This is 100 Climate Conversations. Welcome and thank you for joining us. Yiradhu marang mudyi, Rae Johnston youwin nahdee, Wiradjuri yinhaa baladoo. Hello, friends. My name is Ray Johnston. I’m a Wiradjuri woman, but I was born and raised on Dharug and Gundungurra Country. That’s an area that you might know better as the Blue Mountains. That’s where I have responsibilities to community and country, and it’s where I live today. And we are here today on the unceded lands of the Sovereign Gadigal. And while we enter into this discussion about science, I think about the Gadigal ancestors who were the first people to do science in this place. And I think about their Elders who have kept their culture and their knowledge strong. And I thank them for that. Today is number 95 of 100 conversations that are happening every Friday, and this series represents 100 visionary Australians who are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, and that is climate change. We are recording live today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse museum. And before it was the museum, it was the Ultimo Power Station. It was built in 1899 and it supplied coal-powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system into the 1960s. So, in the context of this architectural artefact from the Industrial Revolution, we shift our focus forward to the innovations of the net zero revolution. Now, in my everyday work, I am a STEM journalist and a broadcaster, and I have the opportunity to speak to some incredible people who are hyper-focused on doing something that will help save the world. And one of those people, I believe, is Mibu Fischer who I have the pleasure of speaking with today. Mibu Fischer is a Quandamooka saltwater scientist working as a marine ethnoecologist at CSIRO, and her research is focused on traditional knowledge and management practices being considered within modern-day fisheries, coastal and conservation management. So, her goal is to bridge a gap that draws attention to the Indigenous communities facing the front lines of impacts and changes to coastlines, ecosystems and livelihoods from climate change. We are so thrilled to have her join us today. Please join me in welcoming her … So, what first sparked your interest in science?

When I was in grade 11 or 12 – I can’t remember which one – I went on a biology camp to far-north New South Wales from Queensland, and we collected seawater and then looked at the seawater under a microscope. And I saw plankton for the first time. And that really like just blew my mind that there were all these things in the ocean that I didn’t know existed. And so, I think that really started that journey into marine science in particular, but definitely science.

Now, you are a saltwater woman. As a freshwater woman, we have very different experiences of home. But tell me about home.

So home for me: I grew up on Country in Cleveland, just south-east of Brisbane. But the community that I’m from live on North Stradbroke Island or Minjerribah or Terangeri – there’s a few different names for it depending on the language group that you’re from. And I spent most of my weekends and school holidays on the island with my family, heading out on boats to my grandfather’s oyster lease. Or we would be camping or collecting eugaries, which are pipis, and just really having good quality family time together. And I didn’t think it was anything special because it’s just – it was just normal. But it was a really, really beautiful place to grow up. I feel like we’re a special community because we’ve been able to maintain our community connections but being so close to a capital city.

Do you think you were aware at the time of the kinds of scientific knowledge that were being handed to you by your family?

Absolutely not. I had no idea. It just – yeah, it just seemed normal. And it wasn’t until I got older and sometimes even now, as an adult, when I’m meeting new people or speaking to them, I realise like: Oh, like you’re – the way you view or the knowledge you have, about where you grew up or your environment, is very different to how I was raised, along with those others in my family and the community, around our connection to place and with the animals that are in the environment. And, yeah, it was just – it’s really different. And it’s because of that Indigenous worldview that it is different. But it didn’t seem like such a big deal as a child.

It feels natural. It’s just like a holistic, deep knowledge of place. As opposed to something that you learn in a textbook.

Exactly.

But, of course, you did go on to study, and you’ve worked at the CSIRO for 14 years now. What has your journey been to your current role as a marine ethnoecologist?

