TEK Advisor

Imagine travelling across the country, visiting Aboriginal communities to meet and talk to people about their histories and traditional ways of life. You are amazed at the knowledge these communities hold and by the incredible artifacts that people show you. When you return home, you take all this information and enter it into databases and archives that you’ve designed. Soon, you’ll be forming a recommendation to the government about including TEK in today’s classrooms. Your hope is that because of your work Aboriginal students will be able to study traditional foods and medicines for credit in their biology classes and to study traditional homes and boats for credit in their physics classes.

As a traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) advisor, you conduct research in traditional ecological knowledge and then apply it to environmental projects. You collect their data and learn traditional knowledge by talking with Elders and community members. Most of your time is spent indoors, but there are outdoor aspects to this job. As a TEK advisor, you work both on your own and with others. Since a lot of your work is tied to Aboriginal land and history, you often work in your home community. When you work in your home community, you provide valuable knowledge to environmental impact assessments, land use plans, and other environmental projects. As a TEK advisor, you’ll learn many interesting things, but archival research can take a very long time and you may spend weeks looking for the right information. You’ll deal with some people who do not want to talk and other people who don’t want to stop talking.

Since the information you collect and store is not your own, you’ll have to be very careful when you share it. Although these things can make the job difficult, how many jobs allow you to research your own cultural history and spend days listening to the stories of your Elders?