Critical land.
Perspectives on climate change

Sylvia Cunningham: Welcome to “Critical land”. I’m your host, Sylvia Cunningham. This is the third episode of an English-language podcast from the SCHIRN debuting along­side its exhi­bi­tion, “Magnetic North: Imag­ining Canada in Painting 1910-1940.” In this podcast series, we’re drawing from some of the themes in “Magnetic North” to go beyond what is displayed on the gallery walls through conver­sa­tions with Indige­nous artists and scholars. In today’s episode, you’ll hear from an Indige­nous leader about land as she knows it. 

Jocelyn Joe-Strack: [Intro­ducing herself] My name is Jocelyn Joe-Strack, and I live in White­horse, Yukon, and I’m a member of the Cham­pagne and Aishihik First Nation from north­western Yukon.

Sylvia Cunningham: In 2019, Jocelyn Joe-Strack came to Germany as one stop on her Euro­pean speaking tour of Cana­dian embassies. She was invited to share her perspec­tive on climate change as an Indige­nous scien­tist. In today’s conver­sa­tion on “Critical land”, Joe-Strack takes us through her expe­ri­ence in acad­emia, from what initially compelled her to become a scien­tist to why today she calls herself a “scien­tist in recovery.” You’ll hear what’s shaped her as a leader and what she says is missing from conver­sa­tions about climate change. As a member of the Cham­pagne and Aishihik First Nation, Joe-Strack belongs to one of the few self-governing First Nations of Canada. She explains why that’s signif­i­cant to her and her people.

Jocelyn Joe-Strack: We’re very proud, I’m proud to say that I come from a family of leaders. In 1973, they went to Ottawa, including my dad, and presented their vision for “Together Today for our Chil­dren Tomorrow” for Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and we still cele­brate that. It happens on Valen­tine’s Day, where Valen­tine’s Day is also just this moment of deep pride for all of the fight that the leaders before us put forward. So I’m a “daughter of tomorrow” and a daughter of the land claims, and so the gener­a­tion today, the work’s not done. There’s still so much to do, but we’ve been trained to do it and to be so committed to create a better tomorrow for our chil­dren to come and all of that is surrounded by our self-govern­ment and our deter­mi­na­tion to be able to evolve the society that we live in to better serve gener­a­tions to come.

Sylvia Cunningham: You mentioned your father, Willie Joe, was also a leader. Is there some­thing that you learned from his style of lead­er­ship or perhaps have looked to as you go forward as a leader in your own commu­nity? 

Jocelyn Joe-Strack: Aw that’s a nice ques­tion. Yeah my dad was a visionary. He had really big ideas and I would like to believe that some of my big ideas come from him as well. He was very charis­matic – people just really, really liked him, he was quite charming, and he passed when I was 13, but when I was 10 is when our final agree­ments were final­ized, and it took 20 years to nego­tiate them, and my dad was a part of it almost the whole way through, at different capac­i­ties. But when I was 10, I remember I was like doing laundry or some­thing in my room and he burst into my room and handed me this like tattered up pile of paper, and he was like “This is for you!” and he was just so excited, I just still really remember his excite­ment and pride and then I think he ran back out and he went to go cele­brate. But that was really impacting for me and I think he must have spoken to me quite early about the deter­mi­na­tion for us to lead, and he always told me like “Be a leader, be a leader” and I was always like “Be popular in high school!” And I didn’t know what he meant. And so it was just really rewarding for him to believe in me so much and just really transmit that devo­tion to me, that I now carry and have my for own chil­dren and for all of the Yukon chil­dren.

Sylvia Cunningham: And that tattered piece of paper, that was the agree­ment then?

Jocelyn Joe-Strack: It was, yes. And I still have it. I still have his copy of the final agree­ment that he gave to me so, yeah it was really special.

Sylvia Cunningham: You are a trained scien­tist – you’re a micro­bi­ol­o­gist and a hydrol­o­gist. Can you describe what that exactly means and what your research has entailed?