Yeah, so when I first finished grade 12, I didn’t know that I could actually have a career in science, which seems a bit silly now because my dad has a chemistry degree, and I realised he probably was doing science. So, that never clicked. So, I was going to be a police officer. Totally random, unexpected. But my mum took me to one of the Aunties who was really big on education. And the piece of advice that she gave me was: Well, what do you actually want to know about? And that was the last day that our uni applications were due. So, I changed all my preferences on the last day, and moved down Human Services and Justice and put all the Marine Science courses around South East Queensland. And, yeah, never looked back because I got into Marine Science. No regrets. Yeah, but I did move from Country down to Bundjalung Country and it was really hard to move away from home. But I wasn’t able to afford to live and so I was told about cadetships. And so, I applied for one and that’s when I first started working at CSIRO as a cadet while studying, and I’ve never left. I’ve just had a lot of different roles in CSIRO, from aquaculture lab technician to research assistant, and it slowly progressed along into like marine ecology. And now call myself a marine ethnoecologist because I was finding it really difficult to describe, even to my colleagues, what I do at work in regards to Indigenous science and Western scientific knowledge and working in that interface. And so, I felt like ‘marine ethnoecologist’ kind of sums it up in a nice way.

So, what do you say to someone when they say: What is a marine ethnoecologist?

So, basically, I just see it as someone who really focuses on the human interactions with the marine environment. And because I have an ecology background, I don’t have a social sciences background, but it is becoming more important. And it’s something that a lot of marine scientists have had to learn along the way because you can’t have impact without influencing people. So, I think if I was describing that ethnoecology term, it’s introducing humans into the ecological environment. And then I just stuck ‘marine’ on the front because I’m interested in marine things.

Just to make it a bit more specific. So, what was it about the work that you were doing that made you feel like it was important to incorporate aspects of social science into the role?

Everyone is doing great science, and you do sometimes have to do science just for science’s sake. But I was really struggling to see how that actually went beyond science and impact into communities – and not just Indigenous communities, but everybody in the public sphere. And realising also that a lot of my friends who were in science don’t understand how science impacts their lives. And so, I think that also was a driver, it was like: I need to figure out how to incorporate human interactions into the work that we’re doing, because without that step, we’re just doing science for the sake of science, and it’s not going anywhere.

It makes a lot of sense. It’s like when I am writing an article or a science article or doing any kind of science communication, you’re always looking for that human element: You know, how is this impacting people? How can we make people interested in this awesome thing that’s happening? And it’s really – if it’s going to affect their lives in any way. So, I suppose that’s that missing step, right?

Yeah. And it’s also really interesting because a lot of scientists who have that traditional classical biological training, they are kind of like: Ah, we don’t research people. Like what do we need to do all that qualitative stuff? And it’s kind of like: Well, actually, like, well, what’s the point in you figuring out how many fish are there if it’s not going to have any influence over people’s wellbeing or their livelihoods? Or, you know, influencing the total allowable catch for different fisheries and all those sorts of [things].

It’s a very siloed way of thinking that is in some ways a complete contrast to an Indigenous way of thinking, which is so much more holistic.

Yes. It’s so crazy. Just that inherent knowledge that everything’s connected that you have from an Indigenous worldview, as opposed to that siloed scientific way of viewing the world. One really recent project that I was involved in that really highlighted it was the State of the Environment Report. Because we have all the individual chapters, and particularly in the marine and coastal chapters, it was kind of like: Well, we have to draw a hardline between what’s considered coastal and what’s considered marine. But that’s not really how the system even works.

I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about the important cultural ties that Indigenous communities on the coast have with those ocean environments.

There’s so many and it changes depending on where you are around the country. For me and my family, the importance that the coast has to us is a sense of safety, but it’s also a resource for our food. It’s an important place for ceremonies. It has connections to who we are as people and how we came into being in this world. And it also holds stories about previous climate events. And it’s everything for us. It’s really hard to describe or separate us from being a saltwater person. And it’s the one thing that really drives, I think, a lot of people in this space – is that passion and feeling of being part of nature. And it’s like your role in your society is to be the voice of Country because it doesn’t have its own voice.

And it’s your kin, it’s your family.

Exactly. Yeah.

So, what impact is climate change having on marine ecosystems?

It’s a bit sad at the moment. It’s going to be a really hot year for marine heatwaves, but it’s changing so many things. So, if we start from like Northern Australia, we’re already seeing impacts of sea level rise on communities in the Torres Strait in particular, and that’s in relation to inundation of freshwater supplies. It’s inundation of beaches and homes and sacred sites, but it also is creating the heating patterns of the marine environment. And everyone says: Oh yeah, the EAC is travelling south. It is, and if you go to Tasmania, we are going to see big shifts in what species are there. There’s definitely going to be changes to species’ distribution because of that heating effect that’s happening both ways. But also, there’s so many things I could talk about. My mind is kind of spinning about which one to pick.

