Interview with Dr. Brenda Murphy about Indigenous experiences in evacuations
Dr. Brenda Murphy of Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, talks about the importance of hearing directly from Indigenous communities about their experience in long-term emergency evacuations.
This interview was recorded at INAC’s national headquarters in Gatineau, Quebec on May 11, 2017, after a showing of From Displacement to Hope: First Nations Stories.
These video stories were funded by INAC’s Emergency Management Assistance Program (EMAP).
Download: MP4 format (84 Mb)
Transcript: Interview with Dr. Brenda Murphy
0:00-0:04: [On-Screen Text:From Displacement to Hope: First Nation Stories]
0:05-0:13: [On-Screen Text: Brenda Murphy, Professor and Chair of the Social and Environmental Justice Program, Wilfrid Laurier University] My name is Brenda Murphy. I’m a professor and Chair of the Social and Environmental Justice program at Wilfrid Laurier University.
0:14-0:17: [On-Screen Text: What is the importance of the Aboriginal Disaster Resilience Project (ADRP)?]
0:18-1:00: So this project is important for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s an opportunity for First Nation communities to be able to tell us about the evacuation experience in their own words. Indigenous communities have been experiencing a lot of evacuations over the last few years, and some folks are out on long-term evacuation. Many of those experiences are hidden and we don’t really hear about them. We tend to hear more about the sorts of things that happen…sort of like what’s happening right now, in Gatineau. We hear more about those things. We don’t hear so much from the First Nation communities. They also have a lot of information to share with us. So by doing these videos, on the one side we got to hear their stories and hear about their struggles but we also get to hear about their words of wisdom.
1:01-1:06: [On-Screen Text: How were First Nation communities chosen for this project?]
1:07-1:19: These communities were chosen because they have all been experiencing evacuations over the last few years, and they were willing to share their stories with us. They had knowledgeable people in the community who had stories that they wanted to share.
1:20-1:27: [On-Screen Text: In what ways does this project benefit First Nation communities?]
1:28-1:51: They, from their side, felt that by sharing their stories, we were validating their experiences. In many cases, some of these stories hadn’t even been shared with their own community, so they were looking at each other and going, I didn’t know that happened, or, you know, those sorts of things. So, amongst them, they were also learning from each other as we were doing the work, and so that is going to help the communities as well.
1:52-1:56: [On-Screen Text: What has your team learned as a result of this project?]
1:57-2:28: I think some of the takeaway messages that we have from this is that, first of all, as I say, First Nation communities facing and dealing with reconciliation have a lot of challenges, but they also have lots of experiences to share. As we move forward, it doesn’t matter what your work is, in any area of INAC or other organizations, this is a real opportunity to co-produce knowledge, to work with communities one-on-one, to work with community members so that we can move the agenda on reconciliation forward.
[On-Screen Text: Copyright: Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada, 2017.]