Jocelyn Joe-Strack: Yeah, I’ve jour­neyed through a lot of different knowl­edges in my youth and younger days. Throughout my 20s I guess I really focused a lot on sciences. My under­grad­uate is in biochem­istry and micro­bi­ology. I suppose a lot of my story is about my dad. So my dad sadly passed of cancer because during World War II, the army came through and built a highway right by our tradi­tional villages and they relo­cated all of the people from the traplines into the commu­nity of Cham­pagne and they had a dump there. They dumped all of their vehi­cles, they dumped all of their oil, and sadly many of the people that grew up in Cham­pagne ended up passing from very strange cancers, including my dad. So when I grad­u­ated at 17, so I’d lost my dad for four years by then, I was really committed to learning more about cancer, and that’s why I went and did biochem­istry, and I did. I’m proud to say I did do cancer research, I spent some time researching stem cells and breast cancer malig­nancy, but the work wasn’t for me, it’s very tedious and repet­i­tive. I started to realize that I wanted to come home to the Yukon and that’s why I kind of started empha­sizing micro­bi­ology and geog­raphy and hydrology, so I took as a job as a new univer­sity grad­uate as a hydrol­o­gist, hydrology tech­nol­o­gist with the Yukon.And then I moved into doing a masters in micro­bi­ology and geog­raphy so I knew that I wanted to know more about my country, my land of our people. So I looked at Kusawa Lake which has a deep history and I looked at the cycle of mercury in the sedi­ments there and the role of bacteria in methy­lating or making the mercury toxic. But I ran into a road­block there, where as an acad­emic and as a scien­tist, I was not allowed to express my love and belonging to Kusawa Lake in my research and my writing and that was really hurtful and harmful to me, because I didn’t feel that I was really telling the story. They only wanted me to tell a story of the science, but it was such a narrow window, and even in my micro­bi­ology I tried to be so compre­hen­sive and just tell as much of the story as I could, and they really wanted me to just focus on very small, little, specific pieces of it to the point where my thesis is a docu­ment that sits on a shelf. I felt that it was mean­ing­less in the end and overall, that five years of work, other than the lessons and the insights that I took out of it, the research itself hasn’t contributed very much.  And so I came back into the Yukon and I started doing consulting for my people, and I started connecting more with my role as a leader, and I real­ized how science was not allowing me to be the leader that I needed to be and that really the most impor­tant thing I could concen­trate on was people and their rela­tion­ships. And so I’m grateful and honored to be known as a scien­tist but now I call myself a “scien­tist in recovery” because I just felt like I couldn’t be true to me within science. I was only known for the knowl­edge, the objec­tive obser­va­tions that I put out, and not what they meant to my heart, and not how I could connect them to the lives of the people here, with the land, and the chil­dren.

Sylvia Cunningham: With all of that in mind when you went forward pursuing your Ph.D., were you able to get to a place with your research where it wasn’t just about collecting data, it was about more than that. Is there some­thing you were able to do that was missing before? 

Jocelyn Joe-Strack: I am sad to say, no! So I did go into a Ph.D. program and I’m no longer doing it, partially because of what you just shared. As a consul­tant, I was devel­oping a land claim for my commu­nity – all of our tradi­tional terri­tory. And so concur­rently I thought that was a great oppor­tu­nity to write a Ph.D., but I got hung up during the compre­hen­sives because they asked a ques­tion about land claims, but they wanted me to pair it with liter­a­ture but unfor­tu­nately the liter­a­ture was so sorely under­de­vel­oped, and from a perspec­tive derived out of southern-based acad­e­mics taking an eagle eye view, observing down and making state­ments about our rela­tion­ships and our deter­mi­na­tion and our devo­tion to chil­dren. And they were writing just about the land and resources and it was just a total clash of world­view. So they asked me to rewrite a paper because I couldn’t pair the liter­a­ture because it conflicted with my iden­tity as a daughter of the land claims. And they just didn’t like that and so we kind of reached an impasse, and I chose to leave the program when I was offered a posi­tion with Yukon Univer­sity as a research chair. And Yukon Univer­sity selected me for that posi­tion without a Ph.D. because they honored my knowl­edge and my devo­tion to the Yukon and recog­nized that a Ph.D. would not enable me or prevent me from doing the work in a good way.

Sylvia Cunningham: Do you feel now, in your role at Yukon Univer­sity, that you’ve been able to intro­duce what you’ve iden­ti­fied as missing? So that it’s not just about the data or measuring what’s in a lake and then not being able to pair it with any other type of knowl­edge – because that doesn’t speak to what you can bring to the table as a person. So are you trying to change that in your role, and how can you do that? 

