Lis, Darrakeli-Keli-Til-Squihalis, Dara Kelly, Tilsquih, Quikwihas, Tilsquih. So, welcome, it's a good day. My name's Dara Kelly, and I come from La Camel, and I carry a name Quikwihas, which comes from Cajalas.

Wow, can you tell us what else you said in that? Was that good morning and your name? Yeah. Wow. And do you enjoy learning more about the language? Like, has that been something that's interested you? Yeah, it's, I wouldn't say I know a lot, but it's a constant source of fascination. I think I was inspired by taking a course at UBC in my undergraduate degree.

I took Huncomenum, you know, for the two years as part of a Bachelor of Arts. program. But when I lived in New Zealand you know I have a lot of friends who are quite fluent in Māori and I was often in environments where Māori language

was exclusively spoken particularly with tribal meetings. So when I returned home to Canada, it also was an important aspect of just a

at least bare minimum, being able to orient myself wherever I am. That's amazing. Can we start, perhaps, with your background? Because I think that your work is really important, and I'm interested to understand how you got there. You are from La Camel First Nation. Can you tell us a little bit about your family background and sort of that journey leading up to going to university? Mm-hmm. So my father is Patrick Kelly.

my mother is Darlene Kelly So through my father's lineage Is our connection to La Camel And deeper than that So I carry a name from Cialis And the connection there is through my great-grandmother Maggie Penaer And my great-grandfather, Hank Penaer

whom, you know, they were married. But I grew up in the city in Vancouver. We moved to Vancouver when I was about four years old. And I grew up in Granville Island, so right in Falls Creek. So, yeah, my upbringing was very much a city life. Falls Creek was an incredible place to grow up. It was not the place that it is today. It's very sort of upscale now, but in the 80s, it was 1986 was when Expo 86 was in Vancouver.

And so it was a really industrial area at the time. But yeah, it was beautiful, you know, being able to grow up in a neighborhood that was largely without cars. So as kids, you know, we were just biking and running and, you know, playing everywhere, all time so yeah it was really really awesome did you do you have strong ties to your community or did you have an indigenous community there that um you were connected to uh no not in the city um but we always we've always stayed connected with our family um out in the fraser valley so um and then my mom moved back to uh derosh in when my brother was eight years old that would have been when i was nine um so i was always coming back

and forth to the valley to to come and um be with my mom right yeah so it was kind of it was actually quite a stark contrast right growing up in downtown Vancouver and then having a a second life that often it was a duality that both worlds didn't really ever meet, if that makes sense. I had all these friends that really didn't see the res life, and then this res life and family who really didn't see a lot of what was what it was like for me growing up in the city. So, yeah, it was, I feel like I've held that duality all my life. I really find that interesting, and I think that it's something that so many people don't understand, or it's hard for them to see, because I grew up in a similar circumstance where my community is Chihuahawthal First Nation. I've never lived on reserve, and then my mother was part of the 60 scoop, so we had family out in White Rock. My non-biological grandmother had like a million dollar home, a very nice community. And so when I would visit our community, whether it was for a funeral or a gathering,

it was completely different living circumstances, different perspectives on the world, different challenges. And it really taught me how hard, I suppose, life can be. But there's a stronger community there. There's deeper bonds, I think, than people realize on reserve. There's more trust, there's, to me, perhaps, less judgment when it comes to maternity.

material things. There's more a community spirit when you're at a gathering. It feels like you're perhaps less judged. Everybody's welcome. There's those elements. But then seeing like the different financial circumstances that other people are in. It taught me that the differences between the two worlds. And I think that Carrie Lynn Victor, who was a past podcast guest, shared something similar that she was working on her art career out in Vancouver and then she'd return and she felt that kind of two-world separation where she was like she had the res life when she was in Vancouver and then she'd go back to the community and she was treated like she was Caucasian in her speaking that she was very eloquent very her words were all correct

and so there was she got it from both sides and I think that that's so interesting because there's just two different cultures. There's two different approaches. And I'm just wondering what your experience was like in regards to that. Did you gain anything from being able to see those two different worlds? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a natural fluency that you develop just being able to navigate within both worlds sort of on a dime. You know, you could be in the city one day and then the same day you're out in the res with family and you just adapt to whatever environment you're in. Yeah, and I mean, I think I was, ever since I was very young,

I've always been very shy, very introverted, and very academically oriented. So, you know, even, I guess even being, no matter where I was, I was reading and I was immersed in a lot of, like, children's fantasy literature. That was my sort of place that I went. But, yeah, so I, but I also have, like, really strong memories of, you know, being only a year difference from my brother. And, you know, we were just kids, and I think it's just normal, you know, when your kids, you're just biking and scrambling around in the bush and climbing trees. That was our thing. We would climb trees just, just like absolutely absurd if I think about it today, you know, the things you do behind your parents back.

And you never tell your parents that, you know, you were like scrambling and waving around in the top of a tree. But that was just normal, right? building forts in the back of, you know, I remember my, my auntie and uncle live just sort of at the entrance of La Camel territories coming from the city. And so I remember being back there and form, you know, building forts and things like that. And that was, the cousin experience was just a lot of play, running. Like, it was that kind of natural athleticism, if that makes sense, where you're just outside all day long. Yeah. Yeah, I find that that's something perhaps we're needing more of. I saw a report that they were saying that we're going

to start prescribing people to go outdoors, that that's going to be something that we do to start to address some of the challenges we're facing with anxiety and depression, that we're going to start prescribing people going outdoors and it's like that sounds that sounds good um but within indigenous communities the beauty is that there is just this go outdoors have fun um explore be be a child and and when i talk to family members or people who um are in their 50s or 60s they talk about how they would just go out into the forest and they wouldn't come back for five hours and they would just be out there exploring and I think that there's part of your development that you go through that helps you grow as a person that creates a sense of independence, a sense of responsibility, a sense of caring

for the people you're with when you're out there because you're like, well, if you fall out of that tree, I'm the only person around, so I have to help you in those circumstances. And when I was with friends on reserve, one of the experiences was like we all got stung by, we entered a beehive by accident and we all got stung brutally and I had to carry one of the one of the other kids back because he had gotten stung so many times he was starting to have like a reaction and so those experiences are so unique and you don't get them when you're in the city you don't get the where are we again like we're lost in the forest oh like we better start to find our way back it's getting dark those kind of exploratory experiences and you start you're having to go farther

and farther into northern BC or into the interior to start to have these experiences. And I think that it's unfortunate, and I don't know, I don't know what the solution is to something like that. I don't know. I think a lot of it's just the messaging of your parents and your caregivers. And of course, the world's different, you know. It's actually not totally safe for kids. necessarily, depending on where you are, right, to just wander anymore.

Yeah, I think it's really challenging. But I do attribute, you know, that playfulness and that inclination to just be kids. I think that that has formed my identity, because I know that my brother has said to me, like, you know, we had no sense of gender, really. Like, I sort of think, I guess I was a tomboy, but there was no sense of girls' boys, you know, the idea of what a girl can do or what boys can or should be doing. It was just, you know, we were just having fun. Yeah. So, and I think, like, I have a love of hiking today, you know, I'm always thinking

about my well-being and my body, not necessarily for fitness purposes, but thinking, like, are my lungs doing what they should be doing? Is my heart pumping the way it should be pumping, you know? And I'm thinking about that, and I'm thinking, okay, if I sit at a laptop or a computer for too long, it's not doing, my body's not operating the way it's supposed to. And so that's where I draw on that connection to my childhood. Yeah, I think that that connection is so important and it's so curious that it's not more popular, that it's, I think we're starting to see inclinations of it, but having that understanding of like, your heart beats every single day. And so how do you make sure that if it is beating every day, that it's beating properly? And we just got a book called Breathe, and this person was a journalist, but they dove in and traveled the world to understand different breathing techniques.

and understanding that, and I didn't know this, that your nose is actually a dehumidifier. And so we've got all this equipment in our house to dehumidify the room. But if you're properly breathing through your nose, you actually get more oxygen per breath. So a lot of people, when they start running or hiking, they're like, well, it's harder to breathe through my nose. But you actually get more oxygen and it actually gets rid of a lot more viruses and bacteria and stuff. and I was talking to Paul Van Westendorp, who's our provincial apiculturist, he's our beekeeper, and he was talking about how if you get stung by a bee, the best thing for you is to do nothing, because your body has a natural response to that.

And if you have arthritis, getting stung by a bee can actually be a really good thing, because the chemicals that your body creates to get to flush that stuff out is really positive for your body. And so those experiences are good for you. And I think that it's so interesting. I also interviewed Stephen Hu, who he wrote 105 hikes in and around southwestern BC. And the connection you have with the environment is something that's so good for you because then you start to see how you're connected with the world. You start to realize that there's like you can do the same hike over and over again and see

different things every time. Mushrooms, trees. Like there's different life throughout the sounds of the birds. There are people who are bird watchers, like people who search for mushrooms, people who search for trees. There's so much to experience out there. And I think that that gives you a greater humility when you go out in the world. The other one that I always think of is like astrology and looking up into space and realizing how small we are and how connected we all really are. And I think that those experiences are becoming more important because we are on Zoom more.

We're on teams. We're on these meeting systems that make our day kind of go by because now you can fit in, five different meetings into one day and you haven't gone outside, but you've been, I guess, more efficient, but you've missed out on having that proper balance. And I think that that's, that's something you, you enjoy more outdoors when you're more connected, when it's right in your backyard. But when you're in a city, it's harder to access. What was your journey like to going to university? Like, was that a clear cut path for you? What was that experience like? I think it was fairly clear cut in the sense that I didn't know what else I was going to do

because I, I guess in my life I've always had mentors in some way, shape, or form. So I'm talking about in elementary school, I had a teacher who, um, identified me, it's a vague memory because this would have been when I was, you know, 11 or 12 years old. So she identified and she recommended that I apply for an accelerated program for high school. So these are called mini schools in Vancouver. And so I did. I applied to some, to accelerated programs and I got into one of them. Now, it's a strange process at the age of 13. going for an interview, you know, you go with your parents, but, you know, you're being interviewed to be in this accelerated program.

I got in. It was amazing. I probably rarely had an amazing high school experience because of that, where I was in a cohort of students, the same 28 students right through from grade 8 through grade 12, which meant that, you know, it was like a cohort style. You didn't have to go and be lost in a sea of, you know, 1,500 students. It was, yeah, and the idea was more of a holistic style of experience and learning and connecting with other grades as well. So it was kind of like this little family, really, a family of 150.

And so we would, and we would go skiing and snowboarding and we had these, you know, whole school trips away and things like that. So it nurtured, like I said, ever since I was really young, I was always academically good at writing, good at math when I was young, got to a certain point and I just lost interest and really wasn't connecting with math and science. but always had that nurturing environment. I was always in places with friends who had shared interests. I did not experience bullying. I think that that's also probably a rare experience for high school. And so by the time I was ready to start thinking about university, it was just kind of natural, right?

It was like, well, yeah, everybody's going to. university, so I guess that's what I'm doing too. And I liked learning, so it didn't feel like it was a burden or anything like that. I didn't have much of an imagination at the time of a lot of my friends went to Eastern universities, McGill or Concordia or Queens. I just applied to UBC, I think I applied to SFU and UVIC, didn't get into the other two programs, but I did get into UBC and had the intention of applying, I mean, I was in the science program for my first year of university, which I did terribly at, failed almost every single course, probably with the exception of my English course. So I was in a science program, we had to take like one

arts credit and I did fine obviously in that one. But yeah, it was it was quite frustrating because I didn't really understand, I guess, the culture of science. I was very surprised at how competitive it was once you were in the program. I didn't know that there was all these sort of cultural values around, you know, they let a whole bunch of students in to first year and by second year, like, 50% have dropped out. Oh, wow. The kind of thing where it's like, you know, it's designed to be competitive and you have to perform.

And it's kind of, yeah, like, it's pretty cutthroat. Sink or swim. Exactly, yeah. And like I said, I didn't grow up in an environment where competitive academics was nurtured. So I sort of missed, actually, the whole cultural piece there and just sunk because it didn't really. really understand that I was supposed to be competing with the other students. I was looking for

another group to support, to connect, to do like, you know, group learning and things like that, and just found nobody at UBC willing to kind of join me in my learning journey, and I struggled and didn't understand what was going on. Was that discouraging at all, like a feeling of like you've done so well up into this point? Did, like, did you struggle at all with that feeling? Or was it easy to kind of switch gears and take a different path. Yeah, I did struggle, but it was also a new experience for me to fail. So if it hadn't happened before, so I didn't sort of have any predetermined pathway or emotions around it. I just sort of failed and was like, whoa, what happened?

