Episode 9 | A Valuable Indigenous Mass Timber Perspective: Eladia Smoke

This is Mass Timber Today and I'm Ann Kovan. This podcast explores the opportunities and challenges of Mass Timber with experts in the design building and forestry sectors to shed light on the question, what is the future of Mass Timber construction? Today I am speaking with Aladia Smoke, who is the founder and principal architect of Smoke Architecture, located in Hamilton, Ontario. Throughout this conversation Aladia discusses her work in the Mass Timber sector and highlights the importance of indigenous design principles. She shares her experience with Mass Timber projects and highlights how Mass Timber can be used to highlight traditional indigenous building methods. Emphasizing the need to bring meaning and cultural awareness into buildings, she discusses the challenges and opportunities involved in teaching indigenous architecture and universities. Aladia also discusses the potential for indigenous leadership in forest stewardship and Mass Timber manufacturing. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Hello Aladia, welcome to the Mass Timber Today podcast. You're well known in the Canadian Mass Timber sector for your work as founder and principal architect of Smoke Architecture. And also you bring a unique capacity of two wide seeing as I've heard you talk about and as I've read in some of your material. And this is much needed in all facets of life. But importantly, inherent in indigenous design, which is linked to the environment and its inhabitants and its culture, which it shares generously with other commentators. And I'm really using the very graceful language you use to try to talk about those concepts. So certainly, as we have a conversation, please feel very free to elaborate on all those concepts because I know they're very important to your work. To start with, can you tell our listeners how you became interested in Mass Timber and how it became a part of your career? Well, sure, thanks Ann. I'd like to just introduce myself a little bit more formally first self-bojo. In case you got a week and there's the cast, Obashika King and Del Jabob, Wabashika Maing and Endo Dam. So I just told you that my anishinaabe name is case you got a week, which means she's fast, or she's quick, fast at apprehend. And I'm from White Wolf clan. And my home community is Laxel, First Nation, or Obashika King. So I grew up near Sioux Lookout in an northern Ontario, there are northwestern Ontario. I also have family on my dad's side in Alderville, First Nation, and on my mom's side, from Winnipeg in Toronto. And yes, I think I was initially involved in Mass Timber through the Centennial College A-Building expansion in Scarborough, Ontario. And for that one, they had some quite ambitious sustainability goals. So it's net zero carbon, and it's really inspiring space as well. The Mass Timber initiative reminds me a little bit about how we did architecture in pre-contact times. So many of our architectural typologies persist to the present day, and we actually continue to use these buildings for their original purposes even now. So that building approach in this region, which was used by Nishinabeq peoples and Hodona Shone peoples, and Wendat peoples right around here in the Great Lakes region, and Biond was a bentwood approach. So it was taking very small scale saplings, in fact. So really bendy, hippy, light members from the forest understory, and bending them to introduce stresses into the member and strengthening that member, and then letting them solidify and develop rigidity. And so this bentwood approach allowed diverse numbers of the community to come together and build things collaboratively, in particular women. So architecture in these parts has always been women's purve, and those small light members were really easy for us to manipulate. So I had the pleasure of building a lodge like that with Laurentian University in their courtyard in Sudbury, Ontario. So it was an initiative started by Jolieland Wabi with the social work faculty, and it was supported by a tic-and-mixing first nation, including their members, Art Patatagus, and Julie Pegamagabo. So that was a really inspiring experience for me, and I see some similarities and parallels with mass timber in that you take small pieces of softwood and laminate them together so they develop greater strength. And then you put these together into a series of bays often. And so this method of building harkens back to a degree, with this bentwood approach. Now the thing I see about mass timber versus the bentwood architecture of this region, it's a little different is that the mass timber members are really big and hard to haul around. So that's the big difference I see, but they're sort of more suited to specialized construction people. Anybody can't just pick up a mass timber member and start putting it together. So that's one difference that's maybe not quite as flexible. But on the other hand, it's considered very, you know, fire safe, very predictable burn rates. So super, super safe to use. And of course, since you're using massive amounts of this carbon bearing material wood, you can sequester carbon in a really wonderful way. So that's some of the differences I see. But I think it's sort of on a continuum of using smaller members and bringing them together to be stronger together. Thank you, Aladia. You certainly have given a sense of what you've been so compelling. What makes you passionate about mass timber? You've mentioned two of your mass timber projects. What are you doing now in the world of mass timber? And are you involved in leading some other projects? Yes, we're working together with now Centennial College. I just want to mention was led by Design Builder Ellisdon and