Northern science used to treat Arctic aboriginal people as specimens to be studied, just the same as caribou and polar bears, says Bob Van Dijken.

Now, First Nations are telling the scientists what to look at.

The International Polar Year is a study of the Arctic. It has happened approximately every 50 years since the 1880s in most circumpolar nations, including Russia, Norway, Canada and the United States.

The fourth started in 2007 and still has a few projects to complete.

It could be the last.

“It’s over,” says Van Dijken, the Yukon International Polar Year co-ordinator.

The International Polar Year is out of money and securing support for a fifth round doesn’t look good, Van Dijken says.

But in Old Crow, the hope is to leave the community with tools they need to keep doing important scientific monitoring, says Van Dijken,

This is not an obligation of the researchers, but after working and living with people in Old Crow for the last few summers, they have made it a priority.

The numerous projects in the small, isolated community of Vuntut Gwitch’in are on the forefront of the change that has happened in northern research, says Van Dijken.

It has largely been unheard of to have the community point out areas of priority and actually sit down to write the proposals for the projects together with the researchers, he says.

“They were always considered part of the landscape,” Van Dijken says of northerners in past IPY projects.

But that community-driven instruction and collaboration is exactly what happened in Old Crow.

“It’s a generational change,” says former Vuntut Gwitch’in First Nation chief Joe Linklater, adding the change has happened on both sides: researchers who are starting to recognize what northerners can bring to their studies and enthusiastic First Nation youth who want to find answers.

Many of the most recent IPY projects in Old Crow focus around climate change and the effects it has on the Vuntut’s traditional territory and way of life.

They cover things from tree rings that prove the drastic disparities in climate, to the desperate search for answers about why lakes in the Old Crow Flats have started to dry up and disappear.

However, there was one project in the remote community that did focus its research on the people themselves.

Old Crow was compared to Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories, by Gabrielle Slowey, a political science professor from York University. The goal was to examine the differences between a northern community engulfed by the oil and gas industry to one that has largely refused exploration.

But the result turned into a comparison of the wellbeing of the people of a self-governing First Nation versus a non self-governing First Nation in the North.

Self government is necessary for a healthy North, her findings show.

Going even further, Ottawa needs to change its priority of Arctic sovereignty to human security which, she argues, goes hand in hand with self governance.

Human security is a term Slowey champions, despite letters from the Prime Minister’s Office telling her to stop, she says.

“There is no precise definition of human security,” she says. “Just like there is no precise definition of self government. It depends on the community and their needs.”

In essence, human security means the wellbeing of the people. Are they fed, housed and happy? And how well can they sustain this lifestyle?

As an abrupt end of a discussion with Linklater at a conference down south, Slowey was invited to visit Yukon’s northernmost community to “see for herself,” she says.

Those visits changed the project’s focus, she says.

The Vuntut Gwitch’in First Nation’s land management is more environmentally sustainable and respectful of the natural world, she says.

Its sustainability is directly related to its ability to make the decisions and control its own development.

She presented her findings at an IPY workshop in Whitehorse on Tuesday.

She was flying from Whitehorse to Yellowknife Wednesday morning to give her input on the current devolution negotiations in the NWT.

“Get self government in place and then have devolution,” she says. “Otherwise, they’re just going to turn the battle from First Nations to the federal government to battles between to the territorial government and the communities.”

And with First Nations recognized as a government, they are less plagued by the paternalistic ignorance from Ottawa.

“I think the best thing that any federal, provincial or territorial government can do when it comes to making decisions in the north is ask northerners, ‘What do you think we should do?’” says Linklater. “I wouldn’t want to hand over the future of my young people to somebody who lives in Ottawa who doesn’t really give a shit about us. There’s no impact on them. Five o’clock they go home. We’re living with the decisions they make. At the end of the day, the person who makes the decision goes to sleep in the Yukon. They live with it 24/7. And, at the end of the day, we’re way further ahead and I think we are envied by a big part of the country for what we’ve accomplished in the Yukon.”

The criticisms of self-governing First Nations are widespread.

