Author Archives: Melissa Lavoie

Firelight Group Website

The Firelight Group is an Indigenous Mapping organization. From the website: We are a consulting group that works with Indigenous and local communities in Canada and beyond to provide high quality research, policy, planning, negotiation, and advisory services. Our work focuses on culture, health, socio-economics, ecology, and governance to support the rights and interests of Indigenous communities.

Their approach is to only work with Indigenous and local communities, or on projects where communities support their participation. This speaks to the level of respect and awareness of issues regarding existing structures of governance in First Nations communities.

In terms of their Ecology work, they support community managers to develop inventories, monitoring programs and management plans that combine scientific technical studies and Indigenous knowledge for important animals, plants, and ecosystems. Firelight Group focuses on the plant and animal species that are important to communities and their culture. As Nancy Turner, ethnobotanist stated in her interview with Dr. Michael Marker, there is a huge connection between stories and plants. Stories are more than just words – they are embodied lessons – every culture has their stories that embody the main lessons of their culture. She relayed the story of The Pauls and the Great Flood. They tied their canoes to the Arbudest trees – these particular trees are gnarled and their roots were deep, so they held on until the flood receded. The Salish people revere these trees, as they did a service to them – the trees saved their people. These types of stories are important to the identity of the people living on these lands. Firelight Group is cognizant of this, as they perform research with Indigenous communities, and not of them.

CreeGeo Mush Guardians

The CreeGeo Mush Guardians is a Citizen Science initiative for youth in Mushkegowuk communities to learn about the environment and identify Indigenous place names and its history. As a CreeGeo Mush Guardian, students will work with various technologies and maps to learn and capture the oral and
pictographic knowledge and history of the traditional values and teachings. Students will help to document instances and effects of climate change in their communities by observing and monitoring environmental changes on the land and water, non-Indigenous species and weather. Guardians are gatekeepers to the land, and working with local Elders, stewards and harvesters they will help to establish research plots using GPS. This is where consistent monitoring and data capture will take place, and we will be building activities in each community as we move forward.

Using Facebook and other modes of publication, citizens of communities in Mushkegowuk territory often post photos, videos and observations of their land. Students are encouraged to use the hashtag #MushGuardians to attach to posts! This will enable all posts to be gathered together in one accessible place and easily searchable by the public. This will allow for a unique open education opportunity for Mushkegowuk communities to learn from and about each other.

We are encouraging students to use whatever social media they are already on (Instagram, Facebook, etc) to help document their stewardship of the land, and to give them choice when it comes to their preferred platform. This could be as simple as taking a selfie while they are out measuring new snowfall or taking a picture of wildlife they come across. Permission is required from parent(s) or guardian(s), and CreeGeo has created a permission form that is embedded on the Mush Guardians website for teachers to print and send home with students.

Cunsolo, Willox et. al argue that “place-based narratives and first-hand observations and experiences of environmental change and climatic variation, shared through oral stories, are not only an important and legitimate source of research but also are methodologically rich and powerful” (Abram, 1996; Briggs, 2005; Burgess, 1999; Chamberlin, 2003; Cruikshank, 2005; Davis, 2004; Dove, 2000; Durie, 2004; Ellen and Harris, 2000; Furgal et al., 2002a, 2002b; Laidler, 2006; Mauro and Hardison, 2000; Raffles, 2002; Robertson et al., 2000; Ross, 2008; Stevenson, 1998, 2005; Watson et al., 2003) (p. 131). The program was created with the above in mind, as Elders join the youth in teaching about the history of the land and the changes they have seen over the years in their communities. This also helps establish potential research areas where students can participate in environmental monitoring activities with support from CreeGeo as well as a network of helpers in the STEM fields.

References

Cunsolo et. al (2013). Lab, My & Inuit Community Government, Rigolet. Storytelling in a Digital Age: Digital Storytelling as an Emerging Narrative Method for Preserving and Promoting Indigenous Oral Wisdom.. Qualitative Research. 13. 127-147. 10.1177/1468794112446105.

https://www.uvic.ca/socialsciences/ethnographicmapping/

From the website: University of Victoria’s Ethnographic Mapping Lab is designed for GIS and qualitative data analysis supporting research and innovation in projects like traditional land use and occupancy mapping in indigenous communities and providing space for interview transcription, high-speed document scanning, and software supported qualitative analysis.

Here is a presentation outlining the ways in which the lab uses Google My Maps to help tell the stories of Coast Salish communities. Cunsolo Willox et. al argue that “place-based narratives and first-hand observations and experiences of environmental change and climatic variation, shared through oral stories, are not only an important and legitimate source of research but also are methodologically rich and powerful” (Abram, 1996; Briggs, 2005; Burgess, 1999; Chamberlin, 2003; Cruikshank, 2005; Davis, 2004; Dove, 2000; Durie, 2004; Ellen and Harris, 2000; Furgal et al., 2002a, 2002b; Laidler, 2006; Mauro and Hardison, 2000; Raffles, 2002; Robertson et al., 2000; Ross, 2008; Stevenson, 1998, 2005; Watson et al., 2003) (p. 131).

References

Cunsolo, A et. al, Victoria & Word’ Lab, My & Inuit Community Government, Rigolet. (2013). Storytelling in a Digital Age: Digital Storytelling as an Emerging Narrative Method for Preserving and Promoting Indigenous Oral Wisdom.. Qualitative Research. 13. 127-147. 10.1177/1468794112446105.

SIKU website (beta until April 2019)

An important audience for Smith’s (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples would be indigenous academics and researchers who may be developing indigenous research agendas, methodologies and protocols. She says:

“It appalls us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations.” (p. 1).