So, the EAC – the East Australian Current. So, it’s not just the heating of that is it? It’s because it’s moving and it carries nutrients. So, we’re seeing things like the giant kelp forests, you know, moving or disappearing entirely.

Yeah. And some of it’s not just because of the ocean climate situation. It’s also because of the species that are being brought down. So, the urchins are being brought into spaces where they’re not naturally occurring in those numbers, and they’re eating kelp and turning them into urchin barrens, which completely changes the habitat. And what species are living within kelp forests are – not going extinct, but they’re having to find homes elsewhere. It’s also changing the species of fish that people are seeing and people are catching. So, more northern species are starting to be caught in those southern waters of Tasmania, which really influences our fisheries as well. But one of the major concerns with communities down that way is the influences to the maireener shells. And so, it’s a really big concern. Everyone I’ve spoken to down there, they’re really feeling it because they’re not sure what it’s going to do to the shells. Like they’ve noticed the shells are becoming brittle because of increases to PH in different areas around where they catch the beaches. The kelp species and the algae are starting to be influenced as well by the marine environment. And so, these influences grow beyond just people not having access to Country. It’s not having access to cultural practices that have really deep ties and will impact on people’s wellbeing. And that’s kind of where that interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary work needs to be happening between the climate scientists and health.

So the maireener shells: they’re the shells the palawa people will collect to make necklaces and they shimmer in the moonlight and have luminescence and they’re beautiful. And it’s a really important cultural practice to be able to continue. But that’s being threatened now by climate change, of all things. So, what kind of social and economic implications does the change to the ocean environments have?

It’s hard to talk about social without economics. And I think economics is going to be one of the key drivers in creating change in the way that we manage our environments because we need our economy to be sustainable. And so, one of the biggest ways it’s going to impact that is changes to fish species and how that influences our fisheries, because fisheries are very – they bring in a lot of money to individual people, not just at large-scale levels, but also as livelihood kind of subsistence fisheries as well, and local-scale fisheries. And so, when those species start to be impacted by where their larvae or their juveniles can be reared, that might mean that ocean spaces might change with heating and ocean acidification, which will impact on the larval stages of fish, which could have effects on the abundance of different species around the nation. And so, then that has the flow-on effect of: fishermen can’t catch the fish that they would like, and so they’re not being able to get cost per unit effort. And so, it’s not going to be viable for people to fish, possibly. And so, what can they do? And it’s not just about that economic status. It’s also people need fish to sustain themselves. And so, it’s kind of like: Where else can we look for food security? So, there’s always these compounding issues that are all stemmed from changes to our environment. And a lot of people aren’t aware of the real implications that this is going to have if we’re not actually making adaptation changes right now.

I also think of all of the coastal communities – that they have their songlines, they have the knowledge that’s been passed down forever about where to find certain fish at certain times of the year, the different signals in the environment. And there would be a lot of cases where those signals just don’t exist anymore because of climate change, right?

Yeah. And Indigenous culture isn’t static and a lot of people aren’t aware of that. We’re still able to add to our knowledge systems and for it to evolve. But the difference is that it’s happening – this change is happening at such an alarming rate that the knowledges and the stories can’t keep up with those changes. And so, I think it’s going to have devastating additional impact to communities from a cultural perspective, particularly around that identity of place. And if your place is no longer there, or you can’t access that species or you have a totem species that is no longer found in your Country – like that is a very distressing thing to happen, and it’s going to happen. And it’s not just going to happen in Australia. It’s going to happen to Indigenous people globally. And so, it’s kind of like: What can we do to assist those communities in either slowing that change or enabling them to feel empowered, that their knowledge is able to change and adapt to the environment that they’re in?

I’m wondering if you can share some insights from your work that really highlight the importance of incorporating Indigenous knowledge into how mitigation and adaption are approached in the research sector particularly.

