How Canada and New Zealand are making moves toward Indigenous engineering success.
Engineering is not a modern concept. For centuries, infrastructure has been designed and developed, and communities improved, in the name of problem-solving for the good of local communities.
In Canada, this engineering was conducted by the region’s indigenous people in line with strong values around sustainability and environmental stewardship.
So it makes little sense today that, as reported in the paper Indigineering: Engineering Through Indigenous Knowledge and Mino Pimachisowin, in certain regions such as Saskatchewan Indigenous people make up 16.3 per cent of the population but just 1.2 per cent of engineers.
The author of that paper is Cree Metis man John Desjarlais, a mechanical engineer. As well as being Chief Impact Officer for KIHEW Consulting and Research, and Executive Director of the Indigenous Resource Network, Desjarlais is a past President of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geo Scientists of Saskatchewan.
“Science is fantastic,” Desjarlais told create. “It’s really good for telling us how hot something is, how wet something is, how much weight a structure can hold, et cetera.
“But there is also a great need for an appreciation and integration of a more sweeping kind of understanding, a macro understanding of how things work. That includes things like migration patterns of various species, the relationship of weather and land to people, and the impact of real sustainability on relationships.
“It includes Indigenous value systems, encompassing ceremony and spirituality, as well as simply being a good person and living a good life. When we talk about Indigenous engineering, we’re talking about that and more.”
Indigenous engineering is not straightforward, but it holds powerful value in terms of outcomes of projects, community engagement and the business of engineering.
People come first
One significant benefit for engineering businesses that get Indigenous engagement right is in recruitment and retention.
Australia is no stranger to a lack of Indigenous representation in its engineering workforce. It’s also familiar with the fact that many more engineers are required to enable future project success.
In Canada, such a gap represents an opportunity.
“There’s a business case here,” Desjarlais said. There’s a population base that is greatly under-represented, and there’s an opportunity to attract and retain. So how do we recruit and retain Indigenous professionals? How do we support access programs, outreach and scholarship?
“This is a business issue now and, actually, the integration of Indigenous practice and knowledge into engineering is no longer optional – it’s table stakes.”
What does Indigenous engineering scholarship look like? At Canada’s University of Manitoba, the Price Faculty of Engineering runs an annual, four-month course that tasks students of Indigenous and non-Indigenous backgrounds with the development of processes and policies, to further include the views and knowledge of Indigenous people in the profession.
The course covers topics such as Indigenous ethics, Indigenous design, community consultations and Indigenous technologies. There’s even a week spent learning to build a tipi, guided by one of the university’s elders-in-residence.
Importantly, all students are equipped with information around the perspectives and types of knowledge required to collaborate positively with Indigenous people. It benefits young engineers as they are all likely to work with First Nations, Metis and Inuit communities, just as many Australian engineers are likely to deal with Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander communities.
One of the course designers, Dr Jillian Seniuk Cicek, said “we want students to understand that engineering is a subjective field, it is not neutral”.
“Values are at play, systems are in play, and if we can’t recognise those systems, we will continue perpetuating them.”
Desjarlais himself is a product of exceptional support throughout his engineering education. He said he may not have succeeded without the attention and support of various mentors.
“I needed help with certain issues,” he said. “I grew up in a remote northern community, and didn’t necessarily have the education, confidence and understanding. But knowing that I had people around me who had my back made a huge difference.”
People with such support will always succeed, he said.
Success is about relationships
When civil engineer Dr Kēpa Morgan, attended university in Auckland in the early and mid-1980s, he was the only Māori student in the engineering course. The learning content, he told Engineering New Zealand, was “entirely monocultural”.
Later, he was invited back to help make the faculty more inclusive, and he did this by creating a powerful environment of collaboration for the younger cohort.
“We’d bring in the senior students and say, ‘So you might not be feeling up for this, but you listen to them because they know how to survive’,” he said. “Then we played rugby, paddled waka, and built relationships around every single student. At the end of the stay we would say, ‘Look around, if any one of you fails, we all fail’.”
For the period that the program ran, the collaborative and supportive approach brought great success. Māori students in engineering became the highest performing cohort at the university.
Later, while working at the university as an academic, Morgan developed the Mauri Model Decision Making Framework. This brought age-old wisdom into the modern world of engineering.
“Pre-colonisation Māori had a very sophisticated way of observing,” Morgan said. “They understood, for example, the influence of the moon, the seasons, the sun and other things, such as Matariki [a cluster of stars, the appearance of which represent remembrance, joy and peace].”
The power of this knowledge, he explained, comes from the recognition of what normal is. If an engineer knows what normal is, they recognise what isn’t normal, what could threaten normal, and what developments could bring greater benefit.
Engineers with a broad world view, Morgan said, will understand that there are “different ways of knowing and experiencing engineering outcomes”. This will make them more innovative, and their work more holistic.