we partnered with Dialog, which is an architectural firm in Toronto. And the Centennial College client group was was really wonderful. So that team was really powerful together. The other team that we're working with is Moryama and Tashima Architects. We partnered with them to undertake Algoma University's new Makwawa Kagan, which is an Indigenous learning and sharing facility in Su-Saint Marie. So it's close to Batchawana and Gideganzebi First Nations. So that's Batchawana and Garden River. And it's also spearheaded by the Children of Shingwok Survivors Association, who really have pushed forward this idea of having an Indigenous space to perform pedagogies in our traditional protocols from that region. So it's a really inspiring space. And the mass timber approach there is much less that regularized base that you would see in your typical mass timber structure. And instead uses this really innovative structural approach by David Moses, structural engineers, to put the building together lacing it like a Tikanagan. So Tikanagan is the way that we take care of our infants. So our little babies go in that Tikanagan and they get laced up. And it's a cradle board, right? And it's back in the day. It was made out of hide and filled with soft dried mosses. And the baby would be very safe in there and you could sort of lean the baby up so that they could see what was going on with the rest of the family, easily transported so that they could go along with mom with whatever she was doing. And it's a way of taking care of our children so that they can be part of the family business. This Tikanagan inspiration is how the mass timber is put together. So you have sort of this zigzag post and beam structure that allows the building to take a much more curblinger sort of flexible form instead of a sort of more regularized rectangular or rectilinear form that you'd see typically. So it's a really inspiring way of expressing how much we value our children and how we take care of them in contrast to the adjacent former residential school, Shigwakal, which still forms almost the very frontmost introduction to Elgoma University's campus. They want to change that and make this counterpoint architectural statement. So people know that Algamy University is committed to indigenous ways. of knowledge sharing. So that I find a really, really inspiring story. Very much so and thank you for making that sort of very, I mean, imbueing meaning into the history of something horribly painful, with something positive and forward-looking, I think, is tremendously interesting. And I have to observe, not as an architect, as you know I'm a forester, but I have to observe that how can we capture that kind of meaning in the buildings? You see being built in downtown to run or elsewhere? I mean, maybe it's something about your two-eye philosophy. I mean, do you think Mass Timber has the potential for bringing meaning into buildings and more indigenous and other cultural awareness? I think we're sort of lacking that kind of importance that you just talked about in your project. For I'll go over you. Typically, we don't see that in buildings and I don't know maybe Mass Timber's like any other construction product, but I'm just wondering if you've given it any thought that it might be able to elevate the design of the building somewhat? Well, in chance we have of bringing through indigenous spatial concepts is going to deepen and offer a certain richness to any space we apply those principles to because those principles have grown out of our ancestors millennia of inhabitation in these territories, and they've collected a series of teachings that is quite revolutionary when you get to know them. So those teachings are alive and they've managed to persist through the concerted effort of our elders and knowledge carriers who have carried them through to the present day against all odds. So those teachings still have a great deal of work to do in the world, which is why they're still around and supporting us. So I'll point to maybe Centennial College is one example of some of those teachings coming through into physical form. There's the indigenous commons room. So at the Centennial College A building, expansion there's the central room that is the heart of the whole building. They're calling it the indigenous commons and I think they're probably going to eventually, I betcha, name it something. That room is a dome room sort of inspired by that Nikwa Form and it's domed because it's sort of harkens back to that bentwood structure. Of course it's all made in mass timber. So the ribs are those mass timber ribs and the four columns in the center are mass timber columns. Those represent the opening to the four cardinal directions. There's a clear story level that allows daylight in and connects to sky. That represents our connection to the celestial realm, to the creatures of air and the four directions each have their own set of teachings. Then there's an implied connection to Shkagamakue or the land, the direction of downward. And right in the center there, they anticipate having drumming when they awakened that space just recently, which was this really inspired event, I tended put on by Sean Cancella who led their indigenous working group and is their director of the eighth fire. He invited drummers and dancers to awaken the space. And that direction of center is the direction of the drum or the heartbeat. That's the direction balance. And when we hear that drum, it represents the rhythms of all interconnected life systems coming together and it reconnects us back into that hole. So those seven directions are manifest in the actual structures of that space. So they become a teaching mechanism. So when you look at those aspects of the space, we're reminded of