I didn't, I like, I barely had any sense making around that. But one of the things I did know was university is expensive and I can't afford to, I was sponsored by La Camel and I knew that, you know, I can't afford to just keep trying and wasting a bunch of money. So I decided to take a year off. And in that, in that years when I worked at a coffee shop downtown, with the really clear intention that I wanted to travel. And that's when I went to India. So I saved up. I went to India for six months. How did you know you wanted to travel? What, what, how did you know that that was something that was in your sites? Did you have, did you experience Expo 86 or something? And you were like, oh, I've seen these cultures. Maybe I'd need

to go experience some of these things. What called to you to that? There was probably, so I remember there was a couple of memories from early to, like, early teenagehood when I was fascinated. There was movies that I had seen that I was fascinated with India. And now I'm trying to remember what were those movies. but yeah it was oh it was elephants yeah i've had a fascination with elephants ever since i was really little and i i don't remember why um but i had you know elephant books and so i sort of pieced together a rationale for why i needed to go to india based on um yeah i definitely wanted to see elephants i also knew that i wanted to travel but was sort of had this abstract

of wanting to go somewhere that was not, it was a polar opposite to Canadian culture. What I imagined to be Canadian culture, I thought India would be the polar opposite. In terms of, I remember describing to my parents and saying I wanted different orientations around religion, just like the sense of society as being really loud, bright, colorful, spicy, you know, all these things I sort of was just like, I wanted a shock value experience. But not so much for voyeurism, if that makes sense. I wanted it for the experience of almost shocking me to life. because I think of that

I think maybe that was how I was processing the failing you know it's just kind of like I was bored and just felt a bit helpless and so this this like wanting to go travel and going somewhere that was so

vibrant was a way of just saying like bringing me back to life if that makes sense but also I don't speak any other language So I was thinking, okay, it has to be an English-speaking country, which in hindsight is, like, fairly limited. If I'd talked that through with somebody, I could have learned another language and gone somewhere.

Yeah, what was India like? Did it meet your expectations? What experiences did you gain from that? Well, I was backpacking, so, you know, you never really know what to expect. I was traveling very cheap. At the time, I was only 20 years old, which. I learned once I got there that most travelers go to, you know, Europe or they kind of travel in easier places, if that makes sense. And India is kind of the next, like it's a level up for an experienced traveler, partly because of, you know, you have, like, safety concerns and how big it is and just how much it is.

but of course that's what I was seeking so for me it was the adventure and the excitement and like I'm ready for like all the buzz and yeah so I mean it was it was pretty scary but thrilling

at the same time it was everything that I had imagined I met a Canadian through the snowboard club at UBC because I was a snowboarder. And so I, through the snowboard club at UBC, there was a Canadian who had a friend in Mumbai. And so I landed in Delhi, spent some time in Delhi, and then took a train to Mumbai, which was about 18 hours, I think. Wow.

And it was great. It was great to connect. At the time, he was the consulate for Canada, which I didn't know that I was meeting a consulate for Canada. He was 24 years old. He was really young. But it was a great connection. He, you know, he was a nice stopping place. He was, you know, very wealthy in terms of sort of the basic standard of living.

So I stayed with him for a month. And then I carried on and did some more traveling, hopped on another train, 25 hours to Kolkata. And then, so I traveled around the north of India. And then for the last leg of my trip, traveled down to sort of the hot beaches in Goa and Kolkata, or sorry, Kerala. Yeah. And so it was amazing. It was an experience that I will never forget. I met incredible people. The community of travelers, I think, when you're traveling alone is always really supportive and, you know, people look out for you. One of the things I noticed, lots of people when I returned asked me, like, are you, were you scared to travel around as a woman? A single young woman. And I remember thinking I would watch other travelers who were often in pairs, and I would watch how.

men traveled, and I was treated quite distinctly differently because what I, what ended up happening is many Indians would ask me, you know, where's your group or where's your partner or, you know, and I would say, well, I'm traveling alone. And immediately it became like, suddenly they felt that they had to protect me from the rest of the world. Oh, interesting. And so they were like, oh, my God, you're traveling alone. You need somewhere to stay. Come and have dinner at our place.

You've got to be careful out there. So they were, like, suddenly rallying to make sure that I was okay. And I was, so I ended up staying with, like, a lot of Indian families. It happened multiple times. And I got a different sense of the country than I think the travelers who were only exclusively staying in, you know, cheap hotels or hostels or, you know, often we're getting ripped off, getting haggled, you know, the taxis or rickshaws or whatever were exploiting them as rich tourists. Whereas my experience was not that. I didn't get, I mean, I did, you know, it's natural. People know that you're from the West, especially when I said I was from Canada.

But, yeah, my experience was not what I think most people expected it to be, which was that I was going to be exploited. I was the person who was like, wow, we have to support and help this young woman who maybe naively is traveling by herself in a dangerous country. that's how they start. Right. Were there any experiences being in those homes that were perhaps unique or where you got a different perspective? Because the reason people typically travel is for the cuisine, the culture, you being able to enter these people's homes and kind of see behind the culture of tourism. Often, like those main roads perhaps look really nice and then you go a few roads back and it's a different place. Did you gain any experiences and or gain any insights into

relationships with people, because it sounds like they went out of their way for you in a really positive way. There was one experience where in order to extend my visa, I had to travel into Nepal just for like a 24-hour period while you renew, you have to go to the office, whatever. there was one dinner where there was a Nepalese man who did the same thing, invited me to come and have dinner with his family. So I got on the back of his motorcycle, and he drove me to his family's home quite rural and quite remote. and it was like a mud home and I was fed really well and they played music for me and it was just it was beautiful it was like really a family life and and I can imagine that for them I don't

know what they thought I was doing or who I was and then he delivered me back into the city but I I got to try cuisine, you know, home cuisine, which is, you know, they cater to the westerners in Kathmandu, and it's like weird pizzas and things like that. Like, yeah. So I was happy to actually not eat the tourist food. It was nice. I got to try this fermented rice drink, which came in like this huge. kind of looked like a wooden keg, but it was, it was like this massive drink, yeah. And so coming back, what was that, like, what did you take away from that?

Did you have more perspective on where you wanted to go or being able to see that culture, wanting to do something with your own? Where did that all kind of come into play? Well, I think I, I think the experience allows. allowed me to develop a stronger sense of my own intuition and my own sense of, you know, I was developing and testing my own boundaries around risk, risk taking, which I felt strongly before I had left, that I didn't feel that, you know, be staying in Canada really allowed me to do that. in a, I don't know, in an interesting and sort of healthy way to test your boundaries. And I remember distinctly too. So this would have been 2003, which was only email communication, really.

There was no, it was the starting to hear about Facebook, but really it hadn't. Yeah, there was nothing. There was no social media. So I remember also handwriting. I've always loved handwriting letters. So I handwrote letters, like millions of letters to family and friends back home. And I remember writing that I had never truly experienced loneliness until I was in India. And that the experience of true loneliness was, I knew at the time,

it was so important because I just didn't know that that was a feeling that I had inside me. And I knew that it was because I had no access to family and no access to friends unless I picked up a phone call and it was quite expensive. So I restricted myself by being so far away and developed emotionally in a way that I could never have anticipated. Right. So, and I know that that change. It changed my life because I kind of reflected that when I was in Canada, that when you're always having access to your family and your friends, you kind of take that for granted. You just lean on that all the time. And you just, I knew that it was important to develop that aspect of myself. Right.

Yeah, you see that a lot now because it's so strange that we have unlimited access to people. you can see 200 of your friends maybe online at a time and yet people feel more alone than ever and my partner Rebecca and I like doing that we like when we travel we don't send messages we don't send text but we write letters or we use postcards and we just write something to the people who are going to appreciate that form of communication that are going to see that we went out we tried to choose a quality card that we tried to write something thoughtful not just like hey hope all is well by we were just like let's share like one experience we had here let's write it down let's be clear about it so that there's um an intention towards the communication because we can

get so hey how are you good how are you uh what's going on not much you like we get so simplified in our communication that uh it concerns me because we miss out on the people uh like the one interesting thing i've always found is it's so hard for people to be able to share their traveling experiences because they feel rushed because you have it's like it's kind of like a dream when you try and explain your dream that was like super amazing to you to somebody else they're like I don't I don't understand but there are certain people who actually care about what your traveling experience was and what you learned or what food you tried or um those people who actually are genuinely interested in who you are and I think we can fall into a category of why I have 10 people

I text all the time so I must have 10 really good friends but who are there for you when you're struggling, when you're feeling a little lost or frustrated. And it's interesting that you make that comment of like loneliness of really starting to understand that and recognizing the people in your life and what their value is because you're disconnected from them and you realize how important they are because you can't just say that thought that's on your mind and now you have to write a letter or you have to schedule a phone call to tell them what your thoughts are. And I think about that a lot in terms of like, We have these moments where we maybe think of someone when we hear a song or something, and then we don't act on it.

We kind of just go, oh, yeah, that means a lot to me that we were, we went to that concert together five years ago. Or we had this experience and you don't tell the person. And it seems like that's the area. I think we could use improvement in our culture, is figuring out how to have those deeper conversations more regularly. Because when I recognize a guest and say like, hey, I really think you're setting a good example, there's this. instinct I see within them to be like, no, I'm not perfect. Like, don't get me confused. Like, I'm just a flawed person like everybody else. And it's like, I think you, you likely are a flawed person, but, um, and we all make mistakes. But I think there's something people can learn from you,

but there's this hesitation to take on that role or to feel like we're, we're worthy, that we set a good example, that we can, we can do good and that can be recognized. I think that that's surprise. We, we like to think people are really narcissistic and we're all on social media and we're all posting the best glamorous photos of ourselves. But there is a part of us that's like not confident in saying like, I set a good example and I'm here to do so. And I hope that that's the message I set for other people. There's like a struggle we have with taking up our mantle or being proud of what we've done

and accomplished and the impact we've had. And I think that it's just interesting that you were able to recognize that on that trip. So like coming home, was your plans just to head back to school or what were you kind of thinking in terms of where you wanted to go when you were coming back? Yes, I knew, I think that was part of the journey was what am I going to do next and exploring that and having that time to really think that through. So it was fun, it was super exhilarating and I came back and felt like a changed person. I should also mention, that again when I was 20 and I made that decision to go to India, there was absolutely a narrative

in there of wanting to explore this place of the people that we were imagined to be. Interesting. I knew that this place of India was so problematic within our identity as Indians in Canada. And I was trying to understand and unravel that. So my very simple question was, well, who are the Indians then? You know, who were we mistaken for? Right. And that's, you know, such as, again, it's so sort of, it's a blunt way of exploring identity.

But it was really important to me to do that because I wanted to then come back to Canada and have this concrete place to jump from to say distinctly, I know exactly what I am not. I know exactly what the mistake was, you know, in terms of I understand who the Indians are now and feeling confident then to kind of delve back into the complexity of being Indian in Canada. So I went into the First Nation Studies program, so basically I just shifted faculties within UBC. And, yeah, found a home almost right away. Like, it was just such a comfortable place to explore and to be nurtured within fairly small groups and cohorts of other students. How did you know that that was the right choice for you? How did you know that moving that faculty into first?

Was there, like, traveling to India, thinking of Indians, that that was like, I want to explore? this topic further and understand my community more? Where did that sort of come from to choose First Nation Studies? Well, I think it was kind of along the lines of like, how could this mistake have been so stark, right? Like, historically, how could we have been mistaken for India? So then, you know, I was like, well, where can I explore this question, you know, of these mistakes? I should also say my debt, you know, it's not that I didn't have any understanding of the political environment in Canada or B.C.

My father's been very involved in in B.C. politics and Canadian politics, you know, ever since he was working at Kokelyza back when he was like 20 years old and working with elders and, you know, caring for, for Max. Maggie, my great-grandmother, dad's always been quite a strong political voice. I read one of his, I think it was, he wrote a satire back in like 1970 for a local newspaper about something very political and he was making a really clear statement about, you know, the state of indigenous politics at the time. So I had that. I had, I had. that filtered through my dad's experience. But I knew that the job that I had to do was to walk my own path to figure that out. So, yeah, so it was a bit of like trying to get the building blocks in place, if that makes sense.

Getting the nuts and bolts of what I also knew were the gaps in my high school education. and, yeah, trying to feel like that. Do you, is your dad a role model to you in that regard of the politics? Did you see perhaps the struggles that he was facing in terms of like running into roadblocks? Because I know working with the native court workers, we do run into political challenges. Did you have like perspectives on that of like, I want to further these issues or like, what was your perception of your father when he was facing? It sounds like some good times and some tough times in the political indigenous realm. I don't think I'd figured that out yet. I didn't

figure out. Yes, my father's been an incredible role mod in my life. He's, I've always looked up to him. Makes me emotional. Yeah. And he's just, uh, Yeah, I'm getting emotional. I've always had an amazing relationship with my father. Like, at this stage in my life, I'm 39, and we're definitely friends, you know. And in many instances, actually more and more colleagues, being able to kind of be on par, you know,

like loving to be in indigenous spaces, especially in indigenous economics, and being able to know that we're both sort of shifting and moving, hopefully the dial for the next generation. That's amazing. What did you learn during, the beginning part of your education that perhaps stood out to you because we're hearing, I think it's frustrating to hear about how these recoveries are being viewed because if you

read the Indian horse or watched the movie, if you have any understanding, you knew that indigenous people did not want their children to go to these schools, that that was something for nearly 100 years now, that they did not want their children in these schools. they knew it was not a good place. And we get, I listened to an interview with Charles Joseph, who's a carver and an indigenous artist, and he went to Indian residential school. And he talked about how children would pass away.

