Indigenous experiences of impact assessment and development projects: lessons from the Aashukan exchange

ABSTRACT

How can Indigenous peoples and practitioners engage Impact Assessment as a collaborative learning process that enables communities to affect and influence the design of development projects and their management systems? How to create conversations between Indigenous peoples in order to craft a message/voice in relation to developers? This article summarizes lessons learned from ‘Aashukan’ an Indigenous exchange organized on James Bay Cree lands, Northern Québec, Canada in conjunction with the IAIA Conference in 2017. It presents the context, objectives, processes, and outcomes of this workshop in relation to the Impact Assessment community and discusses future directions.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous peoples
• impact assessment
• Aashukan
• collaborative research
• workshop
• policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The authors would like to sincerely thank Stacey Bear, Jack Diamond, Doris Small, elder Sanders Weistche, the Council of the Cree Nation of Waskaganish and all members of the local planning committee for all their hard work in hosting the Aashukan Exchange; the event could simply not have happened without their generous partnership. The authors would also like to thank the families in Waskaganish who generously hosted exchange participants in their homes as well as the traditional cooks and all other community members who made the participants welcome in the community. Ethical approval for the Aashukan event was provided by Concordia University’s Human Research Ethics Committee (#30007593). A final thank you to the two anonymous referees for their constructive comments on an earlier draft of this article.

2. Event organization was a collaboration between multiple stakeholders including Niskamoon Corporation, Hydro-Québec, the Indigenous Peoples Section of the International Association of Impact Assessment, the Rural Peoples' Learning Commons (RPLC), the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Connections Grant# 611–2016-0366), the Cree Nation (regional) Government, Air Creebec and other James Bay Cree (Québec) entities as well as the IAIA executive committee and other partners in the academic and corporate sectors (see https://aashukandotcom.wordpress.com for more information).

3. In Canada, the show can be watched in James Bay Cree with English subtitles through following this link: https://gem.cbc.ca/media/maamuitaau/season-35/episode-21/38e815a-00e2e41df59

4. The link to access this video is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nES-gkpgA4Q&feature=youtu.be. This video includes interviews with several of the Aashukan participants in Waskaganish.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by a Connection Grant from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council [ref no. 611-2016-0366].