Respectful Relationships: Investing Ourselves in the Foundations of Research

The Membertou community—small working groups as well as the community at large—has been involved since 2014 in collaborative research with faculty and students based at the Centre for Sound Communities (CSC) at Cape Breton University, with the support of federal (Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Canada 150 Fund), provincial (Nova Scotia Research and Innovation Trust), and university investment. Founded and directed by Ostashewski, the CSC is an arts-led social innovation lab that works to effect positive social and cultural change in the communities it serves. Its work involves research-creation through artistic practice (primarily dance, music, theatre, and digital media), training for students, faculty, and community partners, and helping to develop community capacities, connections, and access to resources. Since 2017, Membertou-based researchers and CSC-based faculty have been working together on a project to recover local Mi’kmaw histories, honour Mi’kmaw traditions and practices, and move towards meaningful reconciliation, a process that has received further impetus from the work of the TRC. Initiated in response to a class action lawsuit by survivors of Indian Residential Schools against the Canadian Government and the churches that had run the schools, the Commission travelled throughout Canada over six years to hear from survivors of the schools. Its Principles (2015c:V–VI) and its ninety-four Calls to Action (2015a) are intended to lay a foundation for reconciliation. Reconciliation, according to the Commission, “is about establishing and maintaining a mutually respectful relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples in [Canada]. In order for that to happen, there has to be awareness of the past, acknowledgement of the harm, that has been inflicted, atonement for the causes, and action to change behaviour” (2015b:113).

As our research group reflected on these points, the idea arose for a project to address local histories and experiences, shaped by encounter, settler colonialism, and migration, building on the CSC’s model of critical, creative research that integrates intergenerational and intercultural exchange; that project would become Songs and Stories. Our research group is investigating the experiences and impacts of the forced relocation of the Kun’tewiktuk (“Kings Road”) Reserve community to the present-day Membertou First Nation location. In Songs and Stories, we share what we learn with the wider community in different ways and times, to raise awareness of what we are learning and to obtain feedback for next steps. Our arts-based research processes are designed to facilitate and support Indigenous leadership as one way of redressing historical inequities in research and relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, and to help establish a practice of the study of Indigenous histories, experience, and knowledge with and by Indigenous people (possibilities that have been noted more generally by Ninomiya and Pollock Reference Ninomiya and Pollock2017 and Whitlow et al. 2019).

If violence is inherent in structures of power, which constrain rather than empower people, particularly the underrepresented, underserved, and colonised, as Araujo (Reference Araujo2008) and others suggest, then research-creation can disrupt historically inequitable research relationships. Collaborative research, in which non-Indigenous university-based researchers understand themselves as working in service to and support of the Indigenous communities, is particularly useful, as the research process can make amends, weakening power structures and suggesting new possibilities for relationship (see also Somerville Reference Somerville and Katelyn2014:3 and Lassiter Reference Lassiter, Atkinson, Delamont, Cernat, Sakshaug and Williams2019). Such practices can, however, lead to puzzlement. For instance, Ostashewski delivered a twenty-minute presentation about Songs and Stories research at ICTM Bangkok Reference Ostashewski, Marshall, Cheetham and MacDonald2019, highlighting activities that were led by the group’s Indigenous researchers. The presentation included a fourteen-minute film of Membertou-based collaborators speaking about activities and outcomes of the project. In the question period, Ostashewski was asked: “Then what did you do?” The following section responds to that question, and to the many times before and since that non-Indigenous researchers have asked her how they might contribute to such collaborative projects.

