FCOR 511.

Working with diverse

knowledge systems in
sustainable natural resources
management
Janette Bulkan
Lecture 1
Terms 1 and 2, 2024-2025
 Why FCOR 510 and FCOR 511?

• Graduates in previous Professional Masters programmes requested in

their exit interviews, course(s) that all four programmes would take:
• Breaking down the silos among the Masters programmes
• Course on communications and negotiation strategies (FCOR 510)
• Course on diverse knowledges (FCOR 511)

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 FCOR 510 – Module 1, 9 September

• Land acknowledgement
• Your positionality statement
• Leigh Joseph’s article (2020). ‘Walking on our lands again’
• Ice breakers
• One-on-one conversations
• Group discussions

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 Territorial acknowledgment at the start of a UBC
event

• “I would like to acknowledge that I live, work

and play on the traditional, ancestral, and
unceded territory of the Musqueam People. I
thank them for their hospitality and hope that
my words and actions reflect my awareness
and appreciation ”
2024-09-
4 JANETTE BULKAN
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 What can be added?

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 Introductions by teaching team

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 Assignments overview
Assignment category Number % of final grade

Group exercises 8 40

Individual exercises 8 40

In-class exercises 8 20
 Today’s topics

• What do we mean by ‘diverse knowledge systems’?

• Ontologies and epistemologies – People live in, ‘see’ and
‘experience’ different worlds
• Why the current interest in diverse knowledge systems in
natural resources management?
• Issues of power and vested interests

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 Q1: ‘What are diverse knowledge systems’?

• Take a moment to think about, and discuss with a

classmate, what a knowledge system is?

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 Your answers

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 ‘to know something’

• According to Webster’s dictionary, to “know” is to “hold

something in one’s mind as true or as being what it
purports to be” …
• “It also means “to be convinced of”

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 ‘Knowledge’

• By extension, knowledge refers to the “fact or condition

of knowing something with familiarity gained through
experience or association”.
• Accordingly, what is “known” is “generally recognized”.

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 ‘A knowledge system is … an organized structure and
dynamic process
• (a) generating and representing content, components, classes, or types of
knowledge, that is
• (b) domain specific or characterized by domain-relevant features as defined by the
user or consumer,
• c) reinforced by a set of logical relationships that connect the content of
knowledge to its value
• (d) enhanced by a set of iterative processes that enable the evolution, revision,
adaptation, and advancement of knowledge, and
• e) subject to criteria of relevance, reliability and quality

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 ‘A knowledge system is … an organized structure and
dynamic process
• Shared by a group of people; ‘culturally encoded’
• Accepted by a group of people – part of the job

• Many knowledge systems = diverse knowledge systems

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 Consider a field of canola
• Farmer
• Observes the stages of the growing crop daily/weekly/often
• Scoops up soil in their hands to examine it; some farmers will taste the soil
• Soil scientist
• Analyses samples of soil
• Consults available trend analyses to determine soil health
• Beekeeper
• Judges the optimum moment for releasing their bees to gather nectar and pollinate the canola
flowers
• Before the farmer sprays the fields with insecticide
• Landowner of that field
• 15Calculates investment, duration of lease, future contracts
 Today’s in-class exercise
• Will be done in groups of 4 between 4.20 and 5 PM
• Each group should have one member from one Professional Masters
programme
• Students online will work in breakout rooms
• MUFL students who are not online will submit their individual answer
to the question below
• Question each group will consider:
• Can BC move from monocultural (or only a few species) to diverse
forests on public lands?
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 Today’s topics

• What do we mean by ‘diverse knowledge systems’?

• Ontologies and epistemologies – People live in, ‘see’ and
‘experience’ different worlds
• Why the current interest in diverse knowledge systems in
natural resources management?
• Issues of power and vested interests

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 Ontology … a way of seeing and being in the
world
• A theory or set of beliefs about the world,
• a philosophical belief system or
• worldview and
• how that belief system or worldview influences
• practices,
• logics,
• processes

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 Ontology … a way of seeing and being in the
world
• Ontology: study of what beings or things exist, or in what sense do things
exist

• Another way of thinking about culture or a knowledge system

• Understanding of a world that is grounded in a philosophical outlook,

language, and cultural practice

• Adaptable over time

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The Euro-American approach to knowledge is
something like this

• There is one world (reality) and many knowledge systems

(cultures)

