'A quest for wisdom': How two-eyed seeing mixes Indigenous knowledge and Western science in N.S.

On a hot day in the height of summer, Tracy Marshall and I stood on the banks of the Halfway River, watching as the trickle of muddy water slowly widened with the incoming tide from the Bay of Fundy. 

Tracy and I had started talking about collaborating on a documentary several months earlier about two-eyed seeing, or etuaptmumk, which attempts to bring together the lens of Indigenous knowledge and that of Western science, to see the world from both perspectives.

But with the delays caused by the pandemic, it was only in the middle of July that we were able to talk in person for the first time, as we watched local fisherman Darren Porter winching his boat into the river, in preparation for work on a project guided by the principles of two-eyed seeing. 

It was fitting that Tracy, a science student from Potlotek First Nation who also works with the Bras d'Or Lakes Collaborative Environmental Planning Initiative, and I, a settler journalist with a focus on the environment, had met on this riverbank to work on a project on two-eyed seeing, which began as a mission to teach science differently but has become an approach that's reshaping science itself.

"Some people call it a true science," said Porter, as we stepped into his boat. "To me, it's a quest for wisdom, ecosystem wisdom."

On the Halfway River, Lachlan Riehl, who oversees monitoring projects in the Avon River watershed for the Confederacy of Mainland Mi'kmaq, watched as members of the team dropped traps and set out nets, to check for the presence of American eel, tomcod and gaspereau.

A tidal barrier once blocked the flow of water upriver at this site, but in 2017, that barrier failed, allowing seawater to move through the ecosystem.

In 2019, the barrier was restored, despite advice from scientists to leave the river open. A coalition of researchers from Acadia University, local fishermen like Porter, and staff from the Confederacy of Mainland Mi'kmaq are now monitoring the system, to see what effect that barrier is having on fish species.

"We've come together to really put the two-eyed seeing approach on this," said Riehl. "So, basically, a recommendation will come forward, from the science we've done, to the chiefs on what to do with that."

As the team started hauling in traps, they passed wands over the bodies of wriggling eels and silvery tomcod. When the scanners beeped, they recorded the tag numbers, a process that allowed them to track how many times fish have passed through the barrier, which in turn provides a sense of how much the barrier is impacting the health of the species.

"And then we have multiple species in multiple rivers, then we have partial barriers, full barriers, fully open systems, within the study," said Porter. "That's when you put it all together, because we're all working together, we share everything."

The use of a two-eyed seeing approach on rivers feeding into the Bay of Fundy has shaped how the research has been carried out, and the priorities shaping the work.

Yet the roots of this approach can be traced to Unama'ki Cape Breton, which is where Tracy and I found ourselves in August, at the home in Eskasoni of Elder Albert Marshall.

"As wonderful as science is, science cannot see nature from an Aboriginal lens," Albert told us, as we sat around his kitchen table.