One of Ostashewski’s roles in this research is to facilitate recording and reporting on our research processes and outcomes. That research itself, however, is largely led by Indigenous community-based researchers, supported by university-based researchers. Thus, while Ostashewski has taken a lead in authoring this article, the co-authors have been consulted repeatedly in the process and have been involved in the writing. Contributors’ own words are used, and are acknowledged throughout. Collectively, we are continually exploring means of acknowledging the contributions of co-researchers—contributions to the varied elements of research practice, data collection, and knowledge creation, and to mechanisms of sharing the research in ways that are culturally appropriate and culturally relevant (Younging Reference Younging2018). The concept of “ally” (Davis Reference Davis2010) serves well to describe the nature of the relationships that are core to the methodology, particularly aspects of authentic relationships and friendship (Christian and Freeman Reference Christian, Victoria and Lynne2010; Snow Reference Snow2018; Diamond Reference Diamond2008). Having collaborated with Snow and other non-Indigenous as well as Mi’kmaw co-researchers in Unama’ki, Ostashewski recommends Snow’s recent publication, which extends Kirkness and Barnhardt’s (Reference Kirkness, Barnhardt, Hayoe and Pan1991) Four Rs for researchers (to be respectful, relevant, reciprocal, and responsible) to include also Indigenous rights; authentic relationships; returning to research participants for continual feedback, clarification, and dialogue; and engaging in constant reflection on one’s place and contributions with respect to Indigenous communities, lives, and issues (Snow Reference Snow2018). These practices align more generally with “Indigenist” (Wilson Reference Wilson2007) and Indigenous paradigms (Chilisa Reference Chilisa2012:19; Kovach Reference Kovach2009:95–96; Wilson Reference Wilson2003:176, Reference Wilson2007:194, Reference Wilson2008:39) that support relationships and contextualised knowledge for culturally specific and culturally relevant discourses and activities, for a research practice that is emergent, and for researchers to attend to how work is conducted at least as much as to what is being investigated.

The recognition that Indigenous people deal with individual and intergenerational impacts of traumatic experience due to colonialism, including residential schools, and that reconciliation is a process of “healing” relationships (TRC 2015b:3, 111), has led Ostashewski to a trauma-informed approach as the basis of work and training, supported by the CSC and affirmed by Mi’kmaw collaborators. According to Hopper, Bassuk, and Olivet, “Trauma-Informed Care is a strengths-based framework that is grounded in an understanding of and responsiveness to the impact of trauma, that emphasizes physical, psychological, and emotional safety for both providers and survivors, and that creates opportunities for survivors to rebuild a sense of control and empowerment” (Reference Hopper, Bassuk and Olivet2009:133). Although our research teams are not therapists or caregivers, we are mindful that underrepresented and underserved groups often have histories of hardships and face challenging circumstances. Given these concerns, our trauma-informed approach to research prioritises honesty, transparency, integrity, and accountability, as well as genuine care and kindness. Researchers’ actions and behaviours seek to inspire and maintain trust and avoid triggering trauma responses in others. For instance, many of our sessions open with an Elder’s or Traditional Knowledge Holder’s prayer to the Creator, asking that our actions and collective efforts reflect Indigenous values and care for one another. This respect-based interaction resonates with ideas such as “living from a place of love,” a frequent topic of discussion in our collaborative working group and a goal for our interactions with one another. As Henderson makes clear, that goal aligns closely with Mi’kmaw values—“the concept of empathic love is the foundation of the L’nu understandings of nature, humanities and law” (Reference Henderson and Battiste2016:48)Footnote ²—and with what Darnell has observed in Indigenous/non-Indigenous collaborations related to reconciliation and “the entailed commitments of our ongoing relationships”: “Words like beautiful and love and sincere are rarely found in academic discourse or in the mainstream political and legal rhetoric, but they recur matter-of-factly here and convey a content and commitment that I am unwilling to dismiss as wanton romanticism incompatible with ‘science’” (Reference Darnel, Michael, John and James2018:230).

Constructive, Creative, Collaborative Action to Address the Ongoing Legacies of Colonialism