And there would be bodies, and the people who ran these schools would, to get rid of the bodies, make the children light the match. and I just, it's, I understand indigenous communities' frustration with the general public when there's this vast disconnect of what's gone on, for him to have that story and for everyday Canadians to feel like, I'm just learning about this now, that when you think of the disconnect between the two communities, it's so evident in that moment because most people know about the Holocaust. Most people

have an understanding of what took place there and when I think about how do we bring these two like we talk about reconciliation these are the things that these are the conversations to me that need to take places. First Nations communities does not

feel like that general public was there for them when we needed them and it's not like we were in different countries we were three blocks away from each other having completely different lived experiences And so what did you learn during your time of taking those First Nation course studies that you took away from it, from your perspective? Well, I mean, I think of, I think because I'm now in the education system on the other side of the table,

instructing university students at the graduate level, I also know that, you know, you can think of the different tiers. So if you think about an undergraduate degree and a master's degree and then a PhD, the skills that you are gaining and the developmental objectives of designing courses and learning in that particular sort of tiered structure. I think so the university or sorry the undergraduate experience really is that found you're you're still actually learning how to learn in an undergrad because you know we there's there's such variation I think in the high school experience that you're still

forming really key things skills how to form an argument how to translate what you read into a coherent, you know, narrative for an essay, say. You're still learning how to do basic research. You know, how do you search for an academic article? What is a database? How to use the library? That's all really still foundational, right? The master's level is when you're starting to get into actual research,

starting to hone those skills around how do you design a piece of research. That's a really particular skill. And then the PhD is doing all of that, right? So it's the cumulative effects of those different degrees leading up to that. So for me, that's how I think about my undergrad, is that at the time, you know, I had incredible instructors. I also had an incredible cohort where, you know, a very good friend of mine, Dr. Carmen Cray, she was in the program one year ahead of me at UBC, and we both now have become, you know, professors at SFU.

And, but I remember being involved in a project of hers after. she had graduated, that had impacts at the university and still does, because I did an interview for a project called What I Learned in Class today, and it was a real story of racism in the classroom, and it was an emergent project where she was hearing that, you know, other students were experiencing racism in the classroom. And then I had an experience of a racist moment in a classroom. So they developed this project to have us tell our stories and record that. It then became a video. And it ended up having quite widespread impacts because this video became mandatory for all faculties, all instructors to watch. And then instructors were also showing it to like

their first year law courses and it became one of those things where I think I was one of the opening interviews. So afterwards, students would be like on, you know, the bus and they'd be staring at me. And then they'd be like, you were on the video of what I learned in class today. I was like, oh, yeah, it was. But afterwards, I got a lot. I got a lot. lot of response because people were saying, wow, that was very brave of you to say what you needed to say. And I remember thinking it felt like a very misplaced way of connecting connecting with me on the moment that I had shared in the video because I didn't speak it out of a place of bravery.

I spoke into that space because I was having a private conversation with a friend of mine, which made it a safe place for me to actually divulge what that racist experience and very traumatic experience was. So it seemed strange that everybody thought I was brave because I was thinking, well, I didn't do it to be brave. I did it because it was safe, because it was something. I trusted her, and I trusted that what she was going to do with that video and that narrative was going to be good work. Yeah.

So, again, it was kind of like there was what was happening in the classroom. There was my personal development. And then there was this kind of thing where, you know, it kind of, there was a certain notoriety that I ended up having on campus where, you know, deans would recognize me too and I'd be like you know it was an incredible transformative time on campus and quite uncomfortable because I was not in a position of power and yet it was disturbing a lot of those power structures at the university wow can you tell us about what that experience was you don't have to but what was that video about what had happened oh um

Yeah, it was a moment when it was an English class, and there was a couple. So I don't know if you've spoken with Otis Jasper. He was also in my cohort at the time. I do know who he is. I have not had a chance to interview him, no. Yeah, so he was also in that video, and he talked about this English class where it was kind of strange because it was right at the beginning. this would have been around 2004, 2005, maybe 2005,

where there were instructors who were bringing indigenous content, mostly in courses like English or history or something like that. Into the classroom, I remember that one of the readings was called Stolen from Our Embrace. and I don't, I think we were given the choice to read that book because it's, it's very, very heavy. And I chose not to read that one. I chose to read a different one. But the way that we had classroom discussions was to sit in a circle. And we were discussing a poem on that particular day.

And it was kind of decontextual. history. So kind of the rough edge of what happened, you know, in residential schools, folks talking about intergenerational trauma in these readings. And then we would sit in a circle and try and get some discussion out of it. But there was a student, I believe she was an international student, and she put up her hand and she said, why are native people so messed up? And in that moment, it was like, I was like, I might as well, like, I just disappeared into the wall. It was that kind of trauma that, you know, your throat closes up and you can't speak, and you just kind of go blurry and just you check out.

because you're sitting there thinking what how could you say that we're this you know we're speaking about such sensitive topics in the readings themselves and these authors are doing incredible work sharing what that's all about and that student processed that as just this really insensitive question about like again why is it our fault as indigenous peoples that trauma has happened to us you know it was it just didn't make any sense it was a misreading it sounds like a misreading but it was also very violent that's how I framed it in in the video when I retold that story is how violent her words were to just because one of of the points I make in the video is that she assumed that there was no indigenous students in the

classroom, I think. I mean, visibly there wasn't, I don't know if she can tell that I am, but it was kind of like she asked the question because she felt she was safe to say it and to be anonymous and, you know, she just sort of didn't, was thoughtless and careless about how those words would land. Yeah, which is like, which is better that she would have not said that because she knew you were and then she would have, the people are thinking horrible things in their head and just living their life like that or saying it and getting, hopefully called out for that. It's not, it's one of my frustrations, and I just worked with the native court workers on this, we updated our website and we've got statistics on like our incarceration rates and we've got

statistics on our education rates and it's like what a terrible picture to paint people is like the worst statistics you can find on us with no balancing because like my argument has been like watch us turn this around you've disadvantaged us we faced insurmountable adversity we've faced racism we've faced abusive governmental policies watch us come back what like this is not the end of our story, and it's what I get hesitant about when we talk about Indian residential schools, colonization Indian residential schools, then the 60 scoop, and then that's it. Well, first of all, there's a whole history prior to colonization that's super interesting. The Koseilish history projects doing a great work on trying to write stories about like the wars that have taken place,

the culture that existed prior. But then now, there are people who are doing amazing work that are setting great examples and doing things like, I don't know if you've heard of Raven Reade's subscription box, but they're doing, they're doing such cool work of like giving you a subscription box of indigenous artists, indigenous books, indigenous styles of like pieces that you can have in this box. And it's so uplifting. I have Carrie Lynn Victor's and Nicola Campbell's book stand like a cedar, Shayla Rain's book, How Creator Seas You. These are such positive they give you hope. They give you a sense of where we could head. I interviewed Sunny McKelsey. He's talking about the Stolo history and what our communities were and why place names

matter because that's one question I've been asked privately by various everyday Canadians, which is why do you guys have these words that I can't pronounce on signs? And it's like, well, here's the definition of the word and you decide for yourself whether that contributes to your understanding. because Sonny McKelsey did a great job of explaining it's called La Chiam, and it stands for where wild strawberries grow. There is still a strawberry patch at the top of Mount Chiam, and so that's beautiful, and we should preserve that wild strawberry patch for as long as we can't. Like, we should be grateful that that exists. Carrie Lynn Victor helped name Lequam Park. Why is it called that?

It's called that because it's where the mossy place is. And she explains that when you have that understanding, you're more. likely to protect it. When you understand what it was, because, and she does a great job of saying, first it starts out as like a small trailhead that's kind of paved by feet. Then people come in and they decide to gravel it and try and make it more clear. Then they put in a play park. Then they put in parking lot. Then they start putting in houses. Then they start building high rises. And then it's no longer the mossy place. It's something completely different. But if you know what it was, you're more likely to protect it. And I think that those conversations help balance

out our understanding, but it really frustrates me when people just want to talk about the terrible things that happen because it's almost as if that's all we are. And I don't think that that's all we are. I think we're far more interesting than just that. And so I'm interested to know where you went from there. Did that light a fire under you? How did you, like that video, it sounds like it was sort of misunderstood by others. But where did that sort of, where did you go from there. Well, I don't think the video was misunderstood because if you watch it, the message is quite clear. It lands like a ton of bricks, basically, with a series.

I think the impact of it was the series of speakers, that it's not just one student. And that was, I think, the transformative impact. for us as participants in that project is that, you know, what I thought was just a horrible moment in my university experience was, is and is a more common experience across a lot of universities for indigenous students in general. And so by being able to capture that collective voice, we were able to not only, like it's healing for us, right, to see that and go, oh you you saw that you experienced that you felt that too so then immediately then it became a systemic change um uh piece a piece that caused systemic change actually which was good so um yeah in the

background i mean i knew that my journey with learning wasn't finished um and I had a mentor. I worked at the UBC Longhouse. At the time, the director was Dr. Rosalind Hannah. She now has a different last name. But, you know, I remember a moment with her where she said to me, you can get a doctor degree too. You know, you'll get a master's degree if that's what you want. You'll get a doctor's degree. And she was like, sharing with me her experience of doing graduate school. She studied in Florida, I believe, in Arizona. And I, again, like, I was doing my undergrad when I was working with her, and so I hadn't really contemplated that. But it lodged a little seed in my mind that that's what can happen next. And when I graduated, again, I took a year off and I was working at,

BC. And during that time, I really was sitting with the question of whether or not I wanted to do grad school. And then ended up thinking, yeah, okay, I do. But I was feeling the itch to travel again and had read decolonizing methodologies by Linda Smith. And at the time, it was the FNSP program, First Nation Studies, there was a strong emphasis on research and we learned a lot about research ethics. We had to go through the UBC research ethics process. We did little mini projects and that started my passion for research where I started to think to myself, what is it that what would be a question that I would want to explore in grad school? And that's when I got to this question of leadership. So I started to, I had good mentors who were advising me. You know,

when you get ready for grad school, you want to have your clear research proposal. You want to be familiar with some literature, even if it's not what you end up using. in your project, you need to demonstrate that you have an interest and you have that background. And so I started to put all those pieces together, you know, for grad school application and thought to myself, okay, I didn't want to stay at UBC because it took me a long time to do my undergrad. So I thought, where can I travel? I didn't want to go to the U.S. Is there any reason for that?

I actually didn't want to do the GRE or the G-Matter, whatever, the standardized tests. Yeah, I didn't have the money at the time and it just, I just didn't have anywhere in the states that I really wanted to go. Yeah, so it was kind of thinking, I could go to Australia. I could go to New Zealand. Those seemed like my options and didn't bother with Australian schools. But yeah, just applied to. There's a program at the University of Otago called the Master of Indigenous Studies. I think I applied to four programs in New Zealand. They were all Maori or Indigenous Studies programs. didn't, I think, I think I got into two. And so once I had two acceptances, that was when I was,

it suddenly became like, oh, okay, this is a reality now and this, I have to make a decision. And so I thought, I can't do that from Canada. I have no idea what, what, what it's like. And so I also knew that it's, it's extremely important to be deliberate and conscious about the decision you make for grad programs because it's, it's a really serious commitment having a supervisor. I know there's some horror stories. You can have really bad supervisors and it's a hard relationship to get out of. I, and I knew that, you know, I wanted to have a program that. that I felt really connected to. So I thought I can only do that if I go there.

So I went and spent a year before grad school, just visiting universities and, again, working in hospitality and just traveling and having fun during that year. Right, and you went down the path of economics. What weighed into that decision? Yeah, so I met in that first year, this story is what I'm losing the word for it there was a lot of maybe serendipity

there was a lot of just having conversations with as many people as I possibly could so I was staying with a friend of Dr. Hanna's from the UBC Longhouse she studied with a woman who lived in Auckland She connected me with her, and I stayed with her and her husband when I arrived, which was, again, amazing to just have somebody on the ground. You didn't feel like he had to be, you know, in a hostel or hotel or whatever.

Where they lived, it was a complete coincidence. Their neighbor happened to be the head of department at the school of management at the business school. So she, so the woman I was staying with, her name was Catherine, and she said she was in sport science or, you know, she was doing her doctorate and she said, sorry, I can't really help you. I don't know your topic area. I'm not really familiar with indigenous topics. But our neighbor works in social sciences. And so she said, why don't you go have a conversation with her? you know, it'd be great. She'll, she's very friendly. At least she'll be more useful than I am. And so I did. I just sort of went over, knocked on the door, brought my little folder, which had my research proposal. I had my transcripts with me. I was prepared for anything if I had that folder because I was just like, yep, if this is what you want to see, here's everything that I would need to get into grad school. I carried that with me everywhere. I had all my reference letters. And so she went through it with me, and she said, like, I had written this proposal about indigenous leadership. And she said, you know, I know a lot of people who would be interested in this.

