Prompt 7
For research and innovation week here at Lakehead University, I attended Rita Wong’s lecture titled Follow the Water, Stand with the Land. Overall it was a very interesting lecture to listen to and I really enjoyed hearing about Rita’s own experiences and stories about the many trips she has been on and what she learned during her work.
The topic of the lecture:
Rita Wong spoke about the climate crisis and how we as people must take action to not continue to take from the land and instead learn to live with the land, not against it. The lecture's big focus was on how oil companies such as CGL ( Coastal Gaslink) contribute to the climate crisis and disturb the land of Indigenous people who work so hard to maintain a good relationship with the land and live sustainably. Rita also talked about the massive hydro dam that would negatively impact the ecosystem along the Peace River. Rita shared some of her written work and one point that stood out to me was how she compares us to water because our bodies are 60% water. She explained how it is so important to keep our bodies clean much like how we want to keep our waterways clean and safe from pollutants from big companies. Her main message of the whole lecture was that water is essential for helping the climate crisis and preventing massive oil companies from invading and risking damage to a fragile ecosystem that is also on the land owned by indigenous people.
Methodology:
I tried to jot some notes down during the lecture, but Rita moved quite fast through her presentation, preventing me from getting some good notes down. From what I did get in terms of notes I would say Rita used a lot of primary research to get her facts about the topic. Using her own experiences and what she has learned from those experiences is what she used to back a lot of her points during the presentation. One example is Rita talked about was a trip she went on and she saw a river that was still one of the few rivers still safe enough to drink straight from the river. Unfortunately, I forget the name of the river she mentioned because I was not able to get that down in time. Rita expresses her work and research into her poems and writing, she takes her messages and portrays them in an artistic way that still shows the true message as to what Rita wants her readers to know. She had some great points bringing up how the expansion of the pipeline would be detrimental to the forest and potentially the water.
I would say she was successful in some ways, such as expressing her knowledge and what she has learned in an artistic way using her poems and other writing. But does not do as good of a job backing her facts with scientific research she instead goes by what she has learned from first-hand experiences such as her work in indigenous communities and seeing the destruction of forests and polluted waters.