Songs and Stories is of course situated within a local historical and research context. The Mi’kmaq in Cape Breton have historically been underrepresented, and their communities underserved. As a number of Mi’kmaw collaborators mentioned in conversations that led to the establishment of Songs and Stories, too little appears to be known, understood, or represented in public discourse regarding even the history of the Mi’kmaq who live closest to Sydney, where the university is located. This is true even among Mi’kmaq themselves; as youth co-researcher Noah Cremo remarks in the documentary film, very few people in the group had much prior knowledge regarding histories of the community and its families (Ostashewski et al. Reference Ostashewski, Marshall, Cheetham and MacDonald2019). To give only the barest outline of that history, Unama’ki is part of Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaw people. This territory is covered by the “Treaties of Peace and Friendship” (INAC 2015) that Mi’kmaw and Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) people signed with the British Crown in 1725. These treaties did not deal with surrender of lands and resources; rather, they recognised Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik title and established rules for what was to be an ongoing relationship between nations. Yet, in the first decades of the 1900s, after having already been restricted to reserve lands, the members of the Kun’tewiktuk (or Kings Road Reserve) Mi’kmaw community near the small city of Sydney, Nova Scotia, were forced by the Dominion of Canada to relocate to the current Membertou First Nation site, an event whose history and impact on the displaced Mi’kmaw residents historical publications are finally beginning to address (Membertou 2016; Walls Reference Walls2016).Footnote ³ Mi’kmaw educator Marie Battiste also makes mention of related oral history in her introduction to a recent edited collection outlining a Mi’kmaq humanities. She describes stories her parents told her about special places in their homeland and one “place in the history of the Mi’kmaq that should remain be [sic] in our memory” (Reference Battiste2016:vi). “One of those places is King’s Road where Mikmaq lived but were removed. The people of Sydney wanted the Mi’kmaw land on the shores of the harbour and created a backlash against them to get them removed” (2016:vi). Despite these and other extraordinary challenges, Membertou is a community characterised by resilience and prosperity.

Songs and Stories aims to foster awareness of this history, and supports efforts to make amends, for instance by making deliberate choices about how and with whom research is conducted, as well as through the impacts of that research. At the time of this writing, four phases of Songs and Stories have been carried out. The first three have been addressed in other publications, especially concerning youth expressions of transnationalism and identity, and the vital role of intergenerational relationships in community (Ostashewski et al. Reference Ostashewski, Frey and Johnson2018); and the resilience of Mi’kmaw people amidst histories of displacement and work carried out by a Membertou-based group of researchers to reclaim and honour the legacy of Mi’kmaw ancestors (e.g., Ostashewski and Johnson Reference Ostashewski, Johnson, De Quadros and Vu2020). The fourth phase, involving an ICTM Colloquium on the theme of Songs and Stories of Migration and Encounter (please refer to www.ictmusic.org/songs-and-stories-migration-and-encounter-26th-ictm-colloquium), was hosted by the CSC in October 2019 and facilitated through partnerships with several communities in different locations around Cape Breton Island.

Although we focus here on the final phase and on the dynamics of collaboration, we offer a brief overview of earlier phases. Songs and Stories began with a one-day pilot project facilitated by the CSC for Multicultural Day in Canada, on 27 June 2017. Indigenous and non-Indigenous community members wrote and performed songs and produced short video documentaries (Episode One, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3cGFe7-Ieg; Episode Two, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fbo6tdzoVQ). The song lyrics, based on participants’ experiences living in Cape Breton, acknowledged a long history of the presence of Mi’kmaq on the land as well as intercultural encounter and relationship. The second phase involved a six-week in-community workshop process at four locations around Cape Breton Island, beginning in September 2017. Our CSC-based team members visited each location weekly, meeting with the local research team members and participants. In addition to the university-based artist-researchers, these teams comprised community Elders and culture-bearers and youth local to each of the sites. The workshop process culminated in a shared performance of song and dance, in some cases building on findings from the pilot and extending them in new directions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNXI-YTZr8Y).

The processes developed in these phases have continued throughout the project. Our research-creation process employed stories and music as means of praxis, and used an emergent strategy of inquiry. The basic model, established through earlier CSC projects, involves an initial period during which the Elders and other culture-bearers are asked to share with the youth their knowledge and experiences related to a given topic. Though not exclusively an Indigenous practice, storytelling and sharing of oral histories in our work are directly informed by Indigenous traditions and research methods: “engaging with elders has been recognized as an essential means of accessing Indigenous knowledge and histories as oral histories” (with reference to Miller Reference Miller2011, in Ostashewski et al. Reference Ostashewski, Frey and Johnson2018:10). Knowledge-sharing gives rise to dialogue and discussion, led by the youth, involving Elders and other Knowledge Holders as well as faculty and research assistants. Following the discussion, the group engages in a process of collaborative creation of a work relevant to the young participants’ own lives. These central processes are supported as appropriate with technology-enhanced interactions and activities such as archival research, ethnographic interviews, digitisation of documents, and so forth. Processes vary as needs and interests emerge, with as much leadership as possible remaining with the youth, advised by the Elders and supported by university-based researchers.