Why don't I set you up with a bunch of professors, basically, to just have a meeting. And she kind of was like, well, you're very lucky because I happen to be the head of department. So if I recommend that they talk to you, they have to. to talk to you because I'm their boss and I was like oh my gosh I didn't you know didn't intend for that to be how I went in but you know and that's how I got connected to um I met with uh Dr. Carla Hokamo um Dr. Manuka Hinare uh Professor Brad Jackson um and there was there were several professors but those were the Māori, Brad's not Māori, but, you know, had worked with, um, uh, on Māori research

before. And yeah, so I had met with, um, several of them and they were great. They just opened my eyes to this, this business school. But also at the time, I didn't really realize, like, why am I meeting with business school professors? This didn't make any sense to me because I was like, I want to study leadership. And then it was Brad who said, me, well, leadership is a topic within business schools. You can study leadership. There's a whole field, there's journals, you know, this is where you want to be if you do want to study and get into the theory of leadership. So, yeah, so I met with Brad. He was the most generous with his time. He sat with me for three hours, showed me around. It's a beautiful, I don't know if you ever

get a chance to go down to Auckland, but the business school is a beautiful glass building. It was brand new, like atrium style. It was just gorgeous. And so, yeah, he sat with me. One of the things he looked at my transcripts and he said to me, wow, I can see you didn't like science. And then he said, but I can also see, so it affects your GPA, right, to have fill failed courses. So he said, your GPA is not super high, but I can see when you love something, you're getting A pluses, you know. So he said, talk me through that. You know, what is it about these particular courses? So he was very interested in actually understanding my identity as a student. And I think I always hold that really close because I think now in the position that I'm in,

he didn't have to take that approach right he was a busy person um but he saw something and he nurtured and really created space for me um and i'm i'm eternally grateful to him for for taking me seriously um so yeah and that's when like we started talking through my my topic and um and to be honest that day is when he said, I will admit you on dean's discretion, which I can do today. You know, you don't even have to go through the application process. He said, if you want to be in our program, I can let you in. I can send you an offer letter if that's what you want. And I was like, I thought I was going to Māori Studies programs because I didn't get into the University of Auckland.

So these were, this was the school that I had not got into. Wow. Yeah, so I was not under any expectations that this was going to be my pathway. But I, you know, immediately got on the phone with my dad, just said, like, this just happened. I just accepted into the business school. Like, I don't know what I should do. But we talked through that, and he was really encouraging. And I ended up saying, you know, I just need a bit of time to think this through.

it's a big surprise for me at the moment. And I'm not planning. I wasn't planning to start right away because this was very early in my trip. And he said, oh, it's no problem. You can defer that for a year or so. You still have the offer. And yeah, so that's what I ended up doing

was I did explore some other universities. continued to, you know, I went to the University of Waikato, had a few conversations there. I had a conversation with Awanui Arangi, which is a tribal university, just off the, sort of the east coast of New Zealand. Graham Smith is a very prominent Māori professor. He's married to Linda Smith, so, you know, in the Māori scholarly world, these were both rock stars and um and yeah he was he was um just getting me interested in the in the tribal university um and then i ended up having conversations with uh victoria university of wellington um as

well yeah and and just yeah sat with all of those experiences and in the end did you feel under like that's something i think we do struggle with is that we focus so much on grades that we don't focus on the person's perhaps passion. Like we have attempts at understanding people of like cover letters. But then you're supposed to like with the Allard cover letter that they like recommend to you in their binder. It's like the first paragraph in half is like already pre-filled in with like I here I am a Peter A. Allard's School of Law student at the University of British Columbia. like you get so little of your own passion and who you are that part of the benefit is that

you got to meet with a real human being you weren't just submitting an online application that sends off through the internet and is read by somebody who could have had a bad day and then they're clicking yes or no or whatever their process is that it's so disconnected and it's tough to see because my partner is considering what she wants to do and she's like well I'm not my goal isn't to get an A plus and everything. My goal is to educate myself the best I can while still being a good partner, while still exercising, while still having good community relationships. Like, I want to be a healthy human being. And it's so, like, it breaks my heart to think that that her being a human, that her living a healthy life where school is not everything, that school is not her whole world is a detriment to her because that's who you want, doing. the work is real people that are going to have balanced approaches because the people who go 100% perhaps at law school are not the people you really want helping you when you're struggling because their goal is to just do whatever they're doing at 100% pace and not consider

how to have a good conversation, how to walk you through what's going on. That's the culture within law is like billable hours. How many hours are you billing? How are you maximizing those? And so that's not usually spent having a good conversation with your client and making sure that they feel comfortable, understood, confident in the direction that they're like, that's not the currency. But my goodness, how much of a better legal system would we have if there was more understanding and more, and so I get, I'm just interested in your experience sounds so positive in that somebody was able to look at you as a person and go, this is who you are. And it must have been, I know when I've gotten grades that I wasn't happy with, there's a sense of shame, there's a sense of if I could just wipe that out, if I could just erase that from people knowing about it, like I would feel more confident or better about myself. So it sounds like that person was able to validate you in a way that for so few get that experience. And I'm just interested in what that meant for you. Oh, it meant everything because, I mean, I think about all the moments that led up to that conversation, right? The intentionality, if I hadn't decided to go to New Zealand, I never would have had that conversation with him, right? I could have just accepted to any program from Canada, rocked up, show up, and then you sort of roll the dice whether or not you are happy to be there.

Yeah, so I think that there was just so much leading up to that. But, yeah, I mean, the reason I tell this story is because I know that Brad Jackson's approach, and he's a professor of leadership, right? So I think that that has a distinct impact on the approach that he took. He studies critical leadership, and he demonstrated. a nuance in his approach to the conversation, which was very human-centric. And you're right, I think it's actually unfortunately rare that that happened at all, right? It seems like almost unthinkable that that conversation was even possible. I think of, I don't know if you've heard of Jocco Willink, but he's a Navy SEAL and he writes

children's books on leadership and I think some adult books but he does children's books and super macho guy very strong very hardworking posts on Instagram every morning a photo of his clock at 4.30 a.m. every day just to tell you that he's he's got this mindset of earning the sunrise he's a very hardworking individual but his kind of message on leadership is that it is something that when people think about it and you give you someone a role as like manager or you give them a role as supervisor instantly they want to demonstrate dominance over everybody else and say like well i'm in charge now you got to listen to me and there's that feeling of like that's what a leader's supposed to be but from my understanding

it's supposed to be the opposite where you're supposed to say okay team what do you need for me to go succeed at the mission this is what we're doing how do we work together to make sure we set that and meet our goals and and succeed together and collaborate and how how How do I get the best out of you? What do you need from me in order to do the best work possible? So what made you interested in leadership? What pulled at you to say that that was sort of an area of interest? Well, it was a bit of a combination.

So as I was thinking about sort of theories of leadership and just looking for academic articles when I was still at UBC and just kind of dipping my toes in, I everything that I read wasn't connecting with what I intuitively felt and understood in particular I've talked about my father and watching him through my whole life and thinking to myself where is that in the literature you know where's the story that I know of the knowledge that he's passed down, the stories that he shared with me mostly about my great-grandmother. Can you tell us about that? Can you tell us about what your dad taught you

and what you saw in him that was missing? Well, I mean, he would tell us about looking after her. So in his young adult life, he lived with her and he would, he would drive her to bingo and he would take her to the long house. She was a spirit dancer. She, and I think about the time that she was a spirit dancer, you know, she was born in 1904, when she was 16, she became. a dancer. She had a lot of songs. And so she was known within the Longhouse Circuit for her songs and her dances. She also found her songs

in an old way. You know, she went up into the mountains and had those experiences where the songs came to her. And so he shared that he shares that you know he talks about that time of knowing like being almost in sync with her through her rhythms of life you know when and obviously it's sort of in the rhythms of the winter dancing season um the spring and you know the summertime where he um drove her around and and you know she was he would drive her to be with the elders program at cocaliza and Yeah, so, and I know that that time is really sacred in his life, because he talks about as that's when he got his teachings, you know, like, that was, she's his point of reference for everything that he learned, protocol, everything that he does, that is based in the teachings now, it all came from that time growing up with, with her.

and spending that time. So, yeah, so I think about, that's what I thought about when I thought about leadership, is that if I place myself in the scheme of the family and think about leadership as not a figurehead, but leadership, I think of it always as kinship, as genealogy. That genealogy is a structure for knowledge about leadership that comes through families. So the knowledge that then, in our little mini kinship structure, you know, she passed on knowledge to him.

He's passed on knowledge to me. You know, she inherited that from her ancestors. and we all kind of branch out. You know, my siblings have heard different stories and little pieces about what that means. A lot of it is driven from the idea of principles and ethics and how to be a good person, you know, like, and that being a leader is hard.

It's hard work. And that's something that Dad always taught me is that, you know, the hard work is the decisions you have to make that they're not always good decisions that don't make everybody happy all the time but that's not your job as a leader is to make everybody happy nobody's going to be happy if you're thinking about a community you're not going to get every single person on the same page

but the hard job of the leader is to be able to sit and listen and watch and be able to understand a general feeling to move forward with something. And so, and also, you know, the time that he was with her was in the 60s and 70s. And so that period of time was, there was a, the word that he was, the word that he is conservative. So the values, we're not talking about politics. We're talking about the conservative teachings that she passed on to him was that there's ways of doing things that are strict, right?

She was very strict, as were, I think, a lot of our grandmas at that time. And, yeah, and so that's what he learned was sort of the strictness of those principles and protocols. Interesting. There's a relationship, it sounds like, between how you look at leadership and our idea of seven generations. And I'm just wondering what your thoughts are on that, because it sounds like it is passed on.

And through interviewing Eddie Gardner and Sunny McElsey, Andrew Victor, they've talked about this idea of seven generations. It's something I've talked about as something I feel like is missing from so many. Like, when we talk about decolonization, I like to try and give examples of what Canadian culture can learn from indigenous culture, where if they were to adopt it tomorrow, I feel like the world would be a better place. One of them is our respect for elders. That's when you saw how seniors were treated in the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in Ontario. It was not good. When I look at my peers, how they approach seniors, they take a photo.

with them is if they're just cute old people. This is the wrong analysis. Even if your family members aren't indigenous, they likely survived things like Indian, like World War 2, the Cold War, World War I, the Great Depression.

There's a lot of lived experiences. Like I know my non-biological grandmother, she wouldn't waste a thing. And that came from a traumatic experience of knowing what it was like to have nothing. And there's knowledge that she can share with us now, she's not here anymore, but when we're facing inflation right now, we're

starting to realize what it's like to have less and less and less. And we know that inflation detrimentally impacts people on fixed incomes the worst. And so there's going to be a tightening of purse strings, a feeling of, I can't afford that now more than we've experienced likely since the original Great Depression. You could probably compare it to the more recent 2008 depression, but it seems like it's going to be worse. And so I'm just interested in your thoughts on the idea of seven generations and the leadership values, it sounds like you've been passed on to you. Well, I, so I also have the experience.

So when I was actually doing research for the master's degree, I was researching leadership in a New Zealand context. So I was exploring and interviewing Māori leaders. And it's also very common, you know, as soon as you put a label of leader onto anybody, it is, it is, you know, almost like a reflex to deflect that and to say, no, like, not me. I couldn't be a leader because I think that's part of the way that we are sort of taught in pop culture, especially through things like fairy tales right like Walt Disney movies we see leadership in a particular lens particular way often it's very gendered probably they're trying super

hard to shift some of that now but you know we learn really young that to be a leader is exceptional it means you have to have a certain characteristic you know you've got to have a to encourage. You've got to have often, you know, you've got to rise up from adversity in order to be a leader. But all of those things can end up being traps where we then feel that, well, the rest of us cannot be leaders then. You know, there's only a few leaders in the world, really, who can actually fulfill those roles. And it works for society to, to promote that type of leadership because, you know, it's not a very fashionable thing to imagine that every single person could be a leader. On the, on the contrary, you know, what I heard from a

Māori perspective, and it aligns with what I was talking about, intuitively understanding how leadership is passed down. A, it's not so much about who you are or the figureheads, right? It's about your contribution to the world. And it is aligned with the idea of gifts that everybody has a gift to offer into society. So leadership then is something that has many different forms. It's more of a spectrum if we think about not leaders, but leadership as being something we all contribute and participate in. And so then if you think, like maybe another way to think about it, I really think about it like a, I don't know, river, right? It's like different pieces of the river that lead to the big river.

Like streams all leading? Streams, yeah, like, or I think also about like blood streams where, you know, you've got a whole interconnected system and we're all part of it. So I always, I think of leadership that way. I think of our economies that way. All of these kinds of ideas are not exclusive. There's a piece of that with regards to economies that I have real trouble with is the idea of it being elite, right? That economics is a science for the elite. We all participate in it.

Like, how could it be a science for the elite? Yes, there's scientific modeling, and yes, that's a very nuanced, you know, science. But the idea of that being exclusively for people who are only trained in econometrics or something like that, that's really problematic for me because that means that that's how you control power and that's how you centralize decision-making. based on those who have access to that education, those who are gifted as mathematicians, you know. I like that a lot because I often talk about how we think of voting

and we think of this individual aspect of ourselves that we are considered the cornerstone of the state, that we're supposed to vote in our leaders, that that's what a democracy is. And people always divert to, well, I didn't vote in the last election, the last provincial or the last federal, or the last municipal, but you vote every day. You vote every day by choosing to shop on Amazon or your small business.

