Volume 3, Issue 2, April 2016, Pages 278–287
Abstract
Community
and regulatory concern over the ongoing impacts of historic extractive
developments has spurred efforts to clean up abandoned and contaminated
sites across the Circumpolar North. Yet, as the environmental legacies
of northern development proliferate, questions remain about how
successfully local or Indigenous traditional knowledge (TK) has been
included in and applied to issues of remediation, reclamation and
restoration at former industrial sites. In northern Canada, Indigenous
TK has in the last 40 years been formally incorporated into wildlife
management and in some cases approval processes for industrial projects,
but has less frequently been applied to remediation issues. This paper
will focus on the high profile case of the Canadian government’s attempt
to remediate arsenic contamination at the former Giant Mine in the
Northwest Territories. This abandoned mine contains 237,000 t of arsenic
trioxide stored underground adjacent to the city of Yellowknife and the
Dene communities of Dettah and Ndilo. While the Giant Mine Remediation
Project professed a desire to incorporate TK into the reclamation
project, the complex technical nature of the process, and a fundamental
misunderstanding of the epistemological basis of Indigenous TK, has
prevented anything more than token inclusion of such knowledge. Using
transcripts from the recent environmental assessment of the project, we
argue that proponents of the remediation project failed to acknowledge
that Indigenous TK is not simply a storehouse of scientific data on
plants and animals, but is woven together with historical memories of
rapid social, economic and environmental changes associated with
northern development projects
Keywords
- Mine remediation;
- Aboriginal people;
- Traditional ecological knowledge;
- Northern Canada
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