Journal Article

Permanent link for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10535/5

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Cross-cultural Conflicts in Fire Management in Northern Australia: Not so Black and White
(1999) Andersen, Alan
"European ('scientific') and Aboriginal ('experiential') perspectives on fire management in northern Australia are often contrasted with each other. For Europeans, management is portrayed as a science-based, strategically directed and goal-oriented exercise aimed at achieving specific ecological outcomes. In contrast, landscape burning by Aboriginal people is more of an emergent property, diffusely arising from many uses of fire that serve social, cultural, and spiritual, as well as ecological, needs. Aboriginal knowledge is acquired through tradition and personal experience, rather than through the scientific paradigm of hypothesis testing. Here I argue that, in practice, science plays only a marginal role in European fire management in northern Australia. European managers often lack clearly defined goals in terms of land management outcomes, and rarely monitor the ecological effects of their management actions. Management is based primarily on tradition, intuition, and personal experience rather than on scientific knowledge, and there is often a reluctance to accept new information, particularly when it is provided by 'outsiders.' In these ways, the processes by which European land managers acquire and utilize information are actually similar to those of indigenous Australians, and can be considered characteristic of a management culture. In this context, the conventional European vs. Aboriginal contrast might be more accurately described as a conflict between scientists on one hand and land managers in general, both black and white, on the other. That is not to say that science has all the answers and that researchers always deliver useful research outcomes. Cultural tensions between Australia's colonists and its original inhabitants rank highly on the national agenda, particularly in relation to land access and ownership. For the effective management of such land, another difficult but rewarding challenge lies in reconciling tensions between the cultures of science and management, black and white."
Haida Marine Planning: First Nations as a Partner in Marine Conservation
(2010) Jones, Russ; Rigg, Catherine; Lee, Lynn
"The Haida Nation is involved in an integrated marine planning initiative in northern British Columbia, Canada. The Haida continue to occupy traditional territory in and around Haida Gwaii, or the Queen Charlotte Islands, and are engaged in a larger planning process for the Pacific North Coast Integrated Management Area (PNCIMA). This initiative is in the early planning stage, focused on capacity building and creating enabling conditions for co-governance. Court decisions, government policies, and a modern treaty process are driving short- and long-term efforts to resolve issues of Aboriginal ownership and resource access, both on land and in the ocean. As a result, the PNCIMA process is being led by two levels of government, First Nations and federal, reflecting changing perceptions of Aboriginal title and rights in British Columbia. The Haida have been resource owners and managers on Haida Gwaii for millennia, and continue to apply traditional knowledge and experience to marine-use planning and fisheries management. The Haida approach is place based and guided by fundamental Haida ethics and values such as respect, balance, and reciprocity. We describe these values and discuss the emerging role of First Nations in integrated oceans management in the context of the six themes: lessons from land-use planning; the PNCIMA governance structure; the relationship of values to planning outcomes; developing an ecosystem-based management framework; applications of traditional knowledge, based on a study of Haida marine traditional knowledge currently in progress; and linking marine planning at various scales. On Haida Gwaii, collaborative marine planning is expected to result in improved protection of Haida Gwaii waters for future generations, greater Haida participation in management decisions, and increasing emphasis on sustainability of both local fisheries and communities."
Innovation in Management Plans for Community Conserved Areas: Experiences from Australian Indigenous Protected Areas
(2013) Davies, Jocelyn; Hill, Rosemary; Walsh, Fiona J.; Sandford, Marcus; Smyth, Dermot; Holmes, Miles C.