those teachings. So when you are able to bring narratives like that through into architectural space, into the artificial habitats we create together, we remind ourselves of what's important, what we value, because those cosmological principles represent what humans believe our place in the world is. And so manifesting them allows us to tell a better story about ourselves, to adopt in our thinking a responsibility to those kinship relationships we have with all other forms of life. So to me, when we make responsible decisions about the materiality we are representing in space, what we build with, how we build the stories that what we build tells. That's how we can sort of get over this hump of being an extractive species that sees ourselves as an element of chaos that does damage and move past that to what we truly are, which is a species that perceives patterns and connects the dots between all of the other systems of life that support us. So I think that indigenous architecture is important in that way, because it gives us those tools to remind ourselves of what we truly believe and the responsibilities we need to uphold. It's it's interesting. The point you make about how the legacy of 10,000 years of indigenous culture in Northern Ontario, for example, and maybe much older than that, that the legacy can be these ideas about survival and resilience and knowledge. And you know, in our other parts of the world, I think that architects learn about the Romans building aqueducts and amphitheaters and important things to learn. But I don't sense that there is much teaching going on or much history about the kinds of important ideas and experiences that we have from indigenous experience for architects. I don't know. Do you know any universities or colleges where they're teaching about indigenous architecture? And we're getting a little off the best timber path, but I think it's all connected. Well, my time at the McHughan School of Architecture at the Orange and University, where I taught from 2016 through 2022, they had a pretty strong connection with indigenous teachings there and they have maybe not by coincidence a really strong emphasis on using wood. So that school of architecture focuses on learning through doing, using wood as sort of your default material to build with, and connecting as much as is possible for an architectural institution with indigenous ways of doing things. Indigenous teachings and systems of practice and process. So I was really inspired to teach there and it opened up a great many doors for me. You never learned so much as when you're teaching. I'm sure I learned way more than my students ever managed to from my courses, but they were a real pleasure to teach. The thing is that the teaching process goes both ways. You also learn from your students a great deal. So I was really honored to be able to have the chance to share what I knew with them and conversely they were really inspiring to me because they're unspoiled by all the desperate realities of the profession as you get to know it. You start out with all these lofty goals and then you realize they're budgets and so you know sometimes politics and sometimes you know firmly rooted status quo ways of doing things that may need to be questioned and they don't know any of that yet. So they are not afflicted with the burden of status quo at all. And so it's wonderful being able to teach there. And I think most of the schools of architecture are seeking ways of introducing indigenous principles into their curriculum. For example, Sean Bailey up in Northwestern Ontario has a land-based learning initiative with the University of Manitoba where he is going out on the land and inviting elders to share knowledge with students going to U of M and U of M is managed to graduate. I think the most indigenous students of any school of architecture to date. And I think Laurentian University will be fairly close behind having just opened. And I think it was the early 2010s. So I find it so inspiring that we have decided to open a nonprofit in the next little while. It's going to be called a placeholder name, AVIA, Amplify Indigenous Voices in Architecture. And our mandate will be to support our elders to share their teachings in the And contacts that are suited to their ways of transmitting knowledge. So institutional environments are really challenging our elders because they're always sort of biting the space. These sort of hard, rectilinear, cold spaces where nothing is alive. And we like to teach out in the forest because the land is our greatest teacher. And so creating opportunities for elders to share knowledge in the ways that suit them best. So it's a lot less effort for them to do that. And supporting our Indigenous academics, who they're very, very few of them in architecture and they're doing incredibly hard work, you know, one example would be David Fortin, who was the very first Indigenous director of a school of architecture ever. He's a matey person. And he actually inspired this idea through inviting us all to sit with him at the University of Waterloo as part of what he called the design lodge. And ideas coming out of that design lodge have inspired this initiative. So supporting those academics to do their work, perhaps over and beyond what their institutions can support because these initiatives are vulnerable when they're affiliated with a single educational institution. Because if the leadership of that institution changes or if the goals of that institution changes, all that hard work by that institution's academic may be thrown into a situation of vulnerability. So supporting our academics and finally, and probably most importantly supporting our Indigenous students to succeed in architecture because the culture shock is very