Insufficient capacity, lack of resources, cronyism, corruption – the list goes on. And Slowey adds to it, rolling her eyes.

“These are new governments, they are junior, they are learning the ropes and they are all stumbling out of the starting block. They have to be allowed to fail, to learn,” she says. “Have you been in downtown Toronto? We all have alcoholics. We have very corrupt political leaders. None of our leaders are immune from scandal, and yet we expect these aboriginal communities to be these perfect microcosms of government and that’s unfair.”

Unless the critique is constructive, it has no place – no matter who is footing the bill, she says, noting if Canadians actually calculated the royalties owed to First Nations for developing resources, “it’s a small chuck of change,” she says.

If you go back to the original agreements and establishment of Indian and Northern Affairs, the Crown of England recognized First Nations as the owners of the land, Linklater says.

They called themselves the trustees. Self-governance is really just First Nations taking back over that responsibility, he says.

We have become much healthier since we’ve taken back control of our land and ourselves, he adds, pointing out real failure exists in the pockets of reserve land Ottawa created.

“It’s not like you have to grow up in Southern Canada in order to be able to govern. We’ve been governing as Gwitch’in ourselves for over 30,000 years and nothing has changed,” says Linklater. “Why do we have to prove ourselves?”

Findings from 19 researchers, conducting 14 different projects in Yukon were presented to more than 160 people in Whitehorse this week.

They will also be included in a large, international conference in April 2012.

The conference is being called Knowledge to Action, and will represent the end of the International Polar Year.

Looking to the future, Van Dijken looks to Old Crow.

“While it is ending I think we’re seeing glimmers of hope,” he says. “In designing things so communities can continue this work.”

Contact Roxanne Stasyszyn at

roxannes@yukon-news.com

For two weeks in January, two York professors bundled into parkas and flew to Arctic villages along the proposed Mackenzie Valley pipeline. They were delivering valuable cargo – the results of their International Polar Year (IPY) research.

Reporting back to the communities was a condition of receiving IPY research funding in 2007, and after three years ecologist Dawn Bazely and political scientist Gabrielle Slowey were ready to deliver. When the two arrived by bush plane, citizens in Fort Simpson and Inuvik crowded into local meeting halls to hear them. Some had helped do the research, all were curious to hear the results.

Right: Dawn Bazely in a plane back to Yellowknife from Fort Simpson

“They were never going to read a report. They need to hear things orally,” says Bazely, director of York’s Institute for Research & Innovation in Sustainability.

Bazely led the Canadian component of an IPY project called Gas, Arctic Peoples & Security (GAPS), investigating the effect of oil and gas development on northern communities. She oversaw teams of natural and social scientists investigating invasive plant species, housing security and homelessness, mental health services and the advantages of self-governance in indigenous communities in the Yukon and Northwest Territories.

“What was really unique about our program was no other had natural and social scientists working so closely in tandem from the beginning,” said Slowey. Oil and gas was the context, human security or the well-being of these communities was the framework. The collaboration worked really well and achieved real results, she said.

Above: Gabrielle Slowey in front of the igloo church, Our Lady of Victory, an Inuvik landmark

Normally, denizens of these northern communities pay little heed as scientists from the south come and go, and never return to share their findings, says Bazely. This time they were all ears. The research offers them a glimpse of what is in store for them and ways they can deal with change. “It’s empowering,” she says.

Slowey agrees. “We’re not just taking knowledge away, we’re giving it back and helping them.” She also presented her findings in Whitehorse.

For the past three years, Slowey has been comparing the ability of self-governing versus non-self-governing indigenous communities to cope with change wrought by oil and gas development and exploration. After surveying residents, community leaders and industry officials, she found self-governing communities, such as Old Crow, have more control over what happens to them. They can make their own decisions and negotiate directly with the territorial government over oil and gas development. Non-self-governing communities such as Tuktoyaktuk must deal with multiple levels of government to get anything done. “Self-government removes all those layers and gives more local empowerment.”