The third and largest phase of the project, lasting six months (January to June 2018), emerged through a request from Membertou First Nation, the most active participants in the second phase. Responding to interest from community members, Shaylene Johnson proposed a new workshop, possibly creating a song about the forced relocation of the Kun’tewiktuk community from their Kings Road Reserve to the current Membertou site. We have described the creative work of this phase elsewhere (Ostashewski and Johnson Reference Ostashewski, Johnson, De Quadros and Vu2020); here we focus on the essential and inevitably personal process of building a mutually respectful and collaborative team.

Johnson’s involvement was invaluable, given her unique combination of experience as a Traditional Singer, university researcher, and community organiser. Her efforts helped engage about a dozen Membertou youth aged seven to sixteen, primarily teenagers, who participated at different stages of this phase. Johnson also facilitated the participation of Elders, including Shirley Christmas and Clifford Paul, as well as those known as community historians, including Nelson Paul, Peter J. Paul, and Dr. Peter Christmas. Additional participants included Graham Marshall, a Traditional Drummer, a student in a course on Indigenous musics that Ostashewski was facilitating, and a member of Membertou’s Council who had also worked with Mi’kmaw youth; Marshall shared news of our activities with many different people in the community. Towards the end of our workshop process, other culture-bearers, including some from other Mi’kmaw communities, joined the group, among them Jeff Ward, Karina Matthews, Shawnee Paul, and Kalo Nicholas. As a consensus developed to create a theatrical production rather than a single song, we drew on the skills of Shirley Christmas, a published poet, CBU’s theatre director and devised theatre expert Todd Hiscock, who also had strong family connections to the Membertou reserve, and Sheila Christie, also of CBU’s drama programme. In short, our team developed through an ongoing process dependent on engaged commitment, personal and community relationships, and trust. Aside from CBU faculty members and a graduate student research assistant, all workshop participants identified as Mi’kmaq or L’nu.

The emergent and relational basis of our work is perhaps clearest in the process by which the Membertou Elders Advisory Council granted us permission to access local Indigenous archives. In response to a request crafted with advice from Elders and Knowledge Holders, the Council invited a small group (Shaylene Johnson, Clifford Paul, and Ostashewski) to meet with them. Our introductions included our roles in the project, but also our places in our communities, and our families and origins. After an extended and positive discussion, some Elders noted their concern for the safety of the archives as a resource for continuing the Mi’kmaw language and protecting the community and its cultural practices. Ostashewski’s response noted not only their awareness of the vital importance of language, but also her personal connection to the issue; despite her very different background, her experience as a member of a Ukrainian family whose mother had fought for bilingual education, and her role as a cantor in the local Ukrainian church, allowed her to appreciate the significance of being able to use one’s own threatened language in culture and worship, just as is the case with Mi’kmaw. She recalls feeling that the Elders appreciated this parallel, and shortly after the meeting, the Elders granted access, or, as Johnson phrased it, “the blessing from Elders for permission” (Ostashewski et al. Reference Ostashewski, Marshall, Cheetham and MacDonald2019). This story of productive interaction between Indigenous and non-Indigenous interlocutors demonstrates the trust and empathy that can develop through mutual respect and shared personal experience.

The musical elements of the play were also shaped by our collaborative, collective process. As the arc of the narrative began to take shape, Nelson Paul indicated when it was a good time to bring in the songs and music; by consensus, the group asked for musicians who could sing traditional songs with a hand drum, as well as play fiddle tunes that were both enjoyed by Mi’kmaw communities and represented the Europeans coming to Unama’ki. Nelson Paul describes his thinking as he guided our musical choices:

As Jeff Ward observed, “Each song told a story…and perfectly connected with a time but also with a message, what we are passing on to one another” (Ostashewski et al. Reference Ostashewski, Marshall, Cheetham and MacDonald2019).