You vote when you choose to buy this product or that product, support that idea or this idea. And I hope that that emboldens people to vote more their conscience. Like I love Tentree, and the reason I like it is because they spend money on planting trees again, and they try and make higher quality products, and they try and promote this idea of being sustainable and being in line with the environment. And I think of that as like, do I buy this shirt or that shirt? Well, this shirt makes me feel like I'm in line with my own values. And whether or not they do a perfect job, just like charities, how much actually goes to their cause.

I don't know. But my goal is to be in line with those values as best as I can. And I do my best to vote with my money by saying, oh, this person is really interested in this. Maybe I can give them a leg up by getting them this product that they're going to really like or that's going to help them succeed in what they're doing. And I think that when we remember that we have an impact, like you were saying, that we aren't disconnected from the economy. We are the economy.

We are the consumers that drive the big machines where these models are based on. They're based on our viewpoints. And I think that that's so easily forgotten. So I really appreciate you saying that. And also it sort of is a convenient way to feel that, that you then don't have to participate. But like you say, we do, we always participate.

And I think that the more that we own that narrative, that I'd like to replace this language, but, you know, we are economic actors. If we become and own our identities as, I always like to think that somewhere along the lines, we could replace that idea of an economic actor with halcamaelam words that are more reflective of indigenous worldviews around the idea of being part of the world, right? We're just, we contribute, we participate, we mutually gain and give, you know, there's a reciprocity there, there's all these kind of mechanisms that are within our feasting. in ceremonial practices, that's what I studied for the doctorate,

is to look at what is, I mean, my question was, what is the nature of the co-sailish economy that allowed me to look at feasts and ceremonies to understand from an ethical and principled level, what are the parts of it, right, that are economic transactional behaviors, but that are indigenous-centric. Can you tell us about that?

Because I've learned about that indigenous people had economies and trade prior to colonization, which fascinates me that most people don't think. And so I'm interested to know, what did your research find? And can you give us insights on things like the potlatch? What did those mean? And how did they function? And is there a place for them, perhaps, in our modern society? because that seems to be the piece that Western culture is missing.

There is an element of philanthropy, but if you watch a lot of documentaries, like I do, the philanthropy is often self-serving in that it's actually accomplishing. It was Hassan Minhaj, who does a show called The Patriot Act, who broke down what Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, these people donated to, and it looked like they were being philanthropists. they were demonstrating philanthropy, but they were not. If you look at where their money was going, they were pushing bills that they wanted to go through in certain jurisdictions. They were trying to create tax loopholes.

They were putting it into a non-profit so the nonprofit could argue for their behalf. And so I'm interested to understand what your research found in regards to how we, what we can learn from these traditions. Yeah, it's interesting you bring up philanthropy because there's, There's a talk that, so one of my mentors in New Zealand I mentioned was Associate Professor Manuka Hinare. He recently passed, but one of the, he would often get, you know, asked, can you do a talk on, you know, Māori perspective of, and then, you know, any number of topics. One of them was philanthropy, and he connected that immediately to the gifting principles, Māori gifting principles. And he said, Maudis are the original philanthropists.

You know, if you think about Māori society as being, you know, 4,000 years, 5,000 years old, and part of a larger network of Polynesian gifting in the Pacific, Asia-Pacific region, which includes Indonesia and Taiwan even that entire region was linguistically connected, therefore philosophically connected. And therefore the principles of Māori gifting were the sort of norms around economic transactions. So, yeah, so he made that connection, that philanthropists and the principles, of philanthropy are not new to Maudi people.

Yeah. But, and then, you know, now we've got, I don't know if you've read Decolonizing Wealth. It's a book, he's, so Edgar Villanueva. He's American, Native American. And he's written, this entire book is about his experience professionally of working in the, sector, philanthropy sector, and he talks about, you know, how we need to reframe and rethink

money. One of the questions he asks is, is can money heal? And he says, you know, money has been so detrimental to our societies. But I write about in my thesis that you know there's there's problems with the foundations of competition that in which our sort of capitalist norms have emerged from and you know that's coming from very distinctly Anglo-Western philosophies and for sure, you know, we point to Adam Smith, but it's not always what Adam Smith necessarily wrote. It's the way that our modern society understands what Adam Smith wrote today. So we have to be careful about... Sorry, who is Adam Smith? Oh, he's the father of economics of modern economics. And he was, you know, I believe that he was Scottish. But so he's, he's seen

as the father, but he and he wrote the wealth of nations. There's a book before that, which, you know, has been of a lot more interest recently. Because the wealth of nations is seen as sort of the, you know, the text, the foundational text. And it was, but there was a book that he wrote before the wealth of nations called The Theory of Moral Sentiments. And it's, there's a lot of economists who have read both of those and said, you know, you can't separate those two books. They are both connected in terms of their.

arguments and volumes, and often people just sort of ignored the theory of moral sentiments, but it's the entire principle and philosophy that precedes the wealth of nations. And so if you take one and not the other, you're missing a huge piece of the story there, because what he's setting out in the theory of moral sentiments is a whole lot of principles and ethics about how you enact as economic actors. How different, just philosophical question, how different do you think the world would have been

if he just made it one volume and had the two pieces so they couldn't have not bought one book and had the other? I don't know. Well, I mean, like, do you mean if he hadn't written the wealth of nations? No, like if he had,

because it sounds like you wrote two books. What if they were just one? And people had to read the whole thing in order to understand things. Because it seems like a mistake in our capitalist world to give two options and then make people buy both should have put them both in one book. Or an oversight of just like historical inaccuracy. You know, like to, it's sort of irresponsible of scholars and academics to ignore a very important, crucial piece of somebody's.

work. You know, our job as scholars is to understand the long story there, not to just say one piece is the piece that should inform our world. But yeah, so I mean, I think there's a lot of sort of debates or there had been, I don't know how much there is now, around this idea of ethical economics, right? And that there's been great shifts, you know, within in the London School of Economics around these kinds of debates and conversations. There's been, you know, numerous Nobel Prizes of folks trying to change and reshape the way we think about economics.

So that it's not just this kind of American cookie cutter, very, you know, when we say capitalist, we have a certain idea of somebody on Wall Street and somebody who's only profit-oriented and somebody who is sort of that cutthrow, all costs, you know, you know, just the business wins, the corporation wins every time. I do what I see in my work within conferences and going to traveling around the world and having these conversations is that the world is interested in in teaching differently at business schools.

Some business schools. Interesting. I'm interested because I had Camden Hutchison on and he's interested in business organizations. He laid out kind of the history of capitalism and one of his hesitations with trying to have a more holistic corporate. or having people with more balance is that you get corporations who start taking on those marketing

perspectives and they start selling you on. Like my big concern is that climate change is real. We have these real issues going on. But now we have this currency of putting a little leaf on something and saying that it's economic or it's environmentally friendly. And then you read in the fine print that it says like this was only like up to 5% of this was actually used in a sustainable way. And then you're like, well, that's not.

not that good. Like, why can it be 50% or 100% or like we should have higher bars to get that leaf? And so his hesitation is that these just become marketing organizations and that they start telling you all the things you want to hear as a consumer and whether or not they're actually making a positive difference or not is sort of besides the point of convincing you that makes you feel good as a consumer. What are your thoughts on that kind of perspective that it's just going to be abused if corporations start selling you on how good they are or how they're trying to be more ethical and responsible. Or the idea that business schools just take on kind of niche topics because it's a new and interesting area for research, but what is the actual impact we

really make? Oh, interesting. Because you can, I mean, to me, that's greenwashing, right? what you've just described is you know you just you take something that originally was intended to have meaning and then it becomes so watered down that you know it's like same with organics and same with like any kind of standard um setting or being able to regulate something that it it loses its its value if we don't do our due diligence around that regulation um but yeah And I think, like, that's a big concern within sustainability topics, right? Is all the different ways. I mean, there's a lot of confusion even within, you know, sustainable business.

Are we talking about sustainable profits? Because a lot of business people are talking about sustainability in their profits. Whereas, you know, a lot of folks are talking about sustainability in terms of really shifting business practices. The way that we do business, why we do business, that all of that isn't totally other area. But sometimes when those lines get blurred, it can easily slip into, you know, different, totally different conversations. Absolutely. So what was your research like when you were out in New Zealand? What were you focused on and what were you kind of gaining from that?

And was that helping inform your perspectives here in B.C.? Yes, absolutely. So I worked a lot with Manuka Henare was my supervisor for a master's degree. My supervisor for my PhD was associate, was Professor Christine Woods. And so when I shifted from thinking about leadership to economics, I really, was thinking a lot about some of the things that I could see were overlooked, basically, and from a literature standpoint. So it troubled me that in BC, when I was trying to do my background research,

I was only finding literature up to 1990, 1990. And I was searching and in the back of my mind going, why? You know, and it wasn't indigenous researchers. It was non-Indigenous researchers who just happened to kind of pick up this topic. And I was like, ah, of course, because the BC treaty process was 1990. And when that process starts kicking in in BC, you suddenly, have a shift in power around resources and decision-making. If suddenly nations are in the so-called driver's seat

as having lands recognized, having resources actually recognized to be within their power, then suddenly the corporate sector is taking a great interest in indigenous people and having to make friends sidle up, whereas before, if that was never recognized, then, you know, there's no economic, there's no indigenous economy prior to that. Apparently, this is how it looks in the literature, because there's no power recognition of indigenous resources. Interesting.

So I was looking at that and saying, well that's a there's a really massive problem with that number one is that it overlooks indigenous economies from a historical standpoint you know it makes it look like 1990 is it you know is that

seriously our timeline and number two it also overlooks the ongoing nature of what I also knew was within our ceremonies and feasting is that, you know, in my lifetime coming back home in my teens and my early 20s and being

with dad and the rest of my family and witnessing and going to potlatches, I also had that in my mind going, well, yes, I know that there was a potlatch ban. There was a period of time when no potlatches were happening. Can you tell us what a potlatch is from your perspective? and then we can continue. I just think it's important for other people who may not know. Sure. That's a big question.

Okay, so the word that is most often used instead of potlatch, certainly among the people that I interviewed from Co-Sailish communities, is not potlatch, but gatherings. So folks were referring to you know going to gatherings and there was any sort of range of what those constituted but the the idea of potlatches is connected to work

so the idea of that communities and families have spiritual work to do and it's connected to to passing on resources passing on property rights, passing on family names. And basically, in order to do that, because we had oral historical cultures, no written languages, that for thousands of years, our oral structures have been conducted within these gathering ceremonies. So that if you have, say, for an example, You want to pass on a fishing site from one family member to the next. You must have that conducted in the presence of other people so that it's recorded in their hearts and their minds. And in order to also conduct that work that, you know, there's all these pieces of the ceremony that give it legitimization.

One of those would be, you know, you've got to have witnesses. You've got to have gifting in order to nomenically capture the transaction. So if I gift to you a paddle to symbolize that I pass down a piece of property from my uncle to my nephew, then you've got a symbol representing that moment in time. And it also ensures that if that transaction is contested in the future, you've got a set of people to look to in order to help you resolve that conflict in the future. You bring your witnesses together and that's where it becomes an intergenerational connected system of transactions, basically, over time. so and then and then you've got a feasting component now i've taken a lot of interest in in the

idea of feasting why would you embed your transactions within a feast you know why would you have those two pieces come together or why would that be important to have those two pieces come together and you kind of see it today feasting's a big part of indigenous and i don't know if they all know exactly why it just right now it just is so please continue i just think that's interesting um because it's not the nature of the transaction that is only important it's the quality of the relationship that is alongside the transaction that is important which is why the feasting and the ceremonial component is important because what you're recognizing is is that there's a good relationship here

that families and communities are wanting to show the world that we have these good relationships. And the way that you, it's the way that you demonstrate that is to invite lots of other communities as well to say not only are we good partners in this relationship, but they are too. Both of us are honorable, respectful. we care for one another enough to feed each other and we also want to show each other

kind of our best work. That makes sense. Yeah, it does. It was one of the running rules I tried to have for guests was that it's because I think we fall into the career part sometimes too much. It's that my goal was to have a guest who not only acts in their own best interest, but is able to act in the best interest of their family, of their community, but not only to do that, but to be able to do that over a year, five years, 10 years, pass that legacy onto their children, to try and live in a way that's harmonious with the community and with themselves in a sustainable way because you see people who are trying to do, like, and this is no slight to mothers, but you can see when a mom's like burning out, and she's trying to do so much.

much and she's so exhausted and like that's not unfortunately sustainable to be able to give your children the care that you'd like to and that you doing that is difficult and obviously like I'm not picking on them but you can see how not being sustainable will make it harder to continue long term and so trying to find that balance I think is important because then you share that and you pass that legacy onto your family and your children and your grandchildren so they can all start to live in that harmonious way and that's sort of what you were just describing which think is interesting. The other part is, for my understanding, is there's that gifting element. It's also a sign of, I think, respect or honor to have given more, that the more you give

in those moments places, gives you prestige. Would you be able to elaborate or explain where I'm incorrect on that? Yeah, the, yeah, that's, I think that's where it's really hard to think. about, I'm sure that Sandy McKelsey would have talked about this because he is one of the wisdom keepers that I interviewed for my research. But the, like, some of the elders talked about it as interest, you know, that you give interest over time. There was a woman from Cowichin who spoke to me about that. And that seems to be a piece that is really fascinating to a lot of the world now. because in my thesis, I put together all these different words that came up from the interviews. One of them was interest, debt, savings, insurance, and banking.