SIKU is an Indigenous Knowledge Wiki and Social Mapping Platform that was initially inspired by a Facebook secret group page entitled “Nunavut hunting stories of the day”. Indigenous people want to share about their communities, their environmental monitoring practices, what they see every day on the land, and generally what they know, but using platforms like Facebook to do it, or, simply sharing with family, friends orally – without a wider audience. When using a platform like Facebook, users are relinquishing their intellectual property to Facebook when they post. It is also difficult to find certain posts in a group (much scrolling is required – not very efficient).

So, SIKU was developed to address this concern and developers created a platform to preserve Indigenous peoples’ intellectual property as their own, so that they can share knowledge in a respectful way. This is very important to Indigenous people. Here are the guiding principles of SIKU:

SIKU’s Guiding Principles

Below is a chart to illustrate the process for data stewardship when adding/posting items to the SIKU platform.

All users must agree to the Terms of Reference when signing up / creating an account, and when they agree to these terms, they must abide by the guiding principles when posting / interacting with information within the app and beyond. What is interesting is that developers make it clear that everyone is to work within existing governance structures outlined by the communities.

https://hudsonbayconsortium.com/summit2018

From the Hudson Bay Consortium website – Background:

Following a long history of efforts by communities, organizations and interested parties in the greater James Bay/Hudson Bay region towards sharing knowledge and coordinated environmental stewardship, the inaugural Hudson Bay Summit will bring together these groups to formally create the Hudson Bay Consortium and move forward on activities and outcomes for environmental stewardship including Communications, Protected Areas, Coastal Restoration and Environmental Monitoring.

The Hudson Bay Consortium Report is available on the website, as we have already participated in the summit and its workshops in order to inform the report’s contents. The participants were configured in a circle to optimize sharing, translation services were readily available and everyone who wished to participate in the discussions and workshops did so freely.

Photo showing the room configuration:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/NJ6gyswj6NEKCs5A7

https://www.felcanada.org/

@FEL_Canada works for future generations by enabling the documentation, protection, revitalization and promotion of Indigenous languages in Canada and endangered languages throughout the world.

On their website, they have a section nested under Projects entitled Introduce Yourself Initiative. FEL Canada was inspired by the UN Indigenous Forum. In February 2016, UN Indigenous Forum made a call for introductory videos as part of their promotions for International Mother Language day. FEL then curated donations of language videos from around the world in the quest to “encourage cultural diversity, vitality, and the sharing of ideas, which enriches us all.”

Cycle of Life

The Omushkego Cycle of Life model was illustrated by the renowned artist Richard Kamalatisit (1959 – 2008).

Excerpt from Omushkego Department of Education (Mushkegowuk Council) pamphlet: “The Omushkego Cycle of Life reinforces Omushkego cultural identity, who we are and where we come from, and the interconnection to the seasonal life cycles of the Omushkego people and communities. These life cycles are based on the six Omushkego seasons and how they affect the land, rivers, birds, animals, and plants that are indigenous to the Omushkego people. This model reflects our uniqueness and origin of the Omushkego culture, traditions, and activities, its historical development, family principles, and values.”

I have used the Cycle of Life calendar to help organize a schedule for youth environmental monitors, to make it more culturally relevant and – it just makes sense!

https://www.cbc.ca/arts/there-s-a-massive-free-catalogue-of-indigenous-films-online-and-we-have-6-picks-to-get-you-started-1.4623884

In Prins’ (2002) article about visual media and the primitivist perplex, he relayed that “white dominant society then began to subvert indigenous understandings of themselves and the world around them. Acting out their own colonial fantasies, whites superimposed the invented “Indian” of their own imaginations on the captive indigenous nations. In this hegemonic configuration, North American Indians became subjects of internal colonialism in a double sense-both politically and psychologically. We might think of this as the “primitivist perplex.” This translated into film, which served to broadcast these inventions to a wider audience and helped to perpetuate these stereotypes and figments of white imagination. The National Film Board of Canada, in 2018, has launched Indigenous cinema, an extensive online library of over 200 films by Indigenous directors — part of a three-year Indigenous Action Plan to “redefine” the NFB’s relationship with Indigenous peoples.

References

Prins, Harald. (2002). “Visual Media and the Primitivist Perplex: Colonial Fantasies and Indigenous Imagination in North America.” Pp. 58-74. Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. eds. F. Ginsburg, L. Abu-Lughod, and B.Larkin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

#IdleNoMore

Tweets by IdleNoMore4

http://www.idlenomore.ca/

In Friesen’s (2015) article, he quoted Ms. Erica Lee, a 22-year-old Cree woman, and her friends as being energized by the success of Idle No More. “More and more first-nations people are going to university and getting good jobs and starting to get in positions of power. A few decades ago, that was even less possible, and I think that has a lot to do with [the growth of the movement],” Ms. Lee said. “This time, I notice friends that I’ve never heard say anything political are talking about this. It’s a concept that hits home.” The organization of ideas into action, and the mobilization of Indigenous people around the world to connect with each other and lend support in many ways – through music and art to help get the message across, volunteer as a photographer / videographer to document the events, and/or help with logistics (cooking, setup and takedown, etc) – helps to promote cultural connectedness and cultural continuity; important in healthy communities.

References

Friesen, J. (2013, January 18). What’s behind the explosion of native activism? Young people.
Retrieved August 06, 2016, from
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/whats-behind-the-explosion-of-native-ac
tivism-young-people/article7552791/