Yeah. It’s still a really slow process. So, even though I’ve been trying to do this work, it is really slow because we’re trying to change the institution of science basically, and getting people to realise that there are different ways of accumulating knowledge. Alternate worldviews are just as important and valid as Western worldviews in ways of creating knowledge. And so, an example that I could potentially use is around restoration of Country. So, lots of communities around the coastline are interested in restoring habitat, but the end goal might be different to what a researcher or a practitioner in that space has. A lot of the time, community wants to restore habitat so that it’s also an additional resource not just for conservation benefits. And there has been more success with restoration in long-term monitoring and management of these places when Indigenous communities are involved because the level of – like they can’t go anywhere. They’re committed to be in that space. Once the project’s done, they’re not going on to another project. That’s their home. That’s their Country. That’s where they have cultural obligations to protect. In addition to all those cultural obligations, that means that that monitoring and ongoing management and adaptation of those environments will continue if they’re resourced appropriately. I also have knowledge about what species should be reintroduced, where those habitats should be formed, what other species we should be seeing coming in as the habitat grows. So there are lots of different little ways that might seem really nuanced and not important, but when you’re looking at trying to reintroduce species into places that haven’t been there for a while, it’s really important to understand those little intricacies – of why you shouldn’t plant that particular seagrass there, and why it should be planted over here because that’s where it was traditionally seen or – that’s one example.

It’s a different level of responsibility and knowledge as well, isn’t it?

Yeah, totally.

It’s not just a job.

It’s not a job. It’s not.

So, how can Western science and Indigenous knowledge be effectively and respectfully integrated to develop sustainable climate change adaptation strategies for coastal communities? Should the aim even always be to integrate the two? Can they operate independently?

I don’t think they always need to be integrated. I think that we need to get better at identifying and being okay with saying: Look, an Indigenous approach to this particular question is going to be the best approach to answer that question or to restore that habitat. So, that’s okay, let’s do that. Or actually, maybe Western science is better to lead this. But then you’ll have moments where they both can come and share their knowledge and their methods together. I don’t necessarily think Indigenous science needs to fit in with Western science. It’s a separate system. And we say science because that’s just the word that describes what knowledge accumulation can be in regards to that kind of context. But I think one of the biggest challenges in trying to integrate Indigenous and Western science is just getting people to realise that it’s valid. And I’ve really been trying to hone in to people and let them know about the worldviews and that – because I feel like once people understand worldviews, they kind of are a little bit more malleable to understanding the Indigenous connections and that really in-depth place-based knowledge that science doesn’t have. And it’s a really big debate like even: What is Indigenous science and is that different to Indigenous knowledge?

Really?

Yeah, it’s a really big question because sometimes some people could say Indigenous science is an Indigenous person doing science.

Okay. Yeah.

So, they’re fairly broad terms, but lots of people interpret them very differently. And I think when it comes to environmental research, it gets really murky about what Indigenous science is and who’s doing Indigenous science. Are we doing it good enough? A lot of the time you’ll see organisations or projects saying they’re doing Indigenous engagement, or we’ve got partners. But then when you read into it, it’s not really Indigenous engagement in what we want to see. It’s: Yeah, you’ve consulted people. Which is more than what a lot of people do, but it’s not best practice. And we’re kind of leaning more into allowing Indigenous communities to be involved in the governance of the project so they can be involved from the start so that it has that co-benefit. It’s not just benefiting Western science. It’s benefiting community as well.

So, tell me about the Future Seas event that was put on by the Centre for Marine Socioecology. You’re a member there, right? What happened at that event? What emerged from it?

I was really – like, I was surprised to get the invitation because I haven’t had a lot of connections with the University of Tasmania or the Centre for Marine Socioecology at the time. And so, when I went down I wasn’t sure what to expect. And then when I got there, they had brought in numerous Indigenous and Traditional Peoples from around the globe. And so, it was a really nice week where we all got to meet and talk and share with each other about our concerns for our communities, about climate change. And from those discussions, we were able to write a paper which is part of the Future Seas’ special edition [of Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries]. But, yeah, it was a really special week. And it was a really good experience in leading a group of Indigenous scholars to write a paper about our experiences of climate change.

So, that’s the ‘Empowering her guardians to nurture our Ocean’s future’ paper. What does it investigate exactly?