Jocelyn Joe-Strack: I’m grateful to say that I am. Yukon Univer­sity like any insti­tu­tion these days, has a road in front of it in terms of decol­o­nizing and creating this type of space. It requires taking risk and oper­ating in a degree of uncer­tainty. Now many of our poli­cies and processes are in place to provide certainty but they also keep us in place. They prevent us from moving forward. They are a box of certainty that prevents inno­va­tion! And it’s sort of a funny thing within acad­emia that they are sort of hall­marked as places of inno­va­tion yet they are actu­ally quite strin­gent in preventing inno­va­tion because of this need of it because of this need of certainty – fiscal certainty, finan­cial certainty, ethical certainty. And I think there are a lot of acad­e­mics that are searching and working very hard to over­come those chal­lenges and to acknowl­edge the boxes and limi­ta­tions, and it just takes lead­er­ship, and being from a family of leaders I under­stand what that means and a big part of being a leader is having the gall to say no! And to call out some of these processes as oppres­sive or as preventing us from moving forward, keeping us stuck where we are. And all of these systems extend beyond acad­emia, they persist within our govern­ments and within the way we make deci­sions. And I believe it’s why we are in the conun­drum of climate change.

Sylvia Cunningham: And that’s a great segue. How did you first become engaged with tack­ling climate change? 

Jocelyn Joe-Strack: As being a scien­tist I suppose is where it started, certainly working as a hydrol­o­gist I become very aware of changes to our water­ways. But it was when I was writing actu­ally the land plan for my First Nation, that was a wonderful exer­cise because I worked so closely with my family, my people – there’s 1,200 people within my First Nation. And I started to come to under­stand the story of yesterday, to today, and then what it is we need to do for tomorrow. And a big piece that’s missing from a lot of the work that we do is yesterday. We often spend so much time focused on today and what we’re doing, and the models and the systems and the obser­va­tions of today to make deci­sions about how we move forward tomorrow, but to be honest honoring our story and our journey is a very impor­tant piece of coming to under­stand how we sit where we are today. And for me as a First Nations person from the Yukon, our story has a sad compo­nent to it in terms of when people came. I’m fortu­nate though that where we are our people came quite late in the scale of time, so I knew people that saw the first white people come to the Yukon, and the first people really started coming to the Yukon in the late 1800s. And then we had a big gold rush here in 1898, where there was a massive influx of gold seekers from across Canada and western United States.Then in the 1940s as I spoke of before, that was the true change when they put through the Alaska Highway and the army settled in and they removed people from their traplines and they brought them into the settle­ments, and this is when the chil­dren first started going to school. And thinking about all of these elements of the evolu­tion of our society and how we’ve come to this place of inequity – caught in these systems where we’re kept in place. These are the drivers of climate change, and they evolved like World War II was a signif­i­cant event, it’s really where we trans­ferred into the time of capi­talism and really started focusing on the mate­rial economy, and so now we’ve come to this place where we’re completely depen­dent on these systems. Where we need these things that we surrounded ourselves with – where we buy our food. Where I live often the food comes from very far away, pack­aged in plastic. We seem to be left with no choice. In order to live, we need money. In order to get money, we need to work 9 to 5. With that money we purchase the things that serve our lives. But then yesterday, my ances­tors and many of the ances­tors in Europe and other places in the world had a much higher degree of autonomy and capacity and capa­bility to care for their own. And it was driven out of one’s indi­vidual skill, but also one’s belonging and depen­dence on imme­diate commu­nity and family and that was very true where we are here in the Yukon. So every indi­vidual person was capable of surviving for a short amount of time within the depths of minus 40 winter in the Yukon where there’s very little food, but they were also very depen­dent on their fami­lies and they had whole social struc­tures and rules of gover­nance, and rela­tion­ship with the land that really prior­i­tized the need of the land to be healthy.And in the winter, there was not much around and there were stories of star­va­tion and so they cached food all summer long in the bounty of summer and then they want back to it during the winter and they harvested food from under ice, and they had moose and caribou. And they survived this way, and it was a really beau­tiful cycle that was depen­dent on the seasons, depended one’s role within the family, and they all knew what they needed to do. That’s another thing. They had confi­dence and emotional aware­ness. They didn’t get unrea­son­ably angry. Their anger was also very purposeful. They just were really trained to be these whole, very self-aware, confi­dent and compe­tent people. 