"Increasing attention to formal recognition of indigenous and community conserved areas (ICCAs) as part of national and/or global protected area systems is generating novel encounters between the customary institutions through which indigenous peoples and local communities manage these traditional estates and the bureaucratic institutions of protected area management planning. Although management plans are widely considered to be important to effective management of protected areas, little guidance has been available about how their form and content can effectively reflect the distinctive socio-cultural and political characteristics of ICCAs. This gap has been particularly apparent in Australia where a trend to rapidly increased formal engagement of indigenous people in environmental management resulted, by 2012, in 50 indigenous groups voluntarily declaring their intent to manage all or part of their estates for conservation in perpetuity, as an indigenous protected area (IPA). Development and adoption of a management plan is central to the process through which the Australian Government recognizes these voluntary declarations and invests resources in IPA management. We identified four types of innovations, apparent in some recent IPA plans, which reflect the distinctive socio-cultural and political characteristics of ICCAs and support indigenous people as the primary decision makers and drivers of knowledge integration in IPAs. These are (1) a focus on customary institutions in governance; (2) strategic planning approaches that respond to interlinkages of stewardship between people, place, plants, and animals; (3) planning frameworks that bridge scales by considering values and issues across the whole of an indigenous people’s territory; and (4) varied communication modes appropriate to varied audiences, including an emphasis on visual and spatial modes. Further research is warranted into how governance and management of IPAs, and the plans that support these processes, can best engender adaptive management and diverse strong partnerships while managing the risk of partners eroding local control."
Mammal Distribution in Nunavut: Inuit Harvest Data and COSEWIC's Species at Risk Assessment Process
(2012) Kowalchuk, Karen A.; Kuhn, Richard G.
"The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) assesses risk potential for a species by evaluating the best available information from all knowledge sources including Aboriginal traditional knowledge (ATK). Effective application of ATK in this process has been challenging. Inuit knowledge (IK) of mammal distribution in Nunavut is reflected, in part, in the harvest spatial data from two comprehensive studies: the Use and Occupancy Mapping (UOM) Study conducted by the Nunavut Planning Commission (NPC) and the Nunavut Wildlife Harvest Study (WHS) conducted by the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board (NWMB). The geographic range values of extent of occurrence (EO) and area of occupancy (AO) were derived from the harvest data for a selected group of mammals and applied to Phase I of the COSEWIC assessment process. Values falling below threshold values can trigger a potential risk designation of either endangered (EN) or threatened (TH) for the species being assessed. The IK values and status designations were compared with available COSEWIC data. There was little congruency between the two sets of data. We conclude that there are major challenges within the risk assessment process and specifically the calculation of AO that contributed to the disparity in results. Nonetheless, this application illustrated that Inuit harvest data in Nunavut represents a unique and substantial source of ATK that should be used to enrich the knowledge base on arctic mammal distribution and enhance wildlife management and conservation planning."
Meaningful Consideration? A Review of Traditional Knowledge in Environmental Decision Making
(2005) Ellis, Stephen C.
"In Canada's Northwest Territories, governments, industrial corporations, and other organizations have tried many strategies to promote the meaningful consideration of traditional knowledge in environmental decision making, acknowledging that such consideration can foster more socially egalitarian and environmentally sustainable relationships between human societies and Nature. These initiatives have taken the form of both top-down strategies (preparing environmental governance authorities to receive traditional knowledge) and bottom-up strategies (fostering the capacity of aboriginal people to bring traditional knowledge to bear in environmental decision making). Unfortunately, most of these strategies have had only marginally beneficial effects, primarily because they failed to overcome certain significant barriers. These include communication barriers, arising from the different languages and styles of expression used by traditional knowledge holders; conceptual barriers, stemming from the organizations difficulties in comprehending the values, practices, and context underlying traditional knowledge; and political barriers, resulting from an unwillingness to acknowledge traditional-knowledge messages that may conflict with the agendas of government or industry. Still other barriers emanate from the co-opting of traditional knowledge by non-aboriginal researchers and their institutions. These barriers help maintain a power imbalance between the practitioners of science and European-style environmental governance and the aboriginal people and their traditional knowledge. This imbalance fosters the rejection of traditional knowledge or its transformation and assimilation into Euro-Canadian ways of knowing and doing."
'Not the Almighty': Evaluating Aboriginal Influence in Northern Land-Claim Boards
(2008) White, Graham
"The settling of comprehensive land claims across Canada’s territorial North has brought about substantial changes in governance. Prominent among these has been the establishment of numerous regulatory and co-management boards dealing with land, wildlife, and environmental issues. These boards were explicitly designed to bring significant aboriginal influence to bear in key land and wildlife decisions. To examine whether the boards have enhanced aboriginal participation and influence in these decision-making processes, factors such as the number and influence of aboriginal board members, the extent of board powers, the independence (financial and otherwise) of the boards, and the boards’ willingness and capacity to incorporate traditional knowledge into their operations are considered. Overall, the evidence supports the conclusion that the land-claim boards represent an important vehicle for substantially enhanced aboriginal involvement in and influence over government decisions affecting the wildlife and environment of traditional aboriginal lands."
The Persistence of Subsistence: Qualitative Social-Ecological Modeling of Indigenous Aquatic Hunting and Gathering in Tropical Australia
(2015) Barber, Marcus; Jackson, Sue; Dambacher, Jeffrey; Finn, Marcus
"Subsistence remains critical to indigenous people in settler-colonial states such as Australia, providing key foundations for indigenous identities and for wider state recognition. However, the drivers of contemporary subsistence are rarely fully articulated and analyzed in terms of likely changing conditions. Our interdisciplinary team combined past research experience gained from multiple sites with published literature to create two generalized qualitative models of the socio-cultural and environmental influences on indigenous aquatic subsistence in northern Australia. One model focused on the longer term (inter-year to generational) persistence of subsistence at the community scale, the other model on shorter term (day to season) drivers of effort by active individuals. The specification of driver definitions and relationships demonstrates the complexities of even generalized and materialist models of contemporary subsistence practices. The qualitative models were analyzed for emergent properties and for responses to plausible changes in key variables: access, habitat degradation, social security availability, and community dysfunction. Positive human community condition is shown to be critical to the long-term persistence of subsistence, but complex interactions of negative and positive drivers shape subsistence effort expended at the individual scale and within shorter time frames. Such models enable motivations, complexities, and the potential management and policy levers of significance to be identified, defined, causally related, and debated. The models can be used to augment future models of human-natural systems, be tested against case-specific field conditions and/or indigenous perspectives, and aid preliminary assessments of the effects on subsistence of changes in social and environmental conditions, including policy settings."
Toward Increased Engagement Between Academic and Indigenous Community Partners in Ecological Research
(2014) Adams, Megan S.; Carpenter, Jennifer; Housty, Jess A.; Neasloss, Douglass; Paquet, Paul C.; Service, Christina; Walkus, Jennifer; Darimont, Chris T.
"Ecological research, especially work related to conservation and resource management, increasingly involves social dimensions. Concurrently, social systems, composed of human communities that have direct cultural connections to local ecology and place, may draw upon environmental research as a component of knowledge. Such research can corroborate local and traditional ecological knowledge and empower its application. Indigenous communities and their interactions with and management of resources in their traditional territories can provide a model of such social-ecological systems. As decision-making agency is shifted increasingly to indigenous governments in Canada, abundant opportunities exist for applied ecological research at the community level. Despite this opportunity, however, current approaches by scholars to community engaged ecological research often lack a coherent framework that fosters a respectful relationship between research teams and communities. Crafted with input from applied scholars and leaders within indigenous communities in coastal British Columbia, we present here reflections on our process of academic–community engagement in three indigenous territories in coastal British Columbia, Canada. Recognizing that contexts differ among communities, we emerge with a generalizable framework to guide future efforts. Such an approach can yield effective research outcomes and emergent, reciprocal benefits such as trust, respect, and capacity among all, which help to maintain enduring relationships. Facing the present challenge of community engagement head-on by collaborative approaches can lead to effective knowledge production toward conservation, resource management, and scholarship."
The Use of Joint Ventures to Accomplish Aboriginal Economic Development: Two Examples from British Columbia
(2010) Boyd, Jeremy; Trosper, Ronald L.
"'Aboriginal economic development' differs from other forms of development by emphasizing aboriginal values and community involvement. Joint ventures, while providing business advantages, may not be able to contribute to aboriginal economic development. This paper examines two joint ventures in the interior of British Columbia to examine their ability or inability to contribute the extra dimensions of development desired by aboriginal communities. The AED framework examines business structure; profitability; employment; aboriginal capacity in education, experience, and finance; preservation of traditional values, culture and language; control of forest management over traditional territory; and community support. Established in the context of unresolved land claims, both enterprises partially contribute to aboriginal economic development, but in different ways and with different overall results."

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