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This post is part of a series entitled “Land, Memory, and Schooling: Environmental Histories of Colonial Education.” You can find the introduction here.
This post and series discuss Indian residential and day schools. Please take care as you read. If you are a Survivor or intergenerational Survivor of residential or day school and you need help, there’s a free 24-hour support line. Call 1-866-925-4419. Additional resources are available here.
Taylor Galvin is one of the inaugural fellows in the First Nations Women Transforming Conservation Fellowship, sponsored by the Indigenous Leadership Initiative (ILI) and Wildlife Conservation Society Canada (WCS Canada). Initiated in 2025, the fellowship is designed to “empower First Nations women to envision and build vibrant, resilient communities” that reflect Indigenous ways of knowing, doing, and being. We caught up with Taylor while she was in New York for Climate Week. This is a transcript of our conversation. It has been edited for clarity and length.
Can you introduce yourself and tell NiCHE readers a little bit about yourself?
My name is Taylor Galvin. My traditional name is Ozaawi Mashkode Bizhiki (Brown Buffalo). I’m a member of the Sturgeon clan from Baaskaandibewiziibing (Brokenhead Ojibway Nation) in Manitoba, Canada.
I’m also a graduate student at the University of Manitoba, doing a Master’s of Environment that focuses on Indigenous science, storytelling, and the conservation of sturgeon. Furthermore, I’m one of the inaugural fellows with the Indigenous Leadership Initiative and Wildlife Conservation Society Canada.
I do a lot of other things at the university, including teaching. I’m co-instructing a course this term, the first of its kind at the University of Manitoba, on Indigenous-led conservation.
Despite all of those titles, I’m really just a water protector at heart.
How did you step into that role as a water protector? How did you come to understand that was your responsibility?
I can’t really explain when, because we’re born with it as women. It’s something that we’re born with as Anishinaabe people. Women are inherently the water protectors as life givers, though that’s actually not a term that I care to use because I myself am not a life giver. But we can carry life in our wombs, through the water. And so spiritually we are water protectors at heart and always will be.
So, there wasn’t a particular time that I can pinpoint where I was like, I’m a water protector now. I’ve just always advocated and provided a voice for her in times of need.
How have residential and day schools impacted your lands, waters, and ways of life?
The majority of us, of Indigenous peoples, are generational or intergenerational residential school Survivors, myself included. Our language, our ceremonies, our songs, our teachings, they stopped when my family members were forcibly removed from community to residential school.
My grandmother was the first that we know of in our family to go to residential school. She attended the Brandon Indian Residential School. She was a fluent language speaker. And she lost everything.
Within a single generation, we lost it all.
My parents, my dad, they never reclaimed that. And so, I grew up very ashamed, with a lot of guilt, and not wanting to ever be acknowledged as Indigenous. It was something that I was just so embarrassed of.
It’s very disheartening to think about, but at the same time, I’m a very firm believer that everything happens for a reason, and my life went the way it went because it was my responsibility to be the one in my family to reconnect and to revitalize and reclaim all of those teachings.
“The work that I do, it may be science, but it’s also spirit.”
The work that I do, it may be science, but it’s also spirit. My parents have since told me that I’m their teacher now, which is kind of interesting. The tables have turned over the years. So residential school definitely impacted me. I wish I grew up knowing all these things, but I’m also very fortunate that I did grow up on First Nations and so I always had that familiarity with what it was like to be on the land and be with the water. It was more a lack of identity that I had to face.
Funnily enough, it wasn’t until I went back to university that I started to understand more about our histories, about residential schools, because my nan, my kookum, she never spoke about it and neither did my uncles. We don’t even know if my grandfather went to residential school because he never talked about his past ever.
When I think about the impacts of residential schools, I think a lot about this quote by the very amazing Murray Sinclair, who said it was education that got us in this mess, and it’ll be education that gets us out. That’s very interesting because it was literally going back to post-secondary school that helped me get to where I am today and has opened the door for a lot of different opportunities. It also introduced me to my peers, who were down the same path. We started to build relationships in that place. I also met my partner at university. He grew up with culture and spirit. He and his family have introduced me to a lot of the knowledge that I carry. It’s kind of ironic that those are the same institutions that removed us.