Left: Gabrielle Slowey

After her presentations in Whitehorse and Inuvik, people in communities such as Pelee Crossing, Yukon, and Sachs Harbour, Northwest Territories (NWT), sought Slowey’s advice on how to proceed given mining exploration or oil exploration occurring in their area. “I highlighted not just onshore but offshore oil and gas development. It’s going to be huge.”

Folks in the NWT were also curious about the potential impact of devolution (downloading of jurisdiction from Ottawa to the territories) on their self-government agreements and future development. It’s a hot topic in the North and Slowey has pointed out in newspaper editorials how Ottawa bureaucrats are ill-prepared to make decisions about the North because they have no understanding of what life is like for the people who live there.

Moreover, she says, “we tend to think of people in the North as victims of policy instead of agents of change. I’m telling them they’re on the right track by pursuing self-government.” Do it now, she’s saying, before the territorial government embraces devolution. Yet it’s not so easy, as local indigenous leaders scramble to keep up as Ottawa keeps changing the rules of the game.

Over the past three years, Bazely and her students have looked for evidence of invasive plant species in settlements from Fort Simpson, gateway to the Nahanni and home of the caribou, north to Norman Wells, Fort Good Hope and Inuvik. Oil and gas exploration and development has brought outsiders to the area and with them a foreign fungus that has infected the grass that caribou eat. Not good news for people whose diet depends on caribou meat. Bazely advised communities to revegetate the ground along the pipelines and roads with local seeds, not imported seeds. Doing so could lead to local – and sustainable – business opportunities, she told Northern News Services in Fort Simpson.

Above: The frozen Mackenzie River

The GAPS research projects will be published in peer-reviewed academic journals, presented at conferences and spawn graduate theses, says Bazely. But the best value, she believes, comes from sharing it directly with local policy-makers and citizens.

By March, IPY research will be completed and next year the results will be shared at a Montreal conference, From Knowledge to Action.

Bazely is editing a book, Environmental Change and Human Security in the Arctic, to which Slowey is contributing a chapter. By this fall, Slowey expects to finish editing a book, Rethinking Public Policy in the Northwest Territories, highlighting each of the Canadian GAPS subprojects.

The biologist and political scientist have embraced the IPY imperative to report back to the communities. They plan to share their IPY research findings with indigenous groups in northern Ontario and local groups in Pennsylvania, who are faced with shale-gas development.

By Martha Tancock, YFile contributor

Research project examines changes new pipelines could bring to region

Roxanna Thompson
Northern News Services
Published Thursday, January 27, 2011

LIIDLII KUE/FORT SIMPSON – Non-indigenous plant species have a foothold in the Mackenzie Valley and more are expected to arrive as new transportation routes and pipelines are built in the region according to a research project.

Dawn Bazely, an associate professor of biology at York University, was in Fort Simpson from Jan. 13 to 16 to report on the findings of a project that was carried out in 2008.

Biologist Dawn Bazely, left, discusses the findings of a research project on non-indigenous plant species in the Mackenzie Valley with Fort Simpson residents Pam FitzRoy and Teresa Chilkowich. – Roxanna Thompson/NNSL photo

That summer, Bazely and two colleagues visited four communities along the proposed route of the Mackenzie Gas Project to look for the presence of non-indigenous plant species along roadsides and other transportation routes.

The research was part of a larger study called GAPS (Gas, Arctic Peoples and Security) that examined the affects of oil and gas industries on people in the Arctic. Part of the International Polar Year, GAPS was conducted by researchers in Canada, Russia and Norway.

For her section of GAPS Bazely focused on how ecosystems might change along pipeline routes, particularly with the movement of non-indigenous plant species into the North.

The research will provide a baseline to measure future changes against, she said.

As they expected, the team found that Fort Simpson — their first study point — had a higher number of non-indigenous plant species compared to Norman Wells, Fort Good Hope and Inuvik.

This isn’t surprising because Fort Simpson is the most southerly, has the most forgiving climate and has many routes in including roads and a pre-existing pipeline, Bazely said.

Most of the species found in the village were in gardens and along roadsides. Those on the roadside have yet to creep into the bush.

“As things warm inevitably they’ll spread,” Bazely said.