All those words came up in all the interviews. So I put these words together as a cluster because that's fascinating to me. that's all banking financial language, right? And yet the elders are all speaking about this with regards to ceremony and feast. That's not a coincidence, right? That's a distinct set of economic transactional language that signals the ways that communities are exchanging

and sharing resources. But I'm also really careful that I, that even though English is the words, English is the language in which those concepts were explained to me in the interviews because that's our default language now, that it's not the English word that should take center here, right?

When we use the word debt, we're not talking about debt the way that we understand debt today. We're talking about ancient practices of indebtedness, which is embedded in relationships, right? We talk about debt as being, Larry Grant from Musquium talks about it as intergenerational, that if you and I create a debt relationship today, that it's unlikely that that will sort of become balanced

within our own lifetime. Because what we do through ceremony is we pass on those, the memory of those relationships to future generations. And that then creates a structure of social connectedness, right? Of embeddedness with one another so that I am making sure that my children and my children's children, my grandchildren, have good relationships for the future. And the way that I do that is I create a debt relationship with you today. so that's that's really different right we're not we're not talking about accruing debt

credit card debt or anything like that but that idea of interest always especially in international context comes up especially there's a lot of shame connected to debt in other cultures where interest is is seen to be quite dangerous because you can, it's unethical financial practice to have interest because that's the way that you can then kind of cripple, you know, the language that I use with regards to those original capitalist principles is like crippling your neighbor beyond repair, which is a competitive practice, which says there's one. winner in one loser and there's no coming out of it like you can't you can't rebuild from that

there's it's the game is over at that at that stage yeah I think of money mart is a really good example of that because you see the prime customers are the exact people who will never be like I just don't understand out of all the things if I could just wave a wand I would get rid of those businesses because I don't I don't understand how it's our most vulnerable people who are being sent into the worst agreements possible and just end up in the spiral. And it's like, you watch any documentary on them. It's almost instantaneous that you're stuck in a system that you cannot get out of. And it just seems malevolent that we allow those to kind of operate within our communities,

in our downtown communities that typically have those. It's not like they say you can have them, but you have to have them in nicer neighborhoods with more wealthy people. It's like, no, we put them in the worst spot where people are going to be desperate and need these services, it just seems crazy to me. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, paired with that praying, you know, praying on vulnerable people.

And one of the things, too, that came up in the research was also this shift from a system. I think it was Kat Penaer spoke about this. from scowlets, that the shift to from a system of freely giving, right, if you come from a society and a structure where if I have surplus, I give it away. And then you've got these Western values and principles that start to come into play are forced upon us. And in fact, we are punished by not adopting those principles, that has shown to have detrimental impacts on our communities, because if I'm not used to the mindset of accumulation,

it looks like I'm poor all the time, even though from an indigenous perspective, I have lots of good relationships, which is a form of wealth as well. So I talk about that a lot too, is like, what is this paradox of wealth and poverty? Because what we have is two very different definitions of wealth and poverty, and they're operating at the same time. It depends, though, when you value that and when dominant society diminishes the value of indigenous wealth, right?

Yeah, I think of that when I'm talking about indigenous communities. I always try and be careful to say that, yes, you can look at statistics of living on reserve and the challenges that that can create, but what you don't understand and what the literature doesn't, what they don't put in the news is, again, those strong bonds I see when you're in community, when you're having dinner with the community, because, like, this is not to be judgmental, but when I visit my community, there's no judgment if somebody has a stain on their shirt, or if their sweatpants don't fit perfectly. There's no care, whether it's Gucci or some sort of name, that doesn't, that's not of currency. One of the first times I did like a real

presentation to the community, I thought I was being logical by wearing a suit and tie. A, nobody cared that I was wearing, and I looked like a weirdo for doing so, and I think that there's value in appreciating that. And it was a learning moment for me to be like, right, this, I went into this with the wrong mindset. I had a vision of what this was going to be of what a presentation is. And I just tried to fit the box that I imagined. And when people didn't value that, it made me, it made me grateful because it was

what I was saying. It was the quality in which I was speaking it that mattered far more. And it was my connection to family, because that's another thing I find so interesting, is so many people ask, what do you do in my everyday life? It's like, what do you do for your career? And in indigenous communities, they could care less. It's more about who are you related to? What's your last name?

Who's your mom? Who's your grandma? And I find that so, it's, again, another area I think that Canadian culture can learn from indigenous culture because we have this pressure on people to go get a job and go get a career and to make that flashy. But shouldn't your goal be to be at home? with your family? Shouldn't your goal be to have the people in your life love you and care about you and respect you and want to be around you? And we have some lawyers that have decided that

they're a lawyer and they are not other things. And so they live atrocious lives outside of their legal life because they define themselves as a lawyer and that's it. And so they can treat their children, their family, their community, however they want because they didn't put stipulations on what that needed to look like. And I think that those people live really empty lives. And I think that for all intents and purposes, the people living on reserve who have that family dynamic are living far more rich, fulfilled lives in the quality of the people who are going to show up perhaps at their funeral at the end of their life in comparison to those who figured out how to make a lot of money, but didn't figure out how to have people who wanted them

around, who respected them and who loved them for their soul rather than their attitude towards things or their ability to buy an expensive car. And I find that really interesting. Yeah. Well, I think that that's a general probably judgment on my career, being in a business school, that it's easy to make a lot of assumptions about what that means or what I stand for. You know, I think that, that maybe it hasn't been said explicitly, but yeah, like, I think that there's a certain expectation that I'm going to be a capitalist or that, you know, and it's often that sort of overly simplified is just like, well, you must, in order to fit in that environment, you must be this or you must be that. of course like I mean I live in a world where there's so rarely black and white definitions and that it's always a spectrum in that gray area is what is probably the more interesting conversation for me and I often think like yeah like that you've interviewed a lot of people where they we all sit on so many different parts of that spectrum when it comes to economies and economic development

everybody's got a different opinion about how to do that what's the best place to start what's best for our communities and what's best for our nations how do we think about

ourselves as individuals within a collective we all have different definitions of how that's going to play out I think it's a really interesting time because there's kind of this push-pull, right, of, you know, who do I want to be and how do I want to act in the world? What will I be remembered for, right?

And what does the world need from me? And I really struggle with this because what the business school needs from me is a lot of work and labor around decolonization, indigenization. What does that mean? How do we work with our non-Indigenous colleagues? How do we transform our pedagogies and our teaching? And, you know, how do we think differently about how we are in the classroom? I think that that's all important work. And I know that on some level I'm committed to that just purely by my role and being hired into a business school.

On the other hand, what I need as a person to grow in the way. the world and to be my best version of myself is not somebody who does all that work, right? If that was only the work that I did, that's A, not I was not trained to do that, right? Yeah. That's by virtue of my identity as an indigenous Stalo la Camel person that they need me to do that. But that is not where my training is. my training is in growing thoughts and theories and digging deep and asking interesting questions and that's what grows me as a person, as Dara.

And that was part of the reason I left Canada as well to be really blunt, is that I needed, I actually left really explicitly because I needed intellectual freedom. and I needed to be away from Canada, away from the Indian Act, away from the entire context of the indigenous world that we are so entrenched in in order to just grow as a person. And I knew that at the time when I left Canada. And I'm so glad that I did that because I really gained not only a global perspective and all these friendships and, you know, I built a whole network of friends who are now family in New Zealand. But I come back with a lot of clarity around that work that the world needs a lot from me

and I'm willing to give some of my energy and some of my time. But I also know that for me to be happy in the world, I have to follow my heart and do what I love, which is not always that heavy work. That's so fantastic to hear. Can you tell us about how you, because that's really interesting that you say that you've been given this perspective of the Indian act of what's taking place of this history, and it's like you only get this one perspective. And then perhaps you can hear a perspective that's a shift over one way or the other way, but it's still with that overarching kind of rubric. What did you see in New Zealand that you liked, that you were like, oh, why don't we do

this? Why don't we like have this more balanced approach? Or what did you see there that you liked or didn't like? And what were your shifts in terms of Canada? Are we on the right track? Do you have optimism? Or were you like, we're 20 years? I think they do, from what I've heard, they treat their indigenous people or have treated

their indigenous people far better. far more equally. Am I incorrect? Am I on the right track? Yes, it's a really different context, for sure. Well, there's quite a distinct history difference. Number one, they're super, super small nation. Their indigenous population is generally unified, you know,

that there is Tareo, the Māori language, that from a cultural side of things, there's a general idea of Māori-ness, Māori-tanga is what they call it, what it means to be a Māori person in the world, and there's generally a lot of agreement on that. Within that, there's a lot of tribal differences, but their tribal differences not necessarily, like,

as distinct as, you know, Stalo, from Anishnabe, you know, that that's not something that they really have to grapple with. So that changes everything quite distinctly because it means that there's Māori language spoken in high schools, you know, for all New Zealanders, you can learn Māori language. It means that they take, they've taken more seriously for a long time to Tittiti O Waitangi, the Treaty of Waitangi as being this history within New Zealand. That's

something that you know if you talk to your they call a non-Maudi New Zealanders Pakeha. So if you talk to a Pakiya person in general they will have an understanding of what that means, right? There's no sort of

denying that history that it's a there was two versions of that document Māori language and it was written in English, that is usually what is contested within, you know, treaty politics there is, you know, which version did Māori sign the Māori version or the English version? And some tribes signed different versions. So, but what I definitely had this strong sense of was that Māori senses of being, are kind of unquestionable, that there are conversations for Māori to have in and among themselves and that it's nobody else's business to make judgments on those conversations

and that there was a lot of certainty and clarity that this is a Māori conversation and nobody else's business, you know? And so that was often presented in a lot of different ways and a lot of different forms. And I think that is something we haven't quite clarified a lot here when it comes to even things like around economic development, leadership, you know, we are so entrenched and entangled still with so much of Canadian society. It's hard, I think, to make that statement to say, this is a conversation for us and us alone. And we have to figure that out before we then engage with the outside world, with the corporate sector, with politicians, whatever that looks like. There's a lot of conversations, I think, that we haven't had within our communities amongst ourselves to fill those gaps yet.

And I think when we, those are sort of threads that are not, they're still frayed, right? Yeah. It's unfinished. And I think we have a lot of that work still left to do before we kind of, you got to crawl before you walk, right? Yeah. And I think we've skipped a lot to straight into running. And that's part of not necessarily our fault. I think a lot of society, and it's that impression that.

that indigenous people in North America have fallen behind, that we are, you know, we have to catch up is often the narrative, right? Like, it's a development discourse that we are underdeveloped within a developed country, and it's our job to sort of pick up our bootstraps and catch up with the rest of the world, especially the narrative that we are, sort of a weight on the Canadian conscience, right, that we need to do it for Canada because we're weighing down the rest of the country, right? It's implicit, but it's there in a lot of media, it's there in a lot of political discourse. So it's not our fault that we have a lot of conversations in that middle space where we We need, those are things that every nation has had to navigate and negotiate, but they've had the time to do that. They've had centuries to do that, in fact.

There's a theory called compressed development that talks about this with regards to different Asian countries that have also just had to develop on a dime, right? because the rest of the world is sort of like, well, hurry up. But actually, that's, you know, it's not fair for us in a lot of ways because we haven't had that space and that breathing time to really grow into our communal selves and the people we actually want to be. What are our real aspirations as people? Those are deep questions that we shouldn't be rushing

to find an answer. or for? That was really well said. I had never looked at it that way, but Inez Louis made a comment that she, she's the health and wellness director for Shiam First Nation. And one of her comments was like, I feel like I'm in these really important meetings where we're making progress, but one of the problems is that you get certain people from other communities who have this mindset of like, this makes me feel bad to make me feel better about it. That this kind of a approach of like it's been called like white fragility. It's not my favorite term because I think it limits it to a skin color. But there's a sense of like I'd like to be, I'd like this to be all

make me feel better through this meeting. And I've seen it before in other circumstances where people learn about the tragedy and then they want to hear the happy ending. And it's like we're halfway through the story. The story's not over yet. This is going to land differently for different communities and so you saying that there's this kind of rush to want to like you could say that Stephen Harper making his apology was like ripping off the band-aid or something owning it and then there's since basically then there's been a goal of like let's all just get back to where we're all at the same point in time as fast as we can because then we can feel better about it and we can move on and we can forget about this or we can put it into our rearview mirror and right now

it feels like people want that kind of the happy ending story. And I just, that's really, that's really insightful to think about because when I'm working on this paper for First Nations economic development, one of the most important parts that I didn't expect to, I like doing like papers where I don't, I just have a question and then finding out later what the answer is. I know some of my colleagues like to have a plan of how their paper is going to be structured, beginning, middle and end. And so one of the parts that surprised me was how important, I think it was Tawasin First Nation, a Soyuz, and a few other communities said that community planning was the most important part.