The intensive learning and creative activity that developed from our team’s strong relationships begin to suggest the unique potential of arts-based research methods, which, as Patricia Leavy has noted, require “openness to the spontaneous and the unknown” (Reference Leavy2015:20), as well as the collaborative and caring approach discussed above. We continued to draw on both Indigenous and settler ways of knowing, skills, capacities, and other resources, and participants contributed according to their abilities, resources, and interests. Elders and other Knowledge Holders, for example, shared oral histories and allowed our team to make video and audio recordings. The discussions that arose from this sharing led us to further questions and stories, to exploration of related traditional teachings, and to searching both local and national archives. We amassed a body of data that included oral histories, trial and interview transcripts, community history magazines, materials from personal archives, recordings and transcriptions of our workshops and meetings, and a bibliography of further resources. This rich and varied corpus provides a concrete example of how collective artistic inquiry and more familiar research methods can service and enrich one another (Leavy Reference Leavy2015:20).

The final words that Shirley wrote for the play, as it was performed on 21 June 2018, were a resounding call to action:

Shirley’s words reflected our collaborative research process; they also reflected the process of traditional Mi’kmaw basket-making preparations and weaving that were woven through the play, metaphorically in its structure as well as embodied in performance, interspersed with storytelling of Kun’tewiktuk families’ experiences, and dialogue from the court process. Through the performance, the knowledge we had shared and developed was further shared with the wider community (more than 400 people attended that day)—and the working group asked that the community take up the process of sharing the knowledge with future generations. We had begun our research with prayer and song; onstage, the play began with a prayer, an offering to Mother Earth. In our research process, the Elders shared their knowledge; onstage, the actors shared stories and knowledge that had been brought to light through our research. Our research was characterised by a commitment to complete work together, and to work in a good way. Likewise, the actors committed themselves to the performance. Our carefully crafted play, a vessel made of strands woven together, was gifted to the audience, to the broader community. It was also a request to the community to help to carry this heavy knowledge, so that it would no longer be only the young people of the working group but the wider community continuing to do the work of remembering and creating together, for the benefit of future generations (see Cape Breton Post 2018).

The most recent phase of Songs and Stories involved an ICTM Colloquium, also entitled Songs and Stories of Migration and Encounter, hosted by the CSC and several communities around Cape Breton Island. This four-day event began in Membertou on October 9, 2019, with traditional songs and drumming by Graham Marshall and close friends; Marshall also welcomed those present and introduced the project, setting the context for a short documentary film about our process. This film, too, is an example of the responsive practise of the group. Initially, our working group submitted a proposal to the ICTM World Conference in Bangkok (July 2019) for Ostashewski and at least one Membertou-based co-researcher to present the work. When it appeared that funding limitations would make this proposal impossible, the working group decided to create a film in which Membertou-based participants speak about their experience and its significance from their perspectives (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhqrUb3h_Qo).Footnote ⁴

The film’s production provides another example of intensive commitment and collaboration, as well as a demonstration of the ways in which different organisations, from the most localised to the broadest international group of researchers, work together to support, share, and learn together. The film is also the result of the organisation of Membertou lending their support to this research. Ostashewski normally has access to film production staff through the CSC, but in that particular window staff time had been oversubscribed. Thankfully, the corporate bodies within Membertou First Nation were able to lend the time of a film production staff member, Kim Cheetham, who worked with our research team. Cheetham generously donated some of her own time to ensure that the film was prepared in time for preview in Edmonton, and then revised before the Bangkok presentation. Marshall’s presentation at the local ICTM Colloquium afterwards meant that finally a community member was able to present from his own perspective, on his own—and the research was shared with a new group of scholars, in the context in which it was carried out. These were all means used to share our research with ever-widening circles of people in dialogue with other research on the theme, through the support of an international scholarly society.

Indigenous Methodologies and Research-Creation: Weaving Methods, Relationships, Baskets

In Arts of Engagement (Robinson and Martin Reference Robinson and Martin2016), Byron Dueck and several other scholars observe and analyse Canada’s TRC process, noting the essential public role of ceremony and song. Our work, like theirs, inhabits aesthetic and artistic realms, with the goal of reconciliation, but rather than observing an intervention, the current work was conceived as an intervention fostering reconciliation. In this final section we focus on our actions, the process of weaving together the methodologies of the co-researchers, especially Indigenous methodologies and research-creation, to facilitate learning and foster reconciliation.