Most non-indigenous species come and invade and don’t have negative impacts, said Bazely. Inevitably, however, some species will arrive that do.

The team did find a fungus they were looking for that lives in some grasses eaten by animals.

Because the fungus was in higher concentrations along the roadways the team suspects it came up in southern seed mixes.

If ingested, the fungus can make animals sick. The findings support the need for local seed material to be used on reseeding projects, she said.

Bazely cautioned that the issue of non-indigenous plants isn’t black and white but is more value based.

People do benefit from a lot of introduced species including food plants like potatoes, she said.

As part of their research the territorial government asked the team to also examine how residents might want to identify new species.

There were a lot of opinions on the subject, Bazely said.

“People were interested in participating and learning about and motoring for newly arrived species,” she said.

The team is producing a report for the government on on invasive species planning. Some of the other findings from the project will be published in scientific journals.

Bazely said she was pleased to be able to return to the North to share the findings with the communities that were studied.

• Negotiating Change: Community-Based Mental Health and Addiction Practice in NWT
• Conferences & Presentations: Learn about where and when the IPY GAPS team has been presenting!
• Sub-project Updates: The latest developments in GAPS research projects
• Ecojustice & Adaptation: An emerging network of activists, First Nations, and academics from the Global North and South
• International GAPS: News from our Norwegian and Russian GAPS colleagues.

• Evolution of GAPS: Community consultations change the course of the project
• Team Workshop: What exactly is Human Security?
• Sub-project Updates: Find out what the GAPS researchers have been doing in NWT
• Interdisciplinary Research: Using human security to manage invasive nonindigenous plants
• Conferences: Researchers have attended many conferences – get the scoop on what they presented and where!
• Major Events: Ecojustice Conference at York University, and Our North/ Our Future Youth Workshop in Tuktoyaktuk, NWT.

In November, Gabrielle Slowey will be heading up a panel discussion around Oil and Development at the Northern Governance Policy Research Conference, also in Yellowknife. Julia and Alana will also present, along with Yellowknife-based GAPS researcher Jessica Simpson. Rajiv is also part of the secretariat for this conference through his continuing work with the Institute for Circumpolar Health Research in Yellowknife.

Two-Day Conference
April 16-17, 2009

April 16th – Founders Assembly Hall
April 17th – The Underground

Community activists and activist scientists from Brazil, India, South Africa, and Arctic Canada  will share stories of local vulnerabilities to climate change, and discuss strategies for addressing inequities in climate change causation, mitigation, funding, and education.

Sponsored by Environment Canada, International Polar Year, York International, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, & IRIS

• Download the event poster (pdf)

For more information please contact the conference coordinators:

Annette Dubreuil (afdubreu@yorku.ca) or
Jennifer Jew (jenjew@yorku.ca)

Phone: 416-736-2100 ext 33631
347 York Lanes, York University
4700 Keele Street
Toronto, Ontario, M3J 1P3
Canada

Research has been going very well, with a great deal of interest and participation from community members. Community organizations such as the Inuvik Homeless Shelter, Inuvik Interagency Committee members, Yellowknife Homelessness Coalition members, and the Centre for Northern Families have provided an incredible amount of support and input over the course of this project. It has indeed been a collaborative effort. I would like to say a big “Mahsi Cho!”, “Quyanainni!”, and “Thank you!” to these groups and individuals.

In the fall, I will conduct fieldwork in the community of Paulatuk to get a sense of how these issues within the context of a small, settlement community and how they connect with housing insecurity and homelessness in larger centres. Without a doubt, homelessness in the territory is the result of a complex web of factors that link communities together. For example, homelessness in Yellowknife can be reflective of issues in much smaller, remote communities. Homelessness is a territory-wide issue.

Of incredible importance are the two research assistants who have provided a great deal of help and support to this project. Kate Snow, an Inuvik high school student, worked closely with me on that portion of the project. Currently, I am working with Gilly McNaughton, a local student and youth worker, here in Yellowknife.

- Julia Christensen
Inuvik & Yellowknife, NT