Economic development corporations are a tool, but that planning part, like everything else flows from that planning part where you bring in the community and you have those complex conversations. And they said that took a long time for them to build perhaps a shared narrative of where they're going. and that creates more buy-in because a lot of the papers I was seeing basically said the problem is corporations come in and they say, hey, we want to do a development right here. Are you good with that? And the communities had no chance to process and figure out, does this align with our values? Does it not? What does it look like? What would we want? What would a reasonable deal look like for us? Is this where we want to see ourselves in 30 years, 100 years? There's no preparedness. So those projects end up failing. Often the community because there was no buy-in. Like, sure, you can offer the community jobs, but if they didn't think that this was in their future, then how are they supposed to want to do those jobs? How are they supposed to see them filling those positions, even if you're offering those opportunities?

And then we get into, like, money. And if you don't see how the money is going to shape your community, my community, we got a huge settlement for Seabird Island. And one of the, I talked to chief and council, a few members, and trying to understand because immediately when we were proposed a number, our community wanted that put into our pockets. And that places us at a disadvantage, again, when we talk about investing and planning for the future and community development and making sure people are taking care of, there was no desire to do that because there was no proposed plan of what a good outcome would look like. And so people ended up getting

around $15,000 and then that was gone. Immediately people bought trucks, they bought cars, they bought new parts for this, that, the other thing, and then the money's gone. And we're in a very similar circumstance to where we were before we received the money because there wasn't a long-term strategy of how do we do this right. And so I've heard politicians argue we just need to give these communities more money. And it's like to a certain extent that will alleviate certainly some of the stress, particularly when you think of what the social assistance rates are in community. They're not equitable in my opinion. But you need a plan so the community can develop in a that they want to.

And I think that I'm interested to know your thoughts on that and what your research has sort of borne out or how your perspective has shifted being a member of La Camel and the kind of seeing what you would like the future to look like. Yeah, La Camel is a really hard one because we have, I feel like we have a lot of healing to do for a lot of our. community members, our politics are pretty cutthroat, I think, as they are with a lot of communities. It's not, I think there's a lot of lateral

violence. And I'm not involved. I'll be honest, I'm really, I, it doesn't feel like a safe place. I'll be honest, with regards to inviting community contributions. and voices, especially from a place of being taken seriously, and I know that that's a, I'm sort of going out on a limb by saying that, because I know if members of our community would hear that, they'd probably be surprised to hear me say that, because there's this impression that our community operates, I think, in a certain way, and that consensus is like,

pretty widespread, but, you know, we've had, I definitely don't feel safe to contribute into that environment. And it's unfortunate because, like, as you were talking, I think about some of those experiences that I had in New Zealand and had the opportunity to interview for a case study on a really fascinating Māori corporation. It's called the Waka-2 incorporation. I didn't write the case, but I worked, a good friend of mine, wrote the case, and some of the incredibly innovative ways that those nations are managing this tension between community politics and their corporations. There's so many just interesting ideas that I think we could build on and develop.

And one of the things that I often talk about in my classroom is the idea of 500-year planning. You know, that they've, and it's not a perfect story either. You know, there's a talk by one of the elders who helped to set up the Wachatoo Incorporation. and his name is Sir Tipini O'Regan. And it's a beautiful talk. I assign it in my classes where, you know, it's just an audio version. And I say, listen to this, you know, it's over an hour long.

And I say listen to this as if it's a podcast because he's an incredible orator. The gift of this, this oratory is just a beautiful piece of work. but he's talking about the economics of Māori's survival and their long journey from the 80s and their battle to get these lands and the treaty settlements and they call themselves the treaty people because generations have now been shaped by the struggle, the struggle of this being in the treaty process and yet now you know wakatoon corporation is in aquaculture wineries um property development they've got this um incredible program where they take uh their members out to the land and and it's an immersion program and they're only allowed to speak to reo um while on the land and it's really hard

because it's based on outward bound. And so you've got this outward bound experience that is entirely in a moody place. And it's beautiful. But so all of these are all pieces that are all interconnected with what Wakatu is trying to achieve. Now, some of the tensions that come up as, you know, Tiffany O'Regan talks about,

okay, so we've made, millions of dollars now, millions. And yet not all of our members are fluent in the Māori language. We still have members who are, you know, not properly housed. And so what gives, what is the gap here? If we have supposedly mastered corporate governance, we have supposedly run our businesses like, you know, impeccably, nothing to do with the New Zealand government anymore. We're entirely self-sustaining, entirely self-sufficient. And yet what he's talking about is this different paradigm of what is wealth and poverty, right? Because he's basically saying, if our members can't speak to Rio or be properly housed and we're not taking care of

everybody, then some of us are still impoverished. Yet we've got this incredible corporate success. There's something happening and something wrong. And it has nothing to do with whether or not we're good business people, because we've proven to the Pakeha world that we can do impeccable business. But that is not what our people want at the end of the day. You know, some people do. Obviously, everybody's living a good life to some extent. But if it's that idea that if there's one person who is impoverished, then all of us are impoverished. And so, you know, the rising tide doesn't lift all boats, which is the narrative that folks want us to believe is that, yeah, well, just get our businesses going. We'll make millions of dollars in our lives will be great.

Well, that's not how it pans out. Wow. That's so interesting and I think it pokes at the idea that like men cannot live by bread alone and like this idea that there is more to life than just the money. Do you like you mentioned this earlier that with Maori, they have like one kind of culture typically. Like they can agree on a lot of things. Is that one of the hurdles that you see for Canadian First Nations? communities, perhaps, is that we seem to compete with each other. We seem to compete within communities. It seems to be based on your last name, that that seems to really influence whether not you're on this team or the other team, and then you expand that out. And you see, at least within our area, the Stolo Tribal Council, or the Chiefs Council, that there seems to be disconnects that take place.

And then I might get in trouble for saying this, but the native court workers versus other organizations in terms of funding from the government. And so we want funding for this. And then they're trying to convince this minister to give funding to that. And then that'll impact us. And we seem to start to fight inwards rather than having a collective vision. And it sounds like that was the idea of the Chiefs Council. Then it started, people started leaving. So what are your thoughts on that level of politics that you see? Yeah. I mean, I think that's very human. I don't think that there's anything um yeah like yeah that's just a human a human nature thing i think um but yes i mean i think it goes back to that question of planning right is is i think there's a lot

to be said for taking time to to really get to know each other and the there's an aspect of respect and trust that can't be falsified, if that makes sense, right? Like, you can't pretend to respect somebody. You can't pretend to trust somebody because then you're not respecting and trusting them. So I think that, you know, there's a lot of going through the actions or walking through the motions on those things, um, without actually really committing to, to true truth, respect and, um, and some, a lot of respects, honesty. Like, like, there's a lot of sort of backdoor business, uh, a lot of saying something and doing something different, the, the kind

of two-faced, um, actions and behaviors. I think there's a lot of self-interested behavior um yeah and it's there's not and then transparency is a pretty pretty big issue too because that's what i mean by it not being sort of safe or clear because i feel like i may say something in a spirit of trying to help or trying to um give new ideas or trying to just just share right But if that's seen as being me acting politically or in the interests of the Kellys or in the interests of, you know, something beyond that there's some ulterior motive to what I'm trying to offer, in my view, I think, well, what a waste of time, you know, what a waste of my time. Why would I do that? Why would I want to put my energy into that space when it's not going to be taken seriously? And it's, again, sort of calculating, is this growing what it's supposed to be growing?

Is this a place where I'm of the best use in a lot of ways with regards to knowledge? Does that, have you struggled? with that? It seems like you're providing perhaps your gifts that's going back earlier to the idea that we're supposed to share our gifts. Has it, have you struggled with feeling like this? Like, that it would just be nice if you were able to share your knowledge in a good space. And like, that must be so discouraging to have gotten all of this education and to feel like the place where you'd love to do the most good is where you feel like you perhaps you can't. Has that been difficult?

Well, the nice thing about my job is that I am actually able to do it in a professional capacity because the classrooms that I teach in now are 90% indigenous students. They just happen to be from all over Canada. So I am actually offering so much of this incredible knowledge and insights and experience to other indigenous students in Canada. And I get a lot out of it because what I learn from them is almost as valuable as what they learn from me. It's a conversation where I really try hard to make sure that I honor my role as a continuous learner as well because I know, you know, I might have a PhD, but that doesn't mean anything. It's a very specific set of knowledge that I've gained.

And it's, what's it called? It's like the pointy end of a pin, really is how much knowledge I have. It's very nuanced. But in the scheme of like the world of knowledge, it's so tiny. So I always, I really, I know I'm a continuous learner and I always will be. I've always loved the learning process myself. So, yeah, what I try to facilitate in the course, classroom is a dialogue. You know, I know there's the students who are coming through my courses

are so much more knowledgeable about, you know, negotiating contracts, dealing with, like, big business, you know, in corporate environments on a day-to-day basis. That's not me, right? I'm not, I'm not in the corporate world. I think a lot about it and I talk a lot about the corporate world, but it's not where I was hired. And I'm always trying to stay immersed in sort of the edge of the new conversations that are emerging. There's a lot coming around sort of green economy stuff, the blue economy. There's a conference that I'm going to be involved with in April about, you know, getting to net zero by the First Nations major projects. coalition. They're doing incredible work and just such interesting conversations. So, yeah,

like I really try and then do both. I really think about knowledge as a basket too, like where I'm like, okay, like I put myself into situations where I'm learning all the time, putting more in my basket. And then I have a physical basket that Manuka gave to me when I was in Auckland. And he said to me, your job is to fill this basket. and that was for my master's degree. But there's one of the Māori stories is about the three baskets of knowledge. And the idea is that, you know, whatever you take from that basket, you have to put back. That's how knowledge grows.

Is that we're constantly innovating with regards to ideas and knowledge and that. So I'm always thinking, okay, so I go and I take things and I put it in my basket and then I give it to a student, right? I'm constantly offering new ideas, concepts, as much as I can in the classroom. That's really interesting. So you finished your PhD. Do you just come back and start looking for opportunities to work here? Were you tempted to stay there at all? What was your process to ending up at SFU?

What kind of decisions went into play to get there? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, after I was there for nine years. I did have like an entire world established in Auckland by that stage, family, friends, partner. So it was a hard decision to leave. But also there was the cohort of PhD students that I was with in Auckland at the business school. So there was, I think, about six of us who were all finishing our PhD students. PhDs around the same time, all indigenous women, Maori, Pacific Islanders, there was a woman

from Peru, a woman of Kiowa and Tongan descent, you know, so we all had sort of blended different variations of our identities. And we were all sort of finding ways to think about going on the job market and getting a job. And some of us were looking at postdoctoral fellows. Yeah, but the opportunities in New Zealand were definitely for Māori and Pacific scholars. So my contribution would have, I would have struggled, I think, to make the case for myself that I was sort of offering value into that space because my research was very specific to Coast Salish. And then I also looked at the job market in Canada, and it's scarce for scholars. You know, there's, I think, not more than 10 indigenous scholars in Canada, not more than 20, I'd say, or 25 in all of North America.

And that's because it's a new, it's a reasonably new discipline, right? If you look at the landscape of economic development and that only goes back to 1990, the landscape of scholarship goes back to 2000 tops, maybe 2005 is when scholars are really starting to pick up research. So globally, it's a really new discipline for research. So, yeah, so there's there was no, it's not. a competitive market right now for scholars, which is very unusual because for business scholars globally, I mean, you're expecting to be competing against like 90, you know, other folks applying for your job would generally be in the hundreds. For positions in Canada right now, if you're a Ph.D. an indigenous business, every

business school right now wants you because every business school has the same problem. They're suddenly waking up and going, huh, what are we doing around reconciliation? Nothing? Well, what do we do? Where do we start? Do we start with courses? Do we start with students? We need a faculty member.

They immediately go into like the HR sort of like filling bodies in bums and seats and things like that. But that's very difficult when you don't have a market of a potential faculty. You have to have a PhD in order to be. a faculty member. So, yeah, I mean, that's my advertising campaign for bringing in, I'm trying to nurture as much as possible new scholars in this area. At the moment, there's one PhD student at the BD school. She's Métis. There's, I think, about six across Canada right now, all doing their PhDs. I mean, it's a perfect time. They're, they're going to be. in hot demand across the country.

That's awesome. Were you excited to work with SFU? Was there a preference there in terms of being able to work with them at all? Or were you looking at UBC or UVC? Was there any preferences at all? Yeah, I think that has to do with some politics around where business schools are located. Not every university has a business school, so So, yeah, I interviewed at another, I had three interviews, basically, at three different business schools.

It is a factor that SFU is close to Coast Salish territories, that it's in Vancouver where I grew up. There's a lot there that I contemplated in terms of, like, being able to engage my networks within that business school environment. whereas if I was in a business school, say, in the prairies, I would have to rebuild all those networks in order to bring that knowledge into the classroom, connect with the students in the classroom. I would have had to do a lot of work, right? Whereas coming into the Beatty school, already as an alma mater of UBC had all those networks, it's familiar, connecting with, you know, members of MST, Muscoaum Squammer Sillowat tooth

was, is a little easier for me because I just know more people. Yeah, so it was definitely a factor with regards to my identity to select BD but a very big factor also is the climate in which I was thinking about

my development as a scholar because there are business schools that are not as, that are hostile, let's just say, to indigenous knowledge is because it's, it's new, there's no guarantee that you're going to be publishing in very high journals. And I think that those business schools will really struggle to create that space. So UBC is one of them, where Sauter schools, is very competitive and my experience in that environment is they care a lot about the rankings of their journals. And it has everything to do with the fact that they are a tier one university and they are competing also with U of T business school, their rankings for business schools.

So those politics matter, right? Because UBC professors in the business school were not as sort of interested or willing to engage with indigenous knowledge because it would impact their rankings. That to normal people sounds like just nonsense. Because like for people who don't go to business school, they could care less. They just want to make sure that people are getting educated. They're getting the tools to succeed. But when universities are competing with other universities, it's like the average person could care less. And that may impact grants or something. But like your university does not resonate with people when that is its priority is how it's ranked against other schools it doesn't resonate with those like the average person does not go to

university and so the average like community doesn't care about what you're ranked and so when you think of like at scale it seems odd to me when that's the priority because you want the dream would be to have the most successful students with the most balanced understanding that are capable of making a great difference and pointing us in the right direction. And I see, I'm always trying to keep an eye out for guests. And when I see that they're ranked in this or that or they've won some stupid award by some organization that nobody cares about, it's like you've accomplished nothing. Like you've not convinced me that you're worth interviewing that I'd spend three hours

talking to you because it seems like all you care about is yourself and your own success. And having that on your LinkedIn page that you are the number one ranked in this magazine that nobody reads like it just seems crazy to me when when universities choose that path because I look at universities I went to uFE and I loved the the relationship building but also those lasting connections and got to be honest I'm not feeling those lasting connections from uBC and that seems short-sighted on their end because they've been more than happy to highlight the work I've done to market themselves but when I've asked when I've needed help less interested in those moments and that might be unpopular to say but I don't really care

because I'm graduating in like a month so what is what is your class like what is the information that people can expect to learn when they attend BD Business School in your class I also should just say in general as a general rule business schools are often kind of the cash cow of a lot of universities so there's that too there's kind of this like cachet of um that universities need business schools to keep other programs afloat that are not as lucrative so i don't know there's there's a whole there's a whole economy of business schools operating as well within university environments just wanted to say that because i also like i don't want to make it seem like you know beady schools the

best and you know it's there's politics in every university and every every school um and and also i'm sure you're familiar with too is like there's the politics of the professional the professional schools medical schools law schools business schools as compared to like i don't know yeah the humanities and things like that there's a lot going on there um but okay so we'll just put that aside so i yeah I teach in, like I said, we have an executive MBA and indigenous business and leadership. Many of the Stalo folks who went through our program graduated before I got there. We do have some new Stalo folks coming through, but like David, Jimmy, I know, graduated well before and Otis Jasper also.

So I teach in the executive MBA. I teach a course in indigenous leadership, which is the first course that they take within that degree. And I taught a new course this fall on indigenous economies. These are all really exciting because both these topics obviously are in my research areas. So I get a lot out of being able to bring all of that knowledge through those courses. and hopefully, you know, when I, so I wrote an article on ancestral leadership, which is a lot of what I described, I love being able to bring my own work into the classroom and it's something I'm so proud of, you know, being able to write an academic article is, you know, very dry and very disheartening process most of the time. but that article that I wrote on ancestral leadership is just something that I,

it's so close to my heart, that experience of collecting that data. So really exciting to be able to do that. Beyond that, I also teach within our part-time MBAs and full-time MBAs. These are, the part-time MBAs are more domestic Canadian students, full-time MBAs. generally are international students. And those courses are like a survey course on indigenous business environments. And those are harder in some ways

because they're non-Indigenous audiences. What I try to do with both of those is really connect to the global work. There's some incredible scholars who are advancing in indigenous rights. There's a book I use called Indigenous Rights and Aspirations. It's a book of cases, and it's really talking about, like, you know, the bare minimum standards approach to economic development

from a corporate perspective versus indigenous aspirations as being that world of indigenous potential, indigenous opportunity, indigenous innovation, entrepreneurship, all the exciting work of indigenous peoples being able to forge and drive new paths that are not based on that sad, terrible legacy that we've inherited. You know, it's folks who are creating a new world for us. I love it. That's so interesting. Can you tell us about perhaps those courses, particularly the one regarding historic indigenous economies. What are your understanding, what would a student, what's the sort of journey over, I imagine, the 12-week

process? Our courses are very short. Okay. MBA courses are generally really short. So those courses are only five weeks long. Okay. Or five modules is sort of how we think about it. And it's, so the first iteration is I don't know if my students will appreciate this, but the first iteration of every course, I think, for every instructor, if you create a brand new course from scratch, it's always sort of a testing ground. You know, you never really know if it's going to fly.

But what I try to highlight, I usually build it around themes. I choose to think about economic freedom and economic un-freedom. That was a theoretical perspective I brought into my PhD. So I try and sort of flesh that out with students and think about, you know, how would we think about that

from the work that they're doing in community and in the corporate sector or different industries? You know, what is economic unfriend? Where does that come from? Because we can think about that in a lot of different ways. We actually partnered with YuVic Law School.

One of the courses was the instructor is Rebecca Johnson. She is working with some incredible legal scholars. Val Napoleon is one of them. And Rebecca Johnson wrote a book chapter with a member of Sequitin community. Her name is Bonnie, and I'm struggling to remember her last name. name. And it's called Coyote and the Cannibal Boy. Beautiful story. And they've really fleshed out this kind of the corporate legal story alongside this community story. It's a beautiful. I highly recommend reading this book chapter. I can send it to you later if you want. I would be more

than happy to, yeah. It's amazing. It's incredible. But yeah, we talk about it in terms of the corporate body, like the corporate person, and what that means and some of the ethics around that. What else? Yeah, we talk a little bit about things like IBAs. That's not really my area. What's an IBA? Oh, impact benefit agreement.

Okay. But there's also like different, you know, there's newer sort of innovation. around those things. What else? So we do kind of, what I wanted was to have assignments where, you know, students bring their own experts in because they're coming from all over Canada.

And so there's such a range of expertise around economic development. So I get them to invite their own experts into the classroom as a presentation. That's really a good idea. Mm-hmm. So that, I mean, The last thing I want is for a student to leave my class and be like, oh, like, we didn't get to explore this one thing that I really love. So that's their opportunity, basically, to, if they want to talk about investment practices and policies, then they can, you know, bring that perspective in.

That is really interesting. Is there a community that you admire that you think sets a really good example? For me, I always look at different communities. Obviously, Squyala stands out. Sheactin stands out. Stahaelis is another one that I really think is doing a good job on the back-end planning phase. But I'm just interested in, what do you, are you able to see different communities and admire different qualities about them? Do you mean with regards to this course or just in general? Just in general. I feel like I haven't had like in terms of communities

also in the lower mainland anywhere. Anywhere you like I mean I bring in some guest speakers from Tawasin so talking about so Andrew Bok I bring in as a guest speaker and he was part of the

treaty process for Tawasin And he comes in and he talks about, like, the relationship that they built with the developer for Tuasson Mills. The development itself may or may not be the most exciting or innovative project, but I like to hear about the approach of how to engage with community conversations in order to get there. It's really about the process by which they, yeah, by which that they were bringing sort of decision-making and consensus to life. Yeah, but aside from that, I don't have very many local examples. I think like I'm always drawing on Māori examples and thinking more about theory. Yeah, fair enough. I'm interested to know, do you enjoy watching entrepreneurship at all?

I know, like, it obviously aligns with your work because I just, again, I look at work like Raven Reads, and it lights a fire underneath me to feel like, how do we move forward? Right now I'm working on a business plan for an indigenous restaurant here in the lower mainland, because I think that when we're having these conversations about reconciliation, I think that there's a space to start exporting our culture, to other communities so they can try our food, they can learn about our language, they can learn about some of our traditions in really accessible, simple ways. And so do you enjoy watching indigenous entrepreneurship? Do you have any that you're a fan of at all? Yeah. So I have a research

project where we're calling it, well, there's two sort of pieces of the project. One is telling indigenous business stories. And the other part is decolonizing the business case. So one is very distinctly like changing how we teach business cases in the classroom. And the way that we're doing that is writing indigenous business cases. So this is a project I really love and I'm presenting on Tuesday at RSFU library about it. But yeah, one of the businesses is an Inuit business, Wausau Soaps. And her story is just incredible about how she's using Inuit knowledge to create soaps and body products and some of the kind of the decolonizing within that process is about reclaiming whale blubber

that because of colonization had been seen as a waste product and turning that into a product. And now her business is booming and she's, you know, she's really taking off. So I love that because it's, that's in my mind, often the role of the entrepreneur is not just thinking, how can I make money. it's it's about expanding like in the theory you know entrepreneurship theory is all about how entrepreneurs expand the bounds of what's possible in our economies they move into places where you know the market would say there's no market there or you know it's impossible because we've never done that before but entrepreneurs are those risk takers and you know always pushing those boundaries. So yeah, it's really interesting because I love to hear what that actually

looks like on the ground. Even though I'm not an entrepreneurship scholarship scholarship, it's a piece of that economic story that is always fascinating. Yeah, it's really inspiring just to watch people have ideas and approaches that you might not have considered. Do you at all have any role models within your academic field that you perhaps look up to within B.C. at all? like I know Carolyn Hilton has become very prominent in regards to, I think, what she calls Indigenomics. Who do you enjoy looking up to or keeping up with within the development sphere? Yeah.

I just saw Caroline the other day, actually. She was, she's in the city, and I believe that she's part of a project with like an indigenous dragon's den kind of project. I think they're, yeah, awarding $100,000 tomorrow, I think, too. Wow. Yeah, I don't know. She was just telling me about it. Yeah, so I think, let's see, I don't know if I have any one person that is really sort of standing out.

But I think, like, there's people who are at the front, and then there's also sort of behind the scenes folks as well. And I really think about a lot of the work that is happening that we can't necessarily see. One that comes to mind is Jordy Hungerford. He's someone who is, is yet not often at the front of the stage or, you know, the loudest voice, but he's doing a lot of work in the background around shaping kind of the culture of regulatory environments around

indigenous economics. So yeah, he's somebody really fascinating and I like connecting with him every now and again. Who else? Yeah, I sort of also keep in touch like through my dad, through the folks that he's working with. He's more in a kind of like policy, yeah, kind of changing political landscapes. Interesting. Yeah. Do you feel like we're moving in the right direction that we've experienced a lot of negativity, trauma, abuse?

Do you feel like it's upwards from here? Do you have confidence that everything is looking positive overall? Obviously, we're going to have squabbles and issues, but do you feel like our general direction is upwards, that we can have hope that we're taking the right steps forward? Yeah, I think that the sort of climate, the kind of conversations that I am witnessing within my workplace, but also more broadly, are, I've never gotten a sense that people are as sort of interested and taking indigenous conversations as seriously as they are now. I have a lot of feelings about that. I think, like I said, I think I always want to be really conscious and respectful of that, that right to take our time with where we need to go and how we need to go together within, yeah, being able to navigate this. this new

I really don't want to use the word world it's not a new world it's a new way of being together in our nations in our families in our communities and in this place that we now call Canada I I don't know if I could say that

it's a general upward trend because I think you know, we have these sliding moments backwards, too, all the time. And it's sort of that thing of two steps forward, one step back. And I think what I'm interested in is indigenous resilience, you know, that I see that. I see indigenous resilience becoming really incredible and this sort of unquestioning commitment to future generations and to an ethical space that we all can and want to live in, which is the definition of freedom that I work with in my theory is, you know, what is economic freedom?

It's freedom to live lives we can and want to value, the fact that you want to be in your life and that you get to choose what it is you value in your life. that excites me. That's really such an open space for all of us to grow and develop and just be the people we really want to become. Yeah, I really hope to watch this indigenous version of Dragon's Den because I think the resilience that you're talking about

it needs to be the new conversation. There is a place to understand the history, but now it's time to understand how badass indigenous people are, how cool it is that we have gone through such atrocities and that we are continually turning it around. And at such a pace that's – because often what's talked about is like 1996 closure of the last residential school to think that we're in 2022 now and the changes that have taken place since then, the leadership, the voices that are starting to arise, despite all the adversity that those families and those communities it faced, you should have a lot more respect for these communities. Dara, I am so grateful that we

were able to record this. I was looking forward to this since the very beginning. I think that your work is so inspirational. I have learned a lot not only in this interview, but from your work in developing my understandings of these topics and trying to support my own community. I think that you are a beacon of light in a topic that is under-researched and not as understood as I think it can be. And so I am so grateful that you're willing to come all the way out here. I know that it was quite the track. And so I really appreciate you being willing to take the time and to share such an amazing story and journey. And I'm really grateful for the work that you're doing in lifting so many students up so that they can go make a difference in their own community.

Hi, Chaka. Thank you so much, Erin. And we just did three hours and ten minutes. That's incredible.