Ken?

Um, sure.

So I'm a member of the Wolastoqey Nation in a community, uh, we call Nugotkuk, or Tobique First Nation.

It's up in, uh, northern New Brunswick.

We're very...

We're about fifteen minutes drive from the main border and an hour's drive from the Quebec border.

We're stuck in that area.

There's a reason why they were after that, is because they see the value of, of where we are and, and, and that knowledge and systems and survival and everything that's in our DNA is indispensable to solving this for all of humanity.

Ken, is there a particular experience you had that got you involved in this work? How did you get involved in this?

Well, it was mostly by accident.

You know, when I went through my early days at high school and university, I was math-minded, analytically-minded.

And I just took science courses and got a Bachelor of Science with a math major, not really understanding what, like... really where my career was going because you know when you're 22 23 years old like really who knows where you're going to be right um but somebody had um approached me and brought me on to a survey vessel to do hydrographic surveys of the ocean floor for a summer and then a summer job at newfoundland and i realized that that well first of all that was a career but um the importance of um really the ocean on our land-based economies, our societies.

And the hydrographic service, the mandate was to create maps so that ships would not run aground.

So it was a safety aspect, and I was dedicated to the cause.

But seven years into that career, as my first career job, that's when the Marshall decision came down in 1999.

There's even a saying, like, don't take the leader or something like that.