severe. And it really still does come from a very, as you mentioned, very Western precedence perspective. So we are still focusing a great deal on architectural precedence from across the ocean, most of which were developed by colonial powers. Most of those architectures we view with great reverence are in fact colonial structures meant to sway the local populace across the globe to the ways and methods of the colonial power. So they are inherently extractive and divorce themselves from local powers of life systems, local powers of governance, local powers of women frequently. So these architectural precedents are problematic and do form the basis of most of our architectural pedagogy to date and our students feel the weight of that. So when we enter these institutions, we feel a great deal of emotion. We feel sort of a little lonely because all of our friends and relatives aren't represented. There aren't other life systems there. And we're often divorced from our support networks back home. There's only seven schools of architecture across the entire nation. So the majority of students have to move away from their families and friends to attend them. So supporting our students and also reaching out to potential students of architecture in our communities. So perhaps developing things like introductory architecture courses they can take from the comfort of their home communities that are recognized by all of the schools of architecture across the nation. So this entity, amplify Indigenous voices in architecture, AVIA is a nonprofit we hope to found in the very short term to be able to move forward some of these schools. Well, I certainly appreciate what you're saying, a lady, and your observations. I've observed that at our faculty, the Daniels faculty of architectural landscape and design, that they wrestle with these questions. And it seems to me it's a very slow wheel that turns on it. But I have a sense and I could be wrong that there's good will where it didn't exist in the past that maybe there is a movement towards really trying to understand how we do this and how we encourage Indigenous students to be educated where they want to be comfortable and supported in doing that. Yeah. Daniel's initiative, Nika B. DeWaden at KickWalk, is hugely inspiring. And I was actually looking at that as one of the precedents to refer to when founding this nonprofit to sort of link in all of those individual initiatives that different schools of architecture have a put forward and sort of connect them up so that they're sort of a central repository to carry these teachings forward and nurture them in an entity that isn't affiliated with any one institution but brings together some of those ways of doing things so that each institution has access to resources so that their students can have access modes of support so that they can connect with elders and support those elders as well. So that initiative by Daniel's is amazing Nika B. DeWaden at KickWalk. I know Matt Hickey and Terence Radford are real supporters of that and I have spoken to you, your elder there, Elder Wabanam and she's wonderful. So yeah, that actually part of the inspiration for what I'm doing is what Daniel's done with that program. But again, it's sort of affiliated solely with Daniel's and I'm thinking, wouldn't it be nice to have a central repository, you know, organized and led by indigenous peoples who can make sure that these teachings are nurtured in our ways? Good to hear and selfishly speaking, it would be great to have more indigenous students being leaders in wood and mass timber design and construction if that's a good fit where if not in other kinds of design. Sure is, I mean, if you look across at our nations on this continent, the way we build is with wood, even on the plains where, you know, forests weren't ready to hand. Folks would trade for those lodge poles with nations that were located in forested regions and they take care of those lodge poles and take them with them across the great plains to erect keep these and other structures. So wood has always been the primary way of building on this continent and it's only just in the very recent past that we've turned to materials like seal and concrete and the more contemporary materials. That wood is something to keep going back to. Yes. Yes. There's currently a lot of discussion about what makes mass timber a more environmentally responsible and sustainable building material, which you're taking on this question. I mean, given your experience as you were designing your mass timber projects, I have a lot of thoughts on this and because on the one hand, I know Canada has the greatest forest cover of any patient, I think, in the world right now with maybe the exception of Russia. I'm not sure of my stats on that, but Canada has some of the most intact forested regions in the entire globe and we are honored with the significant responsibility of caring for those beautiful entities, those forests. Forests are not just trees. Forests are the understory of the forest. They're the soils of the forest, the wetlands and lakes that support those forests. There's the animals and other species that inhabit the forests and I think one focus of Canadian forest stewardship has been trees. I think we have to widen our view of forest stewardship because I've heard of things like spring down the hardwood saplings with herbicide to optimize soft wood from the harvesting. This is not a way, good way of going about forest stewardship. I heard this from my cell about his canoe builder, he's an elder, he's Natia Gonclin and he witnessed this in his own backyard, people calling down and spring down the maple saplings with herbicide. This is just not a good way of doing things. The way our ancestors used to care for