Mi’kmaw methodologies and traditional ways of teaching and learning “in a circle” were central to our processes, as Clifford Paul’s description of our process of teaching and learning together, featured in our short film, makes evident:

In the film, Graham Marshall also notes the sacred nature of the focus of our research, the relationships of the people involved with their community as well as with their ancestors, the transmission of the knowledge intergenerationally, and the performance of knowledge in the form of a theatrical production:

Several of the co-researchers of all generations, including two youth, Noah Cremo and Graham Curtis Marshall, observe in the film that our research process has provided those in the working group and the community with opportunities to learn about the history and experiences of the families of Kun’tewiktuk, what they experienced in the move—and, as Shaylene Johnson points out, the racism and prejudices they dealt with (Ostashewski et al. Reference Ostashewski, Frey and Johnson2018, Reference Ostashewski, Marshall, Cheetham and MacDonald2019).

The centrality of relationships evident in our process—allowing the development of what Morin (Reference Morin, Robinson and Martin2016:71) has called “this space where Indigenous knowledge meets settler ways of being”—has also been widely acknowledged by other scholars of Indigenous research. For example, Wilson (Reference Wilson2008) writes about Indigenous research as a ceremony of achieving enlightenment and of maintaining accountability to the relationships that are inherent even in how we select topics, methods of data collection and analysis, and forms of presentation. For instance, when Johnson and Ostashewski participated in a CSC workshop on digital humanities and data management, Johnson remarked that “data management happens at the sacred fire” (16 March Reference Ostashewski, Frey and Johnson2018, pers. comm.). Johnson went on to say that “the sacred fire plays a part in safeguarding traditional knowledge, for example, how it is shared and with whom, in what circumstances, for what purpose. The sacred fire plays a part in how that knowledge is received as well.” She explains how she understands the two concepts come together:

Addressing the potential impacts of knowledge, Diamond has also observed that “Elders emphasize that some things which are good in one situation can become bad in others” (Diamond and Witmer Reference Diamond and Witmer1994:18). The notion of the integrity of knowledge also resonates with the experience Johnson, Paul, and Ostashewski had when requesting the Elders Advisory Council, charged with protecting the community’s knowledge, for permission to access the Membertou archives.

The importance of our focus on the critical, creative, and collaborative work that is respectful of the ceremonial and the sacred becomes all the more clear when we recognise song, ceremony, visual arts, action, and performance as core aspects of Mi’kmaw knowledge and experience:

As linguist Stephanie Inglis writes, Mi’kmaw language is based on action, and on the relationality of knowledge; it “indicate[s] how speakers and listeners during a speech act, i.e. conversations are connected to each other in terms of shared knowledge and experience [emphasis in the original]” (Inglis Reference Inglis2004:397). A practice-based ethnomusicology of “aesthetic action” (Robinson and Martin Reference Robinson and Martin2016:2) may thus be uniquely relevant and expedient in such contexts as the Mi’kmaw community of Membertou, in which doing, experience, and relationships between knowers and doers and knowledge are fundamental.

Our work in Songs and Stories emerged from the context of Indigenous community needs, histories, and experiences, guided largely by local Indigenous paradigms, with related strategies that align with well-documented frameworks of Indigenous research (Wilson Reference Wilson2003:175, Reference Wilson2008:39). Our activities and time together involved traditional song and prayer and aspects of Mi’kmaw ceremony led by Elders and Tradition Bearers (Battiste Reference Battiste2016); our methods involved stories and oral histories of relations, all founded on respectful, caring, authentic relationships (Bull Reference Bull2011). The sharing of/access to knowledge was governed and managed by Elders, in the traditional manner, seeking to convey that knowledge to future generations. Wilson has written more broadly of the significance of this continued learning as part of Indigenous paradigms:

Nelson Paul also noted in our film that the involvement of the youth in our process of discovery has encouraged their continued investigations into community and family histories, thus supporting a continued process of learning for the community (Ostashewski et al. Reference Ostashewski, Marshall, Cheetham and MacDonald2019).

Graham Marshall describes in our film “what was so significant about this play, Kun’tewiktuk, and what it meant to the community as a whole—…it was a place that we were able to open a door into history and show the people how it was back in the early 1900s” (ibid.), and the experience of being forcibly removed. Here we share the observations of Clifford Paul, whose wise words are presented to conclude this article, just as they were chosen to conclude our film. Paul describes what he feels are the most crucial outcomes of our work together in creating Kun’tewiktuk: