1. Please summarize how the Canadian government and First Nations people are wor
ID: 1160227 • Letter: 1
Question
1. Please summarize how the Canadian government and First Nations people are working to implement TEK principles into decision-making processes.
2. In which ways could you see TEK being applied here in the US?
reading: Centralized, bureaucratic resource management systems have been criticized for leading to ecological collapses and for failing to improve people’s lives (Agrawal 1995, 2003, Holling and Meffe 1996, Scott 1998, Schelhas et al. 2001). Consequently, attention has started to focus on collaborative processes, which are viewed by many as able: to enhance the robustness of ecological management decisions by gaining access to systems of knowledge and management practices that are better attuned to local specifics (Berkes 1998, Pálsson 1998); to increase the efficiency of decision implementation by involving people that are directly affected by the decisions in activities such as monitoring (Kearney 1989, Pinkerton 1989, Hanna 1998, Sheppard and Meitner 2005); and to increase equity in the decision-making process by moving away from management models that are controlled by a central state that is remote from the needs of local people and from regional and cultural specificities (McCay 1996, Persoon and van Est 2003, Pagdee et al. 2006).
To meet similar goals, Canadian First Nations have been active since the 1970s in negotiating with the Canadian state government co-management arrangements that would increase their participation in decisions concerning the land and natural resources. These negotiations, the fruit of years of aboriginal political activism and successive court decisions made in First Nations’ favor, have transformed and continue to transform the way in which resource management is undertaken in various Canadian provinces (Coates 1992). Through the 1973 Calderdecision, involving the Nisga’a nation of British Columbia, the Supreme Court of Canada recognized the existence of an aboriginal title to the land (Dupuis 2001), thereby pushing the Canadian government to establish the Office of Native Claims to negotiate land claims settlements with several First Nations (Cassidy 1992). A court action launched in the early 1970s by the Cree Nation of Québec led to the conclusion of the first Canadian modern treaty, the James Bay and Northern Québec Agreement, which led to the emergence of co-management boards. The 1990 Sparrow decision acknowledged the ancestral right of Aboriginals to subsistence fishing, and the 1997 Delgamuukw decision gave more authority to oral traditions and narratives in decision-making processes. More recently, other decisions such as Haida vs. BC and Taku River First Nation vs. BC, both reached in 2004, gave more leverage to the First Nations’ case with regard to increasing their role in strategic planning and natural resources policy making.
From treaties to more informal arrangements, co-management “broadly refers to the sharing of power and responsibility between government and local resource users, [this being achieved through] various levels of integration of local and state level management systems” (Notzke 1995:187). Through such rearrangement of decision-making processes, First Nations not only seek greater control over land and resources, but aim for processes that will lead to management decisions that are closer to their values and worldviews, reflecting to a wider extent the traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) that they possess about the land. Recent treaties (e.g., Government of Canada 2002, 2005) or bilateral agreements (e.g., Government of Québec and Crees of Québec 2002) therefore often include mechanisms to involve TEK.
However, this task of involving TEK in decision-making processes meets with challenges that have much to do with the way that this knowledge is understood. Often, schemes to involve First Nations in decision-making processes have been criticized for equating TEK to a collection of data about the environment that could complement and be integrated within the existing data sets used by state management systems and for failing to acknowledge the value system and cosmological context within which this traditional knowledge was generated and makes sense (e.g., McGregor 1999, 2000, Simpson 2001, Gallagher 2003). Starting with the premise that TEK is more than a mere collection of data about the environment, I review the different faces that have been given to TEK in the literature. I also identify the challenges and opportunities that each one of these faces poses for the design of co-management arrangements, citing examples from various existing arrangements. The literature on TEK is very broad, and I do not intend to undertake a complete review of the field, if such an endeavor were indeed possible. Rather, for the purposes of this discourse, I focus on how ideas about TEK emerged in the Canadian context of co-management.
Explanation / Answer
Since the 1980s, there was a growing concern worldwide that the traditional people of those nations colonized, along with their vast local knowledge of nature and natural systems were being marginalized, in favor of conventional western science.
The Canadian government decided to team up with the First Nations people to include indigenous people and their specialist knowledge of local areas, also known as traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) during designing and strategizing of projects, resource management, and environmental assessment (EA).
TEK can include providing relevant biophysical information, including historical information, assistance in identification of potential environmental effects, improvement of project designs, building long-lasting relationships for future project flow.
Care needs to be taken, though, to ensure that TEK is not merely used for collection of data to fill in existing data but to understand and appreciate the local knowledge of the First Nations, in it's historical, cosmological and local belief perspective, which is important to every First Nations people across the globe.
2. Like the Canadian government, the US government can involve the First Nations and utilize their TEK knowledge for improved knowledge and understanding of the vast lands and water systems of the USA, how the plant and animal cycles are inter-connected with other natural cycles, in order to bring about an ecological balance while undertaking infrastructure project development, resource management, environmentally sustainable development. The US also needs to recognize that TEK is very much a heritage of the mainstream American history and culture much as their First Nations people are and should be valued and respected, not merely as a means of data collection but to understand the past of their vast nation.
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