Are the natural sciences ready for truth, healing, and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples in Canada? Exploring ‘settler readiness’ at a world-class freshwater research station

Abstract

The Experimental Lakes Area in Northwestern Ontario, Canada, is a globally prominent freshwater research facility, conducting impactful whole-of-lake experiments on so-called 'pristine' lakes and watersheds. These lakes are located in traditional Anishinaabe (Indigenous) territory and the home of 28 Treaty #3 Nations, something rarely acknowledged until now. Indeed, Indigenous peoples in the area have historically been excluded from the research facility's governance and research. Shortly after it changed hands in 2014-from the federal government to the not-for-profit International Institute of Sustainable Development (IISD)-the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada released its Calls to Action to all Canadians. The newly named International Institute of Sustainable Development-Experimental Lakes Area (IISD-ELA) began to respond with a number of initiatives aimed to develop relationships with local Indigenous peoples and communities. In this paper, from the perspectives of IISD-ELA staff members, we share findings from an exploratory study into the relationships beginning to develop between IISD-ELA and Treaty #3 Nations. We used semi-structured interviews (n = 10) to identify how staff perceived their initial efforts and contextualize those with the current literature on meaningfully engagement in reconciliation. Our analysis highlights perceived barriers, including time, resources, and funding constraints, as well as an acknowledged lack of cultural awareness and sensitivity training. Participants also recognized the need to engage Indigenous knowledge holders and embrace their ways of knowing at the research station. While the study is small in scale, as an international leader in freshwater science, transparency in the IISD-ELA's journey in reconciliation has the potential to inform, influence, and 'unsettle' settler-colonial scientists, field stations, and institutions across the country and beyond.

Citizen science in K–12 school‐based learning settings

“…To wholly engage learners in the scientific process, projects ought to strive to include a vast range of partners from Indigenous peoples to academic institutions, to community members in order to incorporate multiple perspectives and ways of knowing into school‐based citizen science projects (Bozhkov et al, 2020; Eitzel et al, 2017). This can in turn support the movement toward citizen science projects that are truly collaborative in nature and facilitated by scientists rather than for scientists (Haklay, 2013).…”

How to put forest and conservation genomics into motion for and with Indigenous communities?

“…jects with Indigenous communities. Involvement and commitment on the part of researchers in the process of the reconciliation and decolonization of research, as well as openness and sensitivity to Indigenous culture and realities, an often overlooked step, were identified by several researchers as avenues for improving relationships between the scientific community and Indigenous Peoples (Asselin and Basile 2012;McGregor 2018;Bozhkov et al 2020). According to TallBear (2013a; 2013b), genomics is a field that relies on rather traditional, even colonialist, theoretical principles and definitions.…”

Doing feminist collaborative event ethnography

“…There was an absence of Indigenous researchers in our teams, despite attempts to recruit diverse team members at our home institutions where we have affiliations and connections with Indigenous studies programs, scholars, and research centers. There are multiple reasons for this, and we recognized the pitfalls, power dynamics and challenges of a settler-scholar team (Bozhkov et al 2020). We spent months developing training materials, especially with an attention to the long-acknowledged problems of non-Indigenous researchers working alongside Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities in global environmental governance processes (Howitt and Jackson 1998;Tuhiwai Smith 2013).…”

“…We saw tensions surface, mostly visibly across disciplinary divisions. There were also themes that have emerged elsewhere in critical work, such as the subjective/objective divide (Vrasti 2008(Vrasti , 2010, the question of generating comparative or generalizable work (Wedeen 2010;Yanow 2009: 295), the broad and confusing nature of ethnographic practice for those who had not had much experience with it before (Schatz 2009), settler-scholar logics (Bozhkov et al 2020), and the lack of training opportunities in ethnography sui generis.…”

“…In attending to these questions, we suggest that CEE can contribute to social science approaches to power in its adoption of feminist methodologies. Moreover, as a team of non-Indigenous researchers we were especially attentive to settler-scholar components and engaged research possibilities of team-based science (Hall et al 2008: 3; see also Bozhkov et al 2020).…”