Sylvia Cunningham: When you say that not looking at yesterday, not looking at the past is maybe this thing that is missing from the discus­sion we’re having about climate change today, is the solu­tion trying to go back to some of the prac­tices that used to be? Or is it more abstract, it’s more about the confi­dence that you mentioned, it’s more this manner of behavior rather than an actual literal prac­tice or this kind of, “here’s a guide of what to do”? 

Jocelyn Joe-Strack: I believe that, yes, that’s very well put. In looking back, it helps us to under­stand who we are today, and there are things we can take from our ances­tors and prac­tices and lessons but at the very root of it all I do believe it is the values of our society that need to change. And if we are to shift values, we need to undergo a process of truth and recon­cil­i­a­tion which is a First Nations, Indige­nous prac­tice I guess that is under­going in coun­tries that have a colo­nial history, so like Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, and the States, and we have different degrees of truth and recon­cil­i­a­tion, and its success. But it’s truth, right? It’s speaking truth to where we’ve come and in many soci­eties, I know there’s a common­ality in sort of covering up the truth, or not acknowl­edging it or being silent about the happening. And that used to happen here.So with resi­den­tial school, when I grew up, I didn’t really know what it was. I knew it was bad, but my family wouldn’t speak about it because it was part of our culture, that happened, it’s done with, and we don’t talk about it anymore. And I know that that happens in other coun­tries, like Spain. When I was in Spain, I did come to under­stand that – there’s a history and a need for recon­cil­i­a­tion there.And then it was inter­esting also when I went to Germany, and I was very proud of Germany and Berlin for the work that they’ve put into recon­cil­i­a­tion and the time of the war. I do believe the war – world­wide – I think we need to go back to there, to really acknowl­edge how much that war hurt our planet. It did, it did. And we’ve been all proud of the success of our devel­op­ment since the war and the comfort that we live in and the safety and secu­rity as indi­vidual devel­oped coun­tries, but we’re leaving others behind. There’s a great degree of inequity in all devel­oped coun­tries.And the other piece too – the most impor­tant piece – is that many indi­vid­uals within these devel­oped coun­tries do not live in a state of content­ment and peace. We’re fraz­zled, we’re anxious. Anxiety is rampant across the globe, and we are discon­nected from land and from each other because of our indi­vid­u­al­istic values. But really I think as people – as soci­etal, connected, commu­nity human beings – we need depen­dence on each other, not these systems, abstract systems. We need depen­dence on each other in order to have wonderful lives.

Sylvia Cunningham: You mentioned Spain and Germany, which were two of the places you visited in 2019 when you were invited by the Cana­dian Embassies to come to Europe and share your under­standing of climate change as an Indige­nous scien­tist. What has stayed with you from that visit?

Jocelyn Joe-Strack: And it was a wonderful visit! So I came over with my husband and my two chil­dren. I think my baby was still a baby, she would have been just under a year. And my daughter would have been 3. So we went to Spain, Sweden, Germany and France. And it was really wonderful, I was so honored to be able to share some of this wisdom and much of what I’m talking about here, although I believe my message has evolved a little bit.But the message that I brought was about connec­tion to land and the ability to have a better life and not neces­sarily a happy life, but a content, content and peaceful sort of life, where you’re more accepted to the cycles and the happen­ings of your journey. So I spoke about some of the ways that we could shift the values, and these are First Nations values that were prized within our society and prac­ticed on a very regular basis. So the first and most impor­tant being grat­i­tude, like thank­ful­ness. Every morning I wake up and face the east and [say thank you for the new day]. And since I’ve started doing that, my life has been a little nicer, I must admit. And some­times when I’m too tired to go outside and do it, I believe that my day is not as nice as the days where I do it.Being grateful is the oppo­site of being enti­tled, and we are very much a society that can feel enti­tled through notions of owner­ship. Owner­ship is not some­thing that persisted within our First Nations commu­nity. There was stew­ard­ship, there was no land owner­ship. You cared. There were places where a family cared for and had authority over because it was under their care, but there were no hard borders. And the only things that you could own were things that you made or food that you harvested, but all of the food was shared grate­fully. And so this enti­tle­ment is some­thing I doesn’t neces­sarily serve us within modern society.

