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- Convenors:
-
Brian Thom
(University of Victoria)
Jennifer Argan (University of Victoria)
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- Discussant:
-
Justine Townsend
(University of Guelph)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 October, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs) provide a powerful mechanism to centre Indigenous-led stewardship initiatives that foreground cultural sites and landscapes. We will attend to the ways the cultural knowledge, languages, and practices entangle IPCAs with cultural landscapes.
Long Abstract:
This session will explore the ways culturally significant sites and landscapes are entangled with Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area (IPCA) frameworks. While many large-scale conservation efforts centre protecting the environment as a core rationale for their efforts, Indigenous peoples often foreground cultural values, knowledges and governance alongside ecological issues as key criteria for land and sea protection. Central to Indigenous land protection is understanding the importance of continued relationships people have with the land, which are exemplified and maintained through discourses like oral narratives and place names, and through embodied actions. These places form a network, a cultural landscape which collects individual experiences yet underlines a specific society's shared ontological and epistemological relations with the land. Cultural sites, sacred sites, and cultural landscapes are thus intimately entangled with Indigenous-led land stewardship through IPCAs. IPCAs also centre a different dynamic of law, policy and practicalities than standard state approaches to heritage or archaeological site protection and management, which often facilitate the destruction of these places.
Panelists are invited to share insights into how IPCAs are entangled with the protection of cultural landscapes through a research focus on cultural knowledge, languages, and practices, including place names, private knowledge of sacred sites, and embodied and emplaced oral traditions. We are interested in the role of IPCAs in the protection of cultural landscapes, and how the IPCA framework and goals can support Indigenous knowledge and governance towards better relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and the land.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 October, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
The idea of 'cultural landscapes' can be a powerful framing for Indigenous Protected Areas. In this case study of Hw'teshutsun, a Coast Salish cultural landscape on Vancouver Island (BC), a declaration of Indigenous legal orders prompted state law and policy to protect it from unwanted development.
Paper long abstract:
We propose adopting the concept of cultural landscapes as a framework for moving forward of Indigenous jurisdictions and intentions in protecting relationships with culturally significant areas, beyond a single place like an archaeological site. Cultural landscapes can be a fundamental part of the agenda of Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs), which have been valued internationally as a way to protect biodiversity. A concept of cultural landscapes speaks to the ontological engagements that people have within a landscape including the human and non-human persons who dwell therein, the ways a group of people value the land, and the legal orders that govern how humans should act in relationship with that landscape.
We elaborate on this concept through a case study of Hw'teshutsun, a Hul'q'umi'num' cultural landscape on southeast Vancouver Island, Canada. Hw'teshutsun was protected from logging and other extractive developments in 2001 through a unilateral declaration by Cowichan Tribes and subsequent negotiations. Hw'teshutsun is a forest landscape significant for spiritual and ceremonial purposes, surrounded by storied places, and vital for harvesting and other land uses. In a context where 85% of Hul'q'umi'num' territory is privately owned, and logging and urban development mark much of the land, protecting Hw'teshutsun was critical for ongoing and revitalized cultural practices. The intangible qualities and values that make Hw'teshutsun culturally significant reflect particular ontological engagements with the land, value systems, and legal orders. By protecting this cultural landscape, Hul'qumi'num legal orders are brought into Canadian law, affording it the novel protection of IPAs.
Paper short abstract:
While waiting for an official designation, the Pessamiulnuat believe that the joint revitalization of the culture and the landscapes which support it is a necessary approach for reaching their goal of establishing a protected area that is anchored in their own land values and ontology.
Paper long abstract:
In the winter of 2021, the Quebec government announced the creation of a new category of Indigenous protected area that would give greater control to Indigenous peoples at the provincial level. Around the same time, the Innu community of Pessamit learned that their protected area project, aimed at curbing the decline of woodland caribou around the Pipmuacan Reservoir, would not be part of the conservation areas selected to achieve the protection target of 17% of the province’s land environments. Like other communities in Quebec, Pessamit faces a major challenge: that of trying to protect a territory located in the heart of the commercial forest.
While waiting for an official designation, the Pessamit Innu Council is stepping up its actions in the hope of raising public awareness concerning the destruction of forest caribou habitat and its impact on biodiversity, but also on the preservation of Innu culture, which is largely dependent on the survival of this sacred animal. Among these actions is the promotion and occupation of important cultural sites along the riverscape leading to Pipmuacan. The Pessamiulnuat believe that the joint revitalization of the culture and the landscapes which support it is a necessary approach for reaching their goal of establishing a protected area that is anchored in their own land values and ontology.
In order to highlight the undeniable role of culture in nature conservation, our presentation will focus on an event held in the summer of 2021 at an ancestral gathering site located south of the Pipmuacan.
Paper short abstract:
Indigenous peoples’ relationships with landscapes integrate dynamic cultural and ecological elements. Discussing Dasiqox Nexwagwez?an (Tsilhqot'in Tribal Park) we explore how cultural and ecological elements are inseparable, and how Indigenous-led initiatives honour those integrated relationships.
Paper long abstract:
Indigenous peoples’ relationships with places, landscapes, waters, animals and plants integrate dynamic cultural, ecological, and spiritual elements. The core elements, drivers, and goals that characterize Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area (IPCA) initiatives therefore inherently differ from most conventional 20th Century epistemological and protected area frameworks that separate cultural and ecological values. Dasiqox Nexwagwez?an (Tsilhqot’in Tribal Park established by Xeni Gwet’in and Yunesit’in communities in western Canada) is one example of how an Indigenous-led protected area initiative is not only an assertion of inherent jurisdiction and title, but also a creative, proactive process for revitalizing culture by healing landscapes and people in relationship with each other. What is being protected? Dasiqox aims to create and protect space for Tsilhqot’in lived relationships with nenqay. We discuss three aspects of Dasiqox Nexwagwez?an: 1) the ways in which cultural landscapes, knowledge and language are inseparable from ecological systems; 2) the creative approach and methodologies we are taking to Indigenous-led planning; and 3) the ways in which individual team members navigate, adapt, and grow in our roles, embodying and contributing to reconciliation.