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 Within Euro-American ontology …

• there is a clear distinction between humans and inanimate

things

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 One ‘ontological approach’ is …

• There are as many worlds as there are knowledge systems

• the beliefs of the members of one culture are not necessarily

the same as the beliefs of those of another culture

• So the Indigenous Knowledge of any one Indigenous People is

not related to imaginary ways of seeing the world but to the
real world that is being seen
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 Within Indigenous ontology

• There is no distinction between humans and inanimate things

• “In Aboriginal philosophy, existence consists of energy.
• All things are animate, imbued with spirit, and in constant motion.
• … including rocks, rivers, mountains
• In this realm of energy and spirit, interrelationships between all entities are of
paramount importance, and space is a more important referent than time.”

Little Bear, L. (2000). Jagged worldviews colliding. In Walking Together: First Nations, Métis and Inuit
Perspectives in Curriculum Worldview. 77-85 (M. Battiste, Ed.). UBC Press.
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 ‘Perspectivism’, Amazonian Indigenous ontology

• Non-humans have personhood, every entity sees itself as humans see themselves
• ’the capacity to occupy a point of view’
• Non-humans have agency
• A mountain is not only a rock formation but also a sentient being
• In Amazonian ontologies, non-humans can assume human forms, are often
shapeshifters

Viveiros De Castro, E. (1998). Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism. The Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, 4, 469–488. [Link]

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 Indigenous ontology
• Indigenous ways of being and knowing, rooted in communal
relationship with specific territory
• Theories of reality that are grounded in language and
cultural practice
• Adaptable over time

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 The complex politics of knowledge co-
production
• We will assess the ways in which Indigenous epistemologies
and ontologies remain marginalized in environmental decision-
making
• Knowledge co-production is inherently a political and power-
laden process

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 Epistemology
• Epistemology:
• the theory of knowledge,
• how we justify knowledge and
• create judgements about what is ‘right’,
• how we separate belief from opinion
• forms (epistemes) of expressing a group/People’s relationships with the
world

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 Indigenous epistemology
• Indigenous epistemology acknowledges the interconnectedness of the physical,
mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of individuals with all living beings and
with the earth and all of creation.
• Indigenous epistemology, like other Indigenous epistemologies, is highly relational
• Indigenous knowledge is not simply ‘data’ in an objective sense, but part of the
collective understanding that supports community wellbeing

JANETTE BULKAN
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FRST 495
 Today’s topics

• What do we mean by ‘diverse knowledge systems’?

• Ontologies and epistemologies – People live in, ‘see’ and
‘experience’ different worlds
• Why the current interest in diverse knowledge systems in
natural resources management?
• Issues of power and vested interests

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 Q2: under whose knowledge system are natural
resources being managed in British Columbia?

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 Q2: Your answers

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 Q3: Why the increasing interest in diverse
knowledge systems for managing natural
resources in British Columbia and other provinces
and other countries?

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 Your answers

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 Name any ecosystems or species you know
about that are under threat

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 Today’s topics

• What do we mean by ‘diverse knowledge systems’?

• Ontologies and epistemologies – People live in, ‘see’ and
‘experience’ different worlds
• Why the current interest in diverse knowledge systems in
natural resources management?
• Issues of power and vested interests
• Definitions of some terms
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 Q4: who gets to make the decision about how
any species or ecosystem is managed?

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 Your answers

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 Q5: Who are the legal owners of the forests of British
Columbia?

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 Your answers

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 Crown Lands are overlaid on First Nations
territories in BC

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 Ownership

41 Land Ownership: 95% Public (Crown) 2024-09-

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 [Link]

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 [Link]

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 [Link]

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 Forests in British
Columbia

[Link] [Link] [Link]

[Link]

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 BC Ministry of Forestry
•Crown (Government-administered) lands cover 95 %
of BC
•Forest covers 67 % of Crown lands, while 1 % is
under agriculture or range

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 Q6: Who are the legal owners of the Exclusive Economic
Zone (EEZ) offshore of British Columbia?

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 Assignments due over the next three weeks

• In-class exercise #1 – 11.59 PM on 23 September 2024

• Individual exercise #1 – 11.59 PM on 5 October 2024
• Group exercise #1 – 11:59 PM on 13 October 2024

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 Today’s in-class exercise
• We’ll now review today’s in-class exercise and answer your questions

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