Sylvia Cunningham: I want to bring our discus­sion to the art exhi­bi­tion happening at the SCHIRN, where the Group of Seven’s work is on display in Germany for the first time. And I wanted to first ask you about your first encounter with the Group of Seven and how their work struck you?

Jocelyn Joe-Strack: Artwork is such a wonderful way to connect us and to provide a bit of peace and ques­tion and inqui­si­tion, and it also holds a bit of a spirit of the artist or of the feature of the art that is really wonderful to connect with. And as we think about trying to be whole people, art is a very impor­tance piece of that creativity and fulfill­ment. So yeah, I think Group of Seven has done a wonderful job of tran­scending that, bringing the spirit and the life of the land into our homes, or you know into our museums for us all to share.

Sylvia Cunningham: One of the themes the “Magnetic North” exhi­bi­tion at the SCHIRN explores is the differ­ence between land and land­scape. How do you see the differ­ence between those two? 

Jocelyn Joe-Strack: Land and land­scape. I suppose land­scape is some­thing that you are to look at or observe. Whereas land is some­thing that you can have a rela­tion­ship with and be a part of. So we have a motto here called part of the land, part of the water. And even in my role as a scien­tist, I find that people always want me to do work on like, “envi­ron­mental moni­toring” or “land manage­ment,” and so when I come in talking about like, chil­dren and commu­nity and inequity, they struggle to see the connec­tion. But to me healthy people means healthy land. And so all of my energy in terms of climate change is focused on these deep values of people, and that could be part of my micro­bi­ology too, like just going to the foun­da­tion of what the problem is and the problem is that we are stuck in a system that promotes values that in turn harm Earth, and harm each other. So I’m just trying to create a little bit more peace, content­ment, share some more smiles so the chil­dren tomorrow can have a better future. 

Sylvia Cunningham: And that’s my last ques­tion because I know that when your dad was fighting for your future, you were one of these chil­dren of tomorrow. And now you have two chil­dren, and you could say they are the chil­dren of tomorrow. So I’m wondering how you reflect on seeing chil­dren at the fore­front of a lot of climate change move­ments, and having young chil­dren your­self, how do you talk about these topics with them and the kind of future you want for them.

Jocelyn Joe-Strack: Well I’m very concen­trated on the values with my girls, and belief. Belief in the life of a tree and the dignity and autonomy of a tree. The fact that is has a life, it has feel­ings, it has memory. The rocks have memory, believe it or not, and I’m very grateful to be a person to know it be true and to have expe­ri­enced the memory of a rock. And so I worry in our society about how we promote our chil­dren to not believe, and science is a player in that as well. We tell them to believe in fact, but you know science is a theory too. And so we tell them not to believe in Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy, and I think it really damages them moving forward and it discon­nects them from that heart and spirit. So with my girls, I tell them the stories, I connect them with the land. I go to my girls’ kinder­garten class, and I bring all the students outside, and I tell them each to grab a tree…I say, OK, you stand with this tree, you hold its hand and now you breathe. I say you breathe in, and then breathe out. And be quiet and see if you can hear the tree breathe in and breathe out with you. Because it breathes in what you breathe out and you breathe in what it breathes out. And it’s just the nicest thing to help the chil­dren to realize how connected and belong they are with the trees, so that’s what I’m trying to protect the most with my chil­dren is their belief.And then in my work with youth, I work a lot with teenagers and with people in their twen­ties. I think the twen­ties are very much forma­tive years of confu­sion, so I just try to give a little bit of advice and stability to those that are confused. But one of greatest things I can give them is their sense of belonging and purpose and meaning in this life. And for us, connec­tion with the culture and this greater cause of “Together Today for our Chil­dren Tomorrow” and becoming care­takers and our oblig­a­tion to steward the land. It’s very mean­ingful and fulfilling. It’s the greatest thing I can give them rather than our educa­tion system which expects them to either sit at a desk or work on machines or to work in resource extrac­tion…it’s very hard to find mean­ingful purpose. So yeah, that’s what I try and do as well. Meaning.

Sylvia Cunningham: Jocelyn Joe-Strack is a “scien­tist in recovery,” leader and member of the Cham­pagne and Aishihik First Nation from north­western Yukon.