forests is very different. There would be, I've heard controlled burns, there would be controlled harvests of that understory. There was constant attention to the health of the forest, but not just the trees looking at all of the different species. So we hear stories about how the deer population is out of balance taking out too much material from the understory because their predators, the wolves aren't active enough, we've killed off too many wolves and compromised their habitats too much. We hear about the caribouards who no longer exist and our people relied on them for sustenance. We hear about all of these habitat impacts that humans have had because we have narrow focussance of attention. We need to widen our view of our kinship responsibilities to all those life systems that support us that we depend on because forest stewardship is definitely more than just the trees. However, on the upside, I really feel that are focused on wood as a valuable material that we love and want in our spaces is very good, as we learn to love things, we'll learn to take care of them. And so we have to understand the trees as part of a whole system. So I think from a forest stewardship perspective, we need to do an even better job than we're doing right now. However, I do commend Canada and Canadians in general for the accomplishments we already have in successfully protecting some of the largest and most intact forests in the entire world. That's something to be really proud of. To do it better, I think we have to look to indigenous leadership and stewardship because our peoples have been stewarding our natural environments for millennia, really successfully. When people landed here for the first time, they thought, "Oh, wow, it's an untouched paradise." And I can tell you with great certainty, this paradise was never untouched. This paradise is very on purpose and deliberately cared for by our peoples. And the only reason that it can recently back you up on Mataly. Yes, yes. The only reason that looked so empty is because unfortunately, there was a great many diseases that circulated during that time and there just weren't a whole lot of our people left because a lot of them passed on due to disease. But what we could do now, I think, in contemporary forms, is look to indigenous nations as leaders in stewardship. So my home community of Laxville First Nation and Obeshka Gang, they are stewarding their forest resources in their territory. So it's a vast region in Northwestern Ontario near Siuluk out and Laxville holds the contracts for logging and they administrate that forestry service there, which I find incredibly reassuring because I thought that they're going to do a really good job taking care of the forest with a big picture of you. So I think we need to see more of that. So when these lumber companies come through to harvest elements of the forest, the tree parts of the forest, we really need to hold them to task to do meaningful collaboration with First Nations. I think First Nations need to have a share of the profits that are being made from extraction and they also have to have a leadership role in stewarding those forests for better vibrancy, diversity, and growth. So I really do feel strongly that that forest stewardship needs to be meaningfully in the hands of our First Nations that are indigenous peoples in each territory. I remember when I was cheering the class environmental assessment on timber management in the late 80s and early 90s. It was the largest investigation of forestry practices that had ever been conducted anywhere as far as we know. And I remember when Chief Steve Fobister at that point stood up and said, well, you know, this is all good and well, but he said, Joe, we were here before you arrived and we will be here after you leave. So, you know, get on board with the idea that we need more indigenous governance and more input into the conduct of forest operations. And I think to the credit of government, a lot of the forest industry that has been taking place, that recognition, and importance, I think, is starting slowly to take root. So I think that's very exciting. I know the Becansha come people, and I think we've talked about this before, are looking at mass timber fabrication as something that could be done with their narrow diameter old black spruce in ways they want to harvest and so forth. So I think those kinds of investigations are really significant when we're looking at mass timber specifically, but in any aspect of forestry. Yeah, I'd like to also add that the processing is another area I really feel indigenous peoples could have a leadership role. So right now, we have a very limited number of nils across the nation that can provide mass timber products. And we have observed in the architectural field that the demand is actually outstripping the supply in some cases. So what I think is needed is greater localization, greater regional manufacturing capacity for mass timber products. So I know my home community of Obishekeng is looking at an old sawmill that they'd like to retrofit into a mass timber facility. I don't know how they are doing on that process, but I think it would be hugely inspiring to see First Nations take control of that manufacturing process. As we know, Canada has been generally focused on extracting resources and has often neglected to develop our manufacturing capability to refine those resources. So as a result, we sort of over-extract or extract to the exclusion of all other focus for all of our resources. And if we focused on developing greater depth in our manufacturing capacity, our economy would be very well served, furthermore, perhaps we could be more responsible with how we extract resources and actually develop a reciprocal relationship with those life