The Importance of Traditional Knowledge and Indigenous Involvement in the Protection of the Environment and Cumulative Effects

Deborah McGregor

2021

English

Canada

One of the goals of ICCE is the recognition of two knowledge systems: Indigenous Knowledge and Western science and how they can work together to understand the impacts, mitigate, manage and predict them.

Indigenous Knowledge (IK) can be used to understand environmental impacts because Indigenous people live it everyday, and because they live it, they can make the connections between time and place. The impacts are not seen as site or project specific.

Indigenous Knowledge has become recognized to help solve environmental problems by external interests, however IK was originally used for our self-determining autonomous societies. The community must decide how to use IK when developing tools for decision making.

Indigenous Knowledge is relevant at multiple scales and levels for cumulative effects and different models for how IK and Western science can work together (i.e. two-eyed seeing, braiding, weaving etc.). Indigenous people have a right to be a part of the process, not just a resource of knowledge to be extracted.

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