So, there are lots of case studies in there because that was kind of one of the things we had to discuss because we’re all different. We all talk about ourselves differently. Our experiences are very different. We don’t all have connections to coasts and oceans. And so, we decided that we would give each Country a voice and wrote our little case studies, I guess, for each environment. And we kind of did it like a roadshow. That’s how we were describing it: You go on a journey and hear from all these different communities. But before we hear from the communities, we’re going to set up the scene and talk about the difficulties being Indigenous people globally and having to work most of the time in a colonised system. And so, we addressed the language issues, because language is really important in regards to knowledge and obtaining knowledge and passing it on. And we talked about worldviews and the differences and importance of including an Indigenous worldview because of the holistic nature of things. We tried to be positive at the end, being like: Just include us within your climate change adaptation policies or through legislation and implementation. So, it was a really lovely journey. And I was particularly moved by my colleagues from Greenland because they’re really like – they were feeling it. They are absolutely feeling it. Even restrictions to – because it’s like they hunt still. But because the ice is melting so quickly, the species are moving earlier, but the fishery season doesn’t open up. So, it’s like they’re missing these opportunities because the legislation doesn’t match what’s happening on the ground. And so, it’s like those sort of issues – we really wanted to try and highlight the importance of talking to people on the ground, about: How can we allow people who are subsistence fishermen or farmers to miss out on their livelihoods just because it doesn’t match with our management? And so, it’s kind of like that discussion around climate change policy needs to be very fluid for moments like that that are going to occur.

Needs to be disconnected from the Roman calendar, right? So, what kind of commonalities did you find with the Indigenous groups from around the world?

It was so similar. It just felt safe. Like we had days where it was just us in the room and we would kind of do a yarning circle – and we’d each, you know, we’d put a question and then all go around and talk. And it was just really, really lovely safe time. And I think that unspoken similarities allowed us to easily share and create and think about the future and what type of future we would like. And it was always about that connection to place and what place meant to us as people. And that was the most important thing, I think, was that we felt like: We are Country. And that was the common link, I guess, between us all, definitely.

Can you tell me about the importance of storytelling in this work, in this paper?

Yes. I really like that science can be challenged into what communication is. And I think art is a really important part of that storytelling. And it’s about communication of our work and communication of our experience as people. And so, storytelling was so important. And so, being able to allow the individuals to tell their story, how they wanted to, was really important because that’s how they were told. That’s how they learnt. It was about kind of knowledge transfer. And for Indigenous people, that’s essential. And I remember reading a paper and it was like it was really unusual that Aboriginal culture can orally pass down accurate information over such a long period of time because in other cultures it’s not. Like it’s not the same – just because of the way that the story is told and that it’s told over and over, again and again, and it becomes part of who you are. And so that’s, I think, the importance. Like really the key to storytelling is knowledge transfer.

And it’s that integration with art as well that helps you retain it to memory. If it’s in song, if it’s in dance, if it’s in visual art, then it’s much easier to remember. I’d love to hear more about the case studies that were in the paper. Can you tell me more about those?

So, we had the one from Greenland which touched on – each story did describe a little bit of colonisation that happened within their community. And so that’s what they discussed with the Greenland example. And then they talked about the inability to catch species because the species migrated before the fishing season was open. Because the Australian contingent, there were three of us and two palawa men and myself from Quandamooka, and so, our case study was kind of very short and split between Tasmania and Quandamooka Country. And I personally wrote about the importance of being able to continue to collect eugaries or pipis, because the middens on our island were like – they’ve been dated through Western scientific systems to 21,000 years. And so, it was kind of like we are still practising that culture. We’re bloodline to Country. We’ve been doing this for generations and we’re still doing it.

Over 21,000 years at least. I always like to say ‘at least’. Yes, that’s what Western science has caught up with, with the dating process. We know that they’re older.