systems that we are impacting through extraction. So those developing localized manufacturing capacity would be a really great step forward in maximizing our potential in Canada to move forward mass timber use in as a default position for all of our buildings, which I think is what I would love to see. The thing is that we also have a great need in the light frame timber manufacturing sector where our housing crisis, as you probably know, we're going through here in Ontario especially and across the nation to some degree as well. Our housing crisis really needs to be met by innovative solutions that involve local manufacturing. Our construction industry has had a challenge to produce a sufficient housing stock for our population and our population is going up with greater immigration targets. So we're sort of having a little perfect storm here to meet our housing demand. It's been very difficult. One solution of probably a variety of diverse solutions we need to meet this crisis is pre-manufacturing light wood frame constructions. And this, again, is I think a real opportunity for First Nations to look at whether we can employ our local crews who are already building houses throughout the year in local prefabrication plants. So that's another area of interest for me in developing our forestry resources. And I think one that really is in parallel with a lot of our First Nations goals, the ones that I've spoken to anyway. I think that most people in forestry and those concerned with government and economic policies would agree with you vehemently about that. Aladia, certainly we see the kind of discouraging situation where we export 90% of our lumber to the United States, of course we do. And they're much larger and the demand is there. But we're exporting lumber now that's going the Americans will manufacture fabricate into mass timber products and sell them back to us. That's been the Canadian story for hundreds of years of course. And it would be nice if we could adjust that a little bit so that we are manufacturing and fabricating wood mass timber and other products in Canada and certainly with an emphasis on remote and northern areas where indigenous people can benefit. When I have these conversations, someone will always say, "Oh, but the transportation costs are too high." Well, I kind of questioned that because how could we be importing mass timber from Austrian Finland? By the transportation costs too high, I think not, we found a way of doing that. And so I agree with you a lot of this comes to governments who are dedicated to putting resources into actually moving us ahead on some of these questions and not coming up with the same time worn excuses about why we can't do it. We can do it. You don't need a huge mill employing hundreds and hundreds of people to build mass timber. As you said, smaller, localized, highly computerized, systems which can be located it, almost anywhere could certainly be up to the job. Yes. Yeah. And not all of our first nations are remote, either. I mean, of course, some of our first nations are regional hubs for other more remote communities. And I think those perhaps are natural locations for developing manufacturing capacity like what we're talking about. But some of our communities are actually not remote at all and they're quite close to rich market areas. So yeah, I don't see a big challenge there in terms of shipping. And besides, I think they will benefit all of us to connect up our more remote communities with the wider economic regions so that they can better participate. Canada is characterized by some very, very remote communities and they are all compromised economically by not having access to the larger Canadian economy. In particular, our first nations have been relocated to places that are really, really far away sometimes. And sometimes not. Some of our first nations are right close to major centers. So it's not a cohesive answer across the board. But I think there's lots of opportunity there and I'd really love to see dedicated support by the provinces, by municipalities, and by the federal government to a cohesive strategy to enhance manufacturing capacity that optimizes our forestry resources. I really, really think that that's a way forward for Canada and it just seems atrocious that 90% of it is going down south. You know, we really, really are not well served if we're selling off the raw material and then buying back the refined one. It's a Canadian story. We've been a rich country historically because of our natural resources and now we have to be smarter about certainly any indigenous leadership is welcome in that discussion and those actions. So I think we've been talking about some of the important challenges for the mass timber industry. And do you think there's anything that we've left out with respect to the supply chain issues or some of the key friction points? Things seem to be moving quickly, which is very gratifying to see. I don't see where it's all going to in a bigger picture, but I wonder if you see anything that is a sort of an important opportunity for us also. Well, let me think about that. I wonder if you could elaborate on the question a little bit, I'm drawing a blank here. Well, I'm trying to just pull together some of our conversation about some of the challenges that we've identified for mass timber. And if you can think of any or in your experience have seen ways of overcoming those challenges to sort of smooth the road for more mass timber design and use in the construction industry. At the end of the day, I would argue, but but I can be wrong that mass timber has higher sustainability value as a proposition than concrete and steel. And so it seems that the introduction of more mass timber into the construction building industry