Guest Editor’s Comments Special Issue Introduction

I want to start this editorial by expressing my sincere gratitude to everyone who has supported the publication of this special issue of JAED. I joined the editorial board of JAED two years ago, during a time of transformation. Penelope Sanz, JAED’s Managing Editor, and I discuss some of these recent changes to the editorial board in this issue’s concluding remarks. But in the meantime, I will use this editorial space to frame this issue of JAED by exploring the concept of Two-Eyed Seeing and what it means to me. Today, many academics and practitioners have heard about Two-Eyed Seeing. It is an approach that weaves between Western and Indigenous knowledge systems to create space for collaborative co-learning across different ontologies and epistemologies (Bartlett et al., 2012; Roher et al., 2021). This special issue was inspired by a conference held in Membertou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, in the fall of 2023. The conference, Muiwatmnej Etuaptmumk: “Two-Eyed Seeing From Vision to Action,” was organized by the Bras d’Or Lakes Collaborative Environmental Planning Initiative (CEPI) and its secretariat Unama’ki Institute of Natural Resources (UINR). The conference’s primary motivation was to honour and celebrate the work and words of Dr. Albert Marshall and his late wife, Dr. Murdena Marshall, who were both Elders in Eskasoni, as well as to celebrate their friend and collaborator Dr. Cheryl Bartlett. Being guided by the principles of Etuaptmumk/Two-Eyed Seeing was one of the eight lessons in their collaborative co-learning journey (Bartlett et al., 2012). The presentations delivered at the conference, and the articles in this special issue, demonstrate this lesson’s appeal. Over time, people have interpreted Two-Eyed Seeing in various ways, through their eyes, for their own journey. Personally, I refer to Etuaptmumk/Two-Eyed Seeing as a guiding principle honouring the teachings shared with me by Elder Albert Marshall, Dr. Bartlett, and the network of friends who continue to engage with them. When the Integrative Sciences Team adopted Two-Eyed Seeing as a guiding principle more than two decades ago, Elder Albert used the phrase to describe what he was witnessing all around him. At the time, he was working with L’nu Elders Charlie Joe Dennis, Murdena Marshall, Charlie Labrador, and others to transform the relationship between Mi’kmaw organizations and communities and various government departments: the Bras d’Or CEPI is a result of these efforts. While we have included Senator Daniel J. Christmas’ story of CEPI’s formation in Lessons From Experience, some background context might prove helpful here. The Bras d’Or Lakes CEPI arose in response to a request by the Cape Breton First Nations Chiefs in 2003. It was envisioned as “lead[ing] a unique collaboration of partners that incorporates both traditional Mi’kmaw and western perspectives in order to foster a healthy and productive Bras d’Or Lakes Watershed ecosystem” (Bras d’Or Lakes CEPI, 2011, p. 3): that is, it was formed to work through emerging social and interjurisdictional tensions to develop an overall environmental management plan for the Bras d’Or Lakes and watershed. Since its formation, CEPI has worked to enact Etuaptmumk/Two-Eyed Seeing by embracing the guiding principles of collaborative co-learning as established by the Integrative Science Program (Bartlett et al., 2012). CEPI continues to regularly host meetings and workshops with the broader local community and government partners from four levels of government—First Nations, federal, provincial, and municipal—to exchange information and stories and to foster collaborative co-learning relationships. In 2023, CEPI hosted a conference whose theme “Muiwatmnej Etuaptmumk” was a specific response to Elder Albert Marshall’s urgent call to move beyond just talking about Two-Eyed Seeing to enacting it in practice as a collaborative co-learning endeavour, both now …