1 Knowledge linked to medicine and health is highly sought after by bio-prospectors and biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and human health care industries. Traditional knowledge is often at the core of new ideas in these industries. However, the Aboriginal people who contribute such knowledge rarely receive the benefit for these contributions but rather are much more likely to find themselves stripped of access to and use of such knowledge as a result of intellectual property regimes. For more details on Indigenous peoples and biopiracy, see Ikechi Mgbeoji (2006).

2 The 1998 Court of Queen’s Bench decision in R. v. Morin and Daigneault ([1996] 3 C.N.L.R. 157 (Sask Prov Ct.); aff [1998] 1 C.N.L.R. 182 (Sask.QB)) upheld that the effect of scrip on Aboriginal title was a separate question from its effect on resource use, holding that the Métis Aboriginal right to hunt and fish and gather for food was not extinguished. The question of Aboriginal title was not decided. It should be noted, however, that in these court actions, Métis women provided invaluable information regarding traditional knowledge to the court.

3 Clement Chartier, president of the Métis National Council and a resident of Northwest Saskatchewan, and Frank Tough served as the principal investigators on this project. Kathy Hodgson-Smith, who, at the time, was the research director for the Northwest Saskatchewan Métis Council, oversaw the design and implementation of the research, and also worked with a team of researchers who recorded the interviews. These interviews have since been summarized, but they have not yet been fully transcribed. We are grateful to the families who participated in this research, who also provided the photographs that appear in this chapter and gave their permission to reproduce them here. Nathalie Kermoal was a collaborator on Dr. Frank Tough’s CURA-SSHRC Grant Otipimsuak: Métis Land and Society in Northwest Saskatchewan.

4 Mapping was a challenge as the modern maps provided by the provincial government used in preparation of the personal maps of traditional use were often identified by place names that were unfamiliar to the Métis resource users. Names of lakes, streams, particular hunting and fishing territories, the location of settlement and burial grounds were mostly identified by Michif, Cree, or Dene names and not known by the names more recently assigned by governments. For example, the Métis Nation region of Northwest Saskatchewan which encompasses the communities of Buffalo Narrows, Michele Village, Black Point, St. George’s Hill, Turnor Lake, Garson Lake, Bear Creek, La Loche, and Ducharme is called the Clearwater Clear Lake Métis Region. This is one of the twelve regions in the governance structure of the Métis Nation-Saskatchewan. The map of Saskatchewan, as drawn by the provincial government, identifies this lake, known by the Métis as Clear Lake, as Peter Pond Lake. Traditionally, specific sites and waterways were often named after families from the area. For example in the community of Buffalo Narrows, the main channel joining the now named Churchill Lake and Peter Pond Lake is known as the Keizie Channel, named after the Keizie family. The province has named this channel the Kisis Channel. The Métis community has raised this naming issue with the government; however, to date, their concern has not been addressed. With many of the traditional resource users, orientation to maps of particular territories often took a lot of time and often required a translator. The elderly traditional knowledge holder was intimately familiar with their traditional territories and had never relied upon government maps that took an aerial view and showed these new place names and elevation levels. The study was undertaken on map scales of 1:200,000 to maintain privacy of particular use areas and to allow for a more general discussion of use and occupancy.

5 Data from the National Household Survey (NHS) show that “1,400,685 people had an Aboriginal identity in 2011, representing 4.3% of the total Canadian population. Aboriginal youth under the age of 25 represent almost half of the Aboriginal population in Canada” (Statistics Canada 2013, 4). Jeremy Hull’s study Aboriginal Youth in the Labour Market, notes that “between 2001 and 2026 more than 600,000 Aboriginal youth will turn 15, including more than 100,000 in each of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario. This growth represents a massive influx into the working-age population, particularly in Saskatchewan, where it is projected that by 2026, fully 36 percent of the population aged 15 to 29 will be Aboriginal” (Hull 2008, 41).

6 Aboriginal children under the age of 15 are more likely than their non-Aboriginal counterparts to live with their grandparents without either of their parents present. The 2006 census showed that 3 percent of First Nations children were living with their grandparents, as were 2 percent of Inuit children and 2 percent of Métis children. The proportion of non-Aboriginal children under the age of 15 years that lived solely with their grandparents was 0.4 percent (Statistics Canada 2010, 9).

7 As Trask notes, gender is a sociological construct that encompasses economic, social, and cultural distinctions between women and men, arising from their unique roles, authority, and cultural place. Indigenous peoples and societies delineate these roles. The pathway to “meaning” is through the expression of these unique roles through cultural protocols and in response to basic survival needs of the Indigenous society. She further discusses the fundamental value of the gift economy underlying the relationships that underpin Indigenous societies, and the reciprocity, a give and take, that infers the essential recognition of the value of mutual sharing, within the family and extended family networks, across societies and with the rest of human kind and the Creator. This essential value permeates the Indigenous view of their relationship to the land and the obligation as stewards to care for, nurture and protect the earth: Indigenous societies serve the earth and the lands provide. In this view, women have specific and highly specialized knowledge, have developed expertise and knowledge specific to the local environment, ecosystems, plants, animals and their uses, and contribute to the well-being of their families and communities through their key role in a gift economy. “The gift economy is diametrically opposed to the market economy. The Gift Economy is collective, the market economy favours individualism. The Gift Economy thrives when there is a bounty to be given. The market economy increases the price and fiscal value of items that are rare commodities. The values, activities, and outcomes of these diametrically opposed economy systems also conflict” (n.d., n.p.).