would be a good thing. It's not going to replace concrete or steel completely, but it certainly would add something greener to the construction mix. I think the largest untapped opportunity in mass timber lies in synergies. So when I was saying that our forestry resources aren't just trees, I really do mean that. I think if we view the forest as a living system with diverse habitats and diverse species of life living in them, then those synergies start to come to light for just one example. Every time I've gone out harvesting reek wash, birch bark. I went out with art petatagoose one time, a ticketing machine, first nation, very generously hosted us to come and access their birch bark off of their first nation there for that lodge that I built at Laurentian University. One of the gentlemen we went out with found chaggot. So he harvested chaggot and he gave me one for my mom because chaggot is good for almost everything. It's that mushroom you know that grows on birch trees and it's tremendously medicinal. And it tastes really good and it makes this wonderful tea. And when we were building birch bark canoes with Marcel Lebel, he had a chaggot tea sitting there in a pot and he just had water over the days that we're making the canoe and we all felt wonderful because it's so good for you and it tastes so wonderful. And so that's just one forestry product that we don't see a big economy in chaggot. You know what I mean? But there's a ton of medicinal plants in the forest and every single plant that you encounter in the forest is medicinal to some degree even if it's just looking at it makes you feel good. But all plants are medicines and there's such a wonderful nation of peoples that we've sort of forgotten or diplomatic relationships with plants you know and we have these wonderful plant spokespeople that help us so much you know those key medicines, tobacco or some sage, cedar and sweet grass. And those are the ones that are sort of the key diplomatic spokes plants that have offered to rease or directly with humans from an indigenous perspective. And we use those four medicines in so many of our ceremonies. They represent a kinship relationship that we hold with a plant nation and if we view that nation as a whole we will see that supporting them as a system, a resilient system will give us so many different opportunities than just looking at softwood trees. Similarly, all of the living creatures that inhabit a forest, a healthy forest also have tremendous economic and health-giving benefits. So just taking one example, Makwa, the bear, that bear fat is good for anything that eels you, joint aches, skin problems, you know that bear fat is something we pass around the room in ceremony to help us heal our bodily ills. And it's such a nice material that's gifted to us by Makwa. Makwa is a healer protector do dem. So when we think about our clan system, members of clan Makwa are responsible for healing and protection and really that bear is a medicine carrier. And so when we think about all the living creatures in the forest, each one of them represents a benefit to humankind and has chosen to be here to help us out and all of those animals they know that we need a little extra help because humans arrive last and we are awfully dependent. So we sort of rely on all the other critters to help us out. Many of them have agreed to do that. But in order for them to do that successfully, we have to live up to our responsibilities and make sure they're all right so that they can do their jobs. So I think when we think about untapped opportunities, I think about forest resilience and diversity. So how can we learn to value these other systems of life? Maybe we need to make it more known that these elements are medicinal, maybe we need to make it more available to people so people can use these and start to say, "Oh, we really need bear fat for our erythritic knees. Well, we better make sure bears are okay then and make sure they've got habitat to run around them." And we can't keep mowing down forest to make way for development. We really have to make sure that forest connects up so that those habitat zones are big enough to support those large predators. So this is what I think Canada really has the opportunity to do right. Because we have such vast forested areas, still intact, we are actually one of the very few countries in the whole world who has that. We have to make that even stronger. And I think the benefits would lie in sharing indigenous teachings to make sure that forestry products aren't just softwood trees, they're all living systems in the forest, making that knowledge and those materials available to mainstream Canada, where they never have been before. Well put it lady up, as we're getting close to wrapping up our conversation, would you like to tell listeners what are the three articles or websites or books related to mass timber that you might want to recommend to them and why? Well I don't know if they're specific to mass timber, but they're all about relationships. And I think forests are about relationships. So I will give you some book recommendations that might be a little peripheral to what you're specifically requesting, but I think they're still worth it. So, one would be the "Meshoma" book by Ed. word "Bentan Benai". So this is a book of Anishinaabe perspectives. It looks like a kids coloring book. I think it was done deliberately so that those of us with school trauma wouldn't get turned off by a really official looking book. But don't get fooled. It is a deep work of philosophy and all the teachings from Anishinaabe perspectives. The only critique I'd have of it is that a Mishoma's book and not the no-commiss book. So Mishoma means grandfather and of course Anishinaabe nation is matriarchal. So I