The Future of Indigenous Rights and Responsibilities: Ancestral governance, environmental stewardship, language revival, and cultural vibrancy.

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The project focuses on Indigenous rights and priorities. Working in the ancestral territories of the K'omox, Pentlatch, and E'iksan (Vancouver Island, Canada) and Maori (Aotearoa, New Zealand), the project will do in-depth work with ancestral leadership, place based origin stories, environmental stewardship, cultural societies, dance groups and language specialists. It will address four of the most pressing issues for the local Indigenous communities: 1) the renewal of ancestral governance, 2) environmental stewardship, 3) language revival, and 4) cultural revitalisation. The project takes practical approaches to raise community awareness of customary rights and responsibilities to the land, ocean, and ecosystems. It will help map family relations, reconnecting community members with ancestral knowledge and trace their ties to different places and kinships. This work is decolonisation in practice, led by local needs and priorities. It is designed to help overcome knowledge lost to many community members though colonisation and cultural genocide, as documented in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Reports 2015. This project builds on the team members' independent work on decolonisation, cultural renewal and healing, and their international networks. The project will support an ongoing relationship of cultural exchange between Vancouver Island and Aotearoa. Working across cultures provides different models for cultural and language renewal, leadership and governance, and strategies to negotiate Indigenous-settler relationships. In Aotearoa, UNDRIP has not only been adopted into law, but it is now being measured against attainment goals, making it a step ahead of Canada that adopted UNDRIP in 2019.