Churchill at a Crossroads: The long road of integration between western science and local knowledge

This piece is the third in a series on conservation in Northern Manitoba. Read the first part here and the second here. 

Chapter 7: Churchill’s two solitudes 

The half-hour drive to the Churchill Northern Studies Centre is winding and bumpy, causing tires to spit gravel and dirt into the air. To the left is an expansive view of the bay littered with ice floes most of the year. To the right, the scarce trees, muskeg and arctic tundra give the land its quilt-like qualities. 

From 1957 until about 1981, the road was used to access the Cold War-era Churchill rocket range, where scientific military men fired missiles and conducted research on the upper atmosphere. The researchers launched more than 3,500 rockets from launchers that still sit memorialized like abstract sculptures. 

On a walk near the old launch facility, a Parks Canada employee points out a piece of metal lodged in the thick bog. It’s supposed to be a birding excursion, but the forgotten metal hunk has become as nested in the landscape as a common goldeneye or tree swallow.

The road to the Northern Studies Centre has, inadvertently or not, created two solitudes between a local population that’s about two-thirds Indigenous and researchers from the south. 

Scientists from the south can easily miss the textures and priorties of the tight-knit town. When a researcher descends on Churchill, they seclude themselves in the centre, only visiting the town and its people intermittently. It doesn’t help that walking from the centre to town would take hours and risk bear attacks. It is the polar bear capital of the world after all. 

Instead large-pane windows, a rooftop observatory, detailed maps and scientific equipment allow researchers to embed themselves in the land itself. The Northern Science Studies Centre even has an educational tourism component, allowing visitors from the south to sleep at the centre, learn about the land and tour the region, as part of Churchill’s robust tourism economy. 

Feiyue Wang has been visiting the region for more than two decades from his environmental chemistry lab in Winnipeg. He has worked closely with community consulting on the long-awaited Churchill Marine Observatory, the town’s first marine-focused observation centre. He understands the dynamics of the town and how scientists and the townsfolk have been at arms-length. 

“The Northern Studies Centre, it's been great from an education point of view, but from the local point of view, they feel there is a disconnect from the town,” he said.

In June, a gathering was hosted by CPAWS Manitoba and Oceans North to begin early consultations on the creation of a National Marine Conservation Area (NMCA) down the Hudson Bay coast. The NMCA promises to deliver resources for more monitoring and an ongoing scientific understanding of the vast climate changes the North is undergoing.

To the people of Churchill, that’s not good enough on its own; a deepening scientific understanding, many believe, must include the region's lived ancestral knowledge. Without it, the NMCA’s scientific boon could further distance local knowledge-keepers from researchers from the south. 

Georgina Berg, a Cree knowledge-keeper and language teacher, wants to see scientists interact with the community. She believes it’s not enough to just study the area, but share knowledge, and seek it from the people who know the place best. 

“Indigenous peoples do have a lot of knowledge about the animals in their area, and it's worth it to ask their opinion or include them in their research,” she said. “And so some research is important, especially if it affects the wellbeing of the people and in our community.”

The town’s science economy will be a significant stakeholder in the development of the National Marine Conservation Area (NMCA). Mayor Mike Spence has made it clear the go ahead for the proposed conservation area will be decided by Churchill alongside other First Nations in Manitoba up and down the Hudson Bay coastline and the Northern regions of Manitoba. 

For a local population that has been historically alienated from research in the region, outsiders’ pitches — that a conservation area will reinforce scientific understandings of the lower Hudson Bay — don’t always land all that well. 

It raises questions about if, and whether, it will integrate science and local Indigenous knowledge in Churchill. To get buy-in from the local population, the conservation area proponents will have to prove they can prevent the alienation and exploitation of the past, marked by researchers' concerns with instruments over the stories and understandings of the land.

Chapter 8: The tensions of two eyed-seeing 

Ken Paul, a member of the Wolastoqey Nation at Neqotkuk in Nova Scotia, likes to talk about. “two-eyed seeing” which refers to the integration of Western science with ancestral knowledge. His thinking on the concept has led to personal conversations with Elder Albert Marshall, the Mik’maq Elder who coined the term.

“The beauty of it on the surface is it’s a very simple concept — using one eye for your Western knowledge approach and the other eye for an Indigenous knowledge approach,” Paul said. 

Those conversations exposed an inherent tension about how two-eyed seeing should operate. Paraphrasing Marshall, Paul says most people miss the integrative part of two-eyed seeing because “you need two eyes to work together in order to have depth.” It’s not two canoes travelling down the river separately; instead, it’s a complete intertwining. 

It’s not easy to integrate other ways of knowing into the rigid scaffolding of Western science. That is where the hard work will be, and where the innovation will come, Paul says.

Wang, who has worked in the Arctic for decades, says the concept of two-eyed seeing remains a new concept for most scientists, but not for those who have worked in the Arctic for years. In the early days of research in the Arctic, the normal practice would be to hire a local as a guide, collect the data and research, then return to the south to publish. But it didn’t take long for that approach to reveal itself as backward.

“You start to realize that you're working in someone's backyard,” Wang said. 

In the early 2000s, Wang recalls, southern researchers began working more closely with Inuit communities and their researchers. But now Wang thinks to work in the North there must be dialogue, and questions guiding the research must arise from the locals themselves. 

“Northern peoples, they're experts in essentially everything we do, whether it’s climate change, sea ice, snow, because they've been operating in that landscape for generations, for thousands of years.

“The challenge is, how do we weave this different knowledge system together?” he asks. “That’s still something we’re figuring out,” Wang said.

Spence, the mayor of Churchill, understands the urgency of integration. He has worked closely with the University of Manitoba on initiatives like the observatory which will lead marine research into the changes in the bay. 

Spence has been mayor for nearly 30 years and lived in Churchill since his family survived the York Factory Cree relocation when he was a boy. And for Spence, the recent speed of climate change has made it “a really critical time” in Churchill.

Throughout his life he has seen the changes, and follows the reports. Within decades, the polar bear, something like a patron saint of Churchill, could be gone, a martyr of Churchill’s changing climate. And now, it’s time for the integration to begin to help give a complete understanding to the impacts of climate change in the North. 

“We bring the knowledge, they bring the science,” Spence said. 

Chapter 9: Community science to bridge the divide 

At the Churchill Northern Studies Centre, a young researcher attending a presentation on community science asks how she can integrate the community into her research on one of the hundreds of local migratory bird species. She is at a loss as to how to approach the locals in town. 

Another scientist, KT Miller, who had just completed a community research project on polar bears for her master’s degree, gives a simple answer: move slow and build relationships. Miller speaks from experience. She co-led a “co-existence” study of polar bears where Churchill knowledge keepers shared their knowledge of the iconic Arctic animals. 

Her research partner, Berg, the local Cree knowledge keeper, is also in the audience. Even before there was a research question about bears, Miller and Berg's relationship grew over long talks in the living room, often with a cup of tea in hand. 

To develop their research question, the two travelled south towards the old port of York Factory, owned by the Hudson Bay Company. The route traced the path Berg’s family took during a forced relocation in 1957 to Churchill when the Company left the region. The journey deepened the relationship between research partners and, for Miller, contextualized the history of Churchill from a Cree perspective. 

“How much can you pack in a canoe? That was what they could take, was what they could fit in their canoe,” Berg said, recalling what her parents lived through in their journey toward a new life. 

When her family landed in Churchill, Berg was raised in the Flats. It’s where many Crees settled in Churchill, what Berg calls “the other side of the tracks. Berg points to a CBC piece that referred to the Crees as “squatters who were living in shacks along the river.” 

In the Flats, families learned to survive and co-exist with polar bears, despite not having the most “bear proof” buildings, she said. People would burn their garbage to keep away curious bears. The approach was to mind one’s own business; in turn, the bears minded theirs. 

“We've coexisted for many years, and luckily, we've had very few fatalities with bears and humans,” she said.

Miller says Indigenous Peoples in the region “were experts on how to live with polar bears,” she said. So, Miller poured hours into building relationships with local knowledge-keepers, and shifted her research methodology to centre around sharing circles with Churchill’s Indigenous knowledge-holders. Berg and Miller’s research developed into a podcast series, an oral medium that reflects the past, present and future of the intersection between polar bears and the people who have lived with them for generations. 

It’s a major contrast to the southerner-knows-best approach Miller has seen while spending time in Churchill over the past decade. She’s been travelling to Churchill for over a decade, living in the community for months at a time for her work. There is a pattern of scientists or politicians from the south telling the people of Churchill how to move forward. Miller and Berg hope that their work can create a path for new research. There are signs that their collaborative model is catching on — a similar project is in development for beluga whales in the region. 

Miller sees those coming up from the south “with a lot of ideas — and what I would like to see more of is people asking northerners, what are the right ideas?”

“We have this tendency as researchers, as academics, as conservationists, to inherently think of the world from south to north,” Miller explained. “And I think one of the questions I would challenge people trying to work in these spaces is to flip that on its head and think north to south.”

She wants to see a conservation area — and the science that results from its resources and protection — to include collaboration with the people of the North. 

“The North has been storied over time as this vast, empty, harsh, desolate place, and that perspective is very southern and very white,” Miller said. “And a northern perspective might see it as abundant, beautiful, full of life, and rich.” 

This story was made possible in part by an award from the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.