would have loved it to be the no-commiss book, the grandmother book, but we will take what we could get. It's a really good book and Edward Bentan Benai is a highly respected knowledge carrier for Anishinaabe peoples. Another one would be and grandma said, which is a book by Tom Porter or Sagabuanyanglis. Tom Porter is a very highly respected Hodona Shoney knowledge carrier and he's been all around the continent and beyond listening to knowledge carriers from all different nations. And he had a dream one night that his grandma came to him and said, you know you've been doing such good work listening to elders from all over the place. You have to write that all down in a book so other people can read it. And what you're going to do, you're going to put my face on it and you're going to call it and grandma said, so that's what he did. And it's a beautiful book. It's in his own words, it really feels like he's just speaking to you. And another one that I'd recommend is a book by Dr. Lawrence Gross. It's a lot more scholarly of the three selections. So this is a gentleman who did a great deal of scholarly research on Anishinaabe and other knowledge systems and he's brought it all together in this book called Anishinaabe Ways of Knowing and Being. So that's Dr. Lawrence Gross. He's from White Earth in Minnesota. And I'd like to mention just a couple more actually because I think they're really valuable. For any architect you might be listening, there's the contemporary handbook of Indigenous Architecture. And that's edited by Daniel Glenn, who is an Indigenous architect, along with some other editors as well. It's a wonderful resource. It's not exclusively by Indigenous authors, but it is a series of articles that recounts a process of undertaking architecture by and for Indigenous communities. And then two others, our voices and our voices, two, edited by Patrick Stewart among others. Patrick Stewart is a Niska architect from the West Coast. Wonderful man. He heads up the RAIC, the Royal Architecture Institute of Canada, the RAIC Indigenous Task Force, of which I'm also a founding member. So it's really good resources, our voices, one and two. I have an article in number two. They didn't print my images though because apparently I didn't get sufficient academic backup that they were images I could use. But I do have wonderful images for that article. Trust me, it's all text though. I hope it's on your website. Yeah, I'll have to do that. They were actually images. Most of them gifted to me by Larissa Rock, who's my very first employee with smoke architecture. She's some want to pate for his nation and she went around documenting a whole bunch of roundhouses. So the article that I have in our voices too is on roundhouses. The Anishinaabe Namii Idawiga-Bing. So anyways, those are some good rec side. I have no compunction about recommending highly. One word of advice to anyone who is trying to research Indigenous principles, go to primary sources. So articles and books written by Indigenous peoples. The challenge with secondary sources, so books written about us by others who are not Indigenous, is that the literature has been somewhat compromised by initial accounts which were written by European folks who come here for the first time and wanted funding by their respective organizations, mostly religious organizations. And they told a whole bunch of lies to get more money to support their work here. And unfortunately, because academic literature conventions refer back and refer back to original sources, those initial poor research practices have sort of reflected back into a lot of the academic research. When you read Indigenous perspectives written by Indigenous authors, you can trust them a lot more because we are very careful what we write. Writing is a really risky act. You can't change what's written the same way you can a story that you're telling directly person to person verbally. You can't change it for the audience. It gets set in stone. We're very careful about it, and we make sure that we've heard it from elders before we repeat it. So trust those sources first is the advice I'd give. Thank you, Aladia. Wrecking people find out more about what you're doing. Can you give us your website so that our listeners can find out more about you and smoke architecture? Sure thing. It's smokearchitecture.com. Well, Kate, I don't even have to ask you how to spell it. We want that. Smoke like fire. That's terrific. Thank you so much, Aladia, for your time, and we appreciate very much that you spent the time with us explaining how Indigenous knowledge and experience and culture is feeding into wood and timber management design today. Thank you. Great. Thanks for all your questions and great conversation pleasure speaking with you as well. Thanks for inviting me. The Mass Timber Today podcast is produced by the Mass Timber Institute at the University of Toronto's John H. Daniels Faculty of Landscape Architecture and Design and explores the opportunities and challenges of Mass Timber with experts in the design, building, and forestry sectors to shed light on the question. What is the future of Mass Timber construction? You can find the show notes and any references mentioned in this podcast on our website at masstimberinstitute.ca. Where you can also view our current projects and subscribe to our newsletter. This episode was edited by Derek Welsman and produced by Sean Schuplink at the Mass Timber Institute. We'd also like to give a special thanks to Dialog's Toronto Studio for their generous sponsorship of this podcast. If you like this podcast, please rate us on the Apple iTunes ranking site. We'd also love to hear from you with any suggestions for other people you would like us to interview. You can reach us on our website.