I like to be somebody that always looks ahead rather than someone who looks backwards. And that’s not to say that I would ever forget about what happened, but at the same time, I don’t want to hold myself back in those places of trauma or the things that I’ve lost in my youth and childhood. Rather, how do I build this back up so the next generation of youth don’t have to go through those things and they have access to all of our knowledge systems?
That’s an excellent segue for the next question, which is how is Indigenous-led conservation helping to repair those disconnections, restore what has been lost?
This is something I talk about all the time because I’m part of this movement of Indigenous-led conservation that includes Indigenous protected and conserved areas (IPCAs), the rights of nature, legal personhood for certain natural landscapes. These are all being led by Indigenous people.
There’s a lot of understanding of Mother Earth that western science will never be able to grasp. This is where we as Indigenous scientists, environmental scientists, biologists, climate scientists have a big advantage over western scientists because we have the ability to walk in two worlds. We have the ability to walk in the western science world, and we have the ability to also walk in a spiritual world, in our connective world, our relationship world, full of kinship and love of the land and water. Western scientists can’t do that. They can learn, but it will never be the same.
“We need to acknowledge that Indigenous science and Indigenous-led conservation are practices that are thousands of years older than western science.”
We need to acknowledge that Indigenous science and Indigenous-led conservation are practices that are thousands of years older than western science. They have been around for as long as we can remember, and they always will be.
Something that is very important to me and is a responsibility that I have is to continuously advocate for Indigenous science and Indigenous-led conservation. One of the reasons that we’re here at New York Climate Week is to advocate for the need for land guardians and water protectors because we are the ones experiencing drastic environmental changes in real time. We’re also real-time data collectors because we live with the land and the water.
I’m currently teaching an Indigenous-led conservation course at the University of Manitoba, There are 15 students in the class. Most of them are non-Indigenous students, which is typical for environmental sciences. I say this so humbly, but after every class so far, students have come up to me to say they had no idea about Indigenous histories, science, conservation. They never learned about it when they were in high school or wherever they were before. Or if they did, it was always taught by a non-Indigenous person and all they ever talked about was truth and reconciliation. There was never any substance to the way they were educated. And so to have an Indigenous person, who is in Indigenous sciences, who is very connected to the land and all of the beautiful things that we carry, it’s clearly something that’s needed.
Passionate students come from passionate educators. But also, our ways are different. When we’re out on the land, we use things like storytelling and songs and the movements of water and our language to monitor and mitigate some of the environmental harms. That’s another thing that western science doesn’t understand: the importance of storytelling. And for me, storytelling is one of the most sustainable forms of science and protection. Our stories are so old.
“I always hear people say we should integrate Indigenous knowledge into western science when we should absolutely not do that because Indigenous knowledge and science is a very ancient form of research that deserves to stand on its own rather than being integrated into another colonial system.”
I always hear people say we should integrate Indigenous knowledge into western science when we should absolutely not do that because Indigenous knowledge and science is a very ancient form of research that deserves to stand on its own rather than being integrated into another colonial system.
They have to recognize the validity and the truth behind our worldviews and our knowledge systems and give them the same if not more attention, including funding.
Is there anything else that you want readers to know, or that you want to talk about?
I want them to know the importance of trust and relationship building. If you want to work with Indigenous communities in a very reciprocal and meaningful way, you have to be willing to put in the time to build those relationships, to build trust within the communities, because we’ve been the subjects of research for long enough. We’ve seen people enter into our communities—researchers, the province, the feds, fisheries, etc.—and leave without ever saying a word or without ever showing us the data. That a hundred percent needs to change.
Also, the work that needs to be done doesn’t end when the funding ends, it doesn’t end when your timeline or your deadline indicates. Usually, research identifies things that need to be done to fix a problem or help a community. It’s important that that work happens.
Feature Image: Two feathers standing up in the sand with blurry human legs in the background. Photo Credit: Taylor Galvin.
Taylor Galvin
Latest posts by Taylor Galvin (see all)
- Our Stories Are Science: Taylor Galvin on Land, Memory, and Indigenous Futures - November 25, 2025