Yeah. It’s amazing. And then we had a lovely chief from Haida Gwaii in Canada. Russ [Nang Jingwas] was just a really lovely human. He is really passionate about telling the story of Haida Gwaii because they’ve also worked with the Canadian Government to try and develop Haida Gwaii’s cultural views in with their marine management as well. So, there’s a few little examples of how people are trying to incorporate Indigenous knowledges within marine management. And then we have three case studies of people who weren’t actually there, because we realised that the contingent was still from predominantly white societies. So, like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sámi and Finland. And so, we asked some of our colleagues from other nations if they wanted to contribute as well, which was really lovely. But [Sutej] Hugu, who is from Taiwan, he is a great storyteller. He is like a philosopher the way he talks about things and talked about the Tao people from Orchid Island. And it’s a really beautiful story about how they are trying to generate their knowledge systems, but also trying to make it online so that they can pass it on to future children. He was explaining in that case study about the management of fisheries but from a cultural perspective. And it was like: closed seasons, open seasons; different people had different standings within the society. And so, that meant they were able to eat different species. And so, that was really important, I think, in highlighting like how that management is done by – it’s like linked with your identity and your identity gives you your role in society and how you are supposed to care for the environment. And I think, yeah, I would really like to explore that because we do that here in Australia as well. Your totem species: it’s like that’s basically another form of management if we really want to get rude about it.

Generally, you don’t eat your totem. You are responsible for looking after its environment and where it lives. So, obviously the ocean is a lot more than just a body of water. The ocean and all of the living things within it are connected. Why might we consider the ocean’s identity or personhood even?

So, for a lot of Indigenous cultures globally – and this came out in the Future Seas discussions – a lot of people see the ocean as Mother, and we came from the oceans. So, there’s a preface paper that was written by Tero [Mustonen] who is from Sámi Nation. They used an old Sámi example around the ocean being Mother. And then there was an example from Aotearoa as well about their connection to the ocean and how that is also like a Mother. And I think sometimes it’s really hard to put into words that connection with water. It’s that spiritual link that some – a lot of scientists don’t think should be a part of science, but it’s the reason why people do things. It’s the reason why people want to protect the oceans. It’s the reason why people, you know, get up in the morning sometimes. It cleanses people. It gives them strength to go on with their day. And telling the story that oceans are our ancestors, I don’t think people realise that.

Do you think sometimes, because science is basically an antithesis to religion – it’s the opposite of spirituality – that it’s really difficult for people that are hardcore scientists in the Western system to even entertain the possibility of something spiritual being integrated into it? Do you think that that’s maybe a barrier that comes into play when we’re looking at Indigenous science having that integration?

I do. I do think that. I often think about that split between: trying to be logical and contain everything in its own little ball, and that it has no interactions with anything else in the world, which isn’t the case. Everything is connected. And I think if more people understood their spiritual connections through science to the world, then we would be living very different lives. We would all be making different choices about how we consume things, about how we treat other people. How we treat the environment would be very different. And I do think that a lot of very classically trained Western scientists do struggle with that. And it’s okay. It’s okay to struggle or not understand it, but it doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. And I think that’s an important thing for them or people who have those thoughts to realise – is that it’s not wrong; it’s just a different way of interpreting the world.

It must have been really lovely to be surrounded by other Indigenous people from around the world working in the field of science, because we are few and far between unfortunately. But what role do you believe mentorship plays with being able to support young or new people in STEM fields who are Indigenous?

I think it’s really important. I didn’t think I had a role model in science. I mean, I realised I did because my cousin is Professor Chris Matthews and I went to his PhD dinner or something when I was at school. But I just didn’t really think too much about it because he’s in mathematics. But I definitely think it would have been easier if I had seen other young – or not even young – other Indigenous people in STEM fields, particularly biology or ecology. That would have made a big difference for me. And I think it’s why sometimes I put a little bit too much time in mentorship, because it does take time from your actual work. But I was doing something – where was I? At the World Science Festival, the first year it was in Brisbane, and they had a group of school students from Poruma, and they were in the audience and I was on a panel talking about Indigenous science and marine science. And then afterwards the museum sent me some feedback from the school students. And one of the lines was: I didn’t know that there were Indigenous scientists, but now I’ve seen her I know I could do that too. And I was like: Oh, yeah. It was just like: Okay, this is –

I would have cried.

So this is really important to make sure that – it’s uncomfortable in trying to be visible because people are like: It’s not your job. But it’s actually a really important thing to be doing, to put yourself in uncomfortable positions, because even if just one person sees you and goes: Oh! And remembers you when they’re ticking all those boxes at school about what subjects they want to do. Like, I think that that’s all that matters.

Thank you very much. Please join me in thanking Mibu everyone. Now to follow the program online you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording, go to 100climateconversations.com.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.