Indigenous Planning: From Forced Assimilation to Self-determination

Interest in Indigenous planning has blossomed in recent years, particularly as it relates to the Indigenous response to settler colonialism. Driven by land and resource hunger, settler states strove to extinguish Indigenous land rights and ultimately to destroy Indigenous cultures. However, Indigenous peoples have persisted. This article draws on the literature to examine the resistance of Indigenous peoples to settler colonialism, their resilience, and the resurgence of Indigenous planning as a vehicle for Indigenous peoples to determine their own fate and to enact their own conceptions of self-determination and self-governance.

KITAKIWI MASINAHIKANAN (OUR MAP)

Members of Nibinamik First Nation, an Anishinaabe community in the Far North of Ontario, are in the process of updating their land use plan. As part of this land use planning project, Nibinamik seeks an accompanying and informing map of their traditional territory. Through a partnership between Nibinamik and Ryerson University, we explored the substantive and procedural values informing the mapping, and by extension the land use planning, project. The findings are discussed in relation to the literature on Indigenous counter-mapping and in reference to the guiding provincial policy framework. Importantly, Nibinamik seeks an alternate process to that imposed by the province, while simultaneously seeking recognition by the province. In this way, Nibinamik resists the province’s claims to exclusive power over crown lands, and asserts claims to shared power over traditional territory. Key words: counter-mapping; Indigenous Planning; northern Ontario

KITAKIWI MASINAHIKANAN (OUR MAP)

Members of Nibinamik First Nation, an Anishinaabe community in the Far North of Ontario, are in the process of updating their land use plan. As part of this land use planning project, Nibinamik seeks an accompanying and informing map of their traditional territory. Through a partnership between Nibinamik and Ryerson University, we explored the substantive and procedural values informing the mapping, and by extension the land use planning, project. The findings are discussed in relation to the literature on Indigenous counter-mapping and in reference to the guiding provincial policy framework. Importantly, Nibinamik seeks an alternate process to that imposed by the province, while simultaneously seeking recognition by the province. In this way, Nibinamik resists the province’s claims to exclusive power over crown lands, and asserts claims to shared power over traditional territory. Key words: counter-mapping; Indigenous Planning; northern Ontario

A Parallel Approach to Water Stewardship Planning

The professional practice of planning and the state-controlled mechanisms under which western-science planning operate offer little to improve the lives of Indigenous people and their communities. Arguably, western-science planning along with its many legal tools, collectively reproduce existing colonial relations in the interest of state domination over, and suppression of, Indigenous people. In this paper, we describe a different planning model, one that Viswanathan (2019) refers to as “parallel planning”, wherein Indigenous planning principles are practiced in parallel to western-science planning, with each approach informing, and complementing, the other. Our case example is from the Saskatchewan River Delta wherein Indigenous values nested in traditional knowledge in the land and water are the centrepiece of a planning process supported by the western-science planning framework. Challenges facing this approach will be discussed alongside suggestions on how these challenges may be overcome.

Reclaiming Indigenous Planning as a Pathway to Local Water Security

Access to drinkable water is essential to human life. The consequence of unsafe drinking water can be damaging to communities and catastrophic to human health. Today, one in five First Nation communities in Canada is on a boil water advisory, with some advisories lasting over 10 years. Factors contributing to this problem stretch back to colonial structures and institutional arrangement that reproduce woefully inadequate community drinking water systems. Notwithstanding these challenges, First Nation communities remain diligent, adaptive, and innovative in their efforts to provide drinkable water to their community members. One example is through the practice of source water protection planning. Source water is untreated water from groundwater or surface water that supplies drinking water for human consumption. Source water protection is operationalized through land and water planning activities aimed at reducing the risk of contamination from entering a public drinking water supply. Here, we introduce a source water protection planning process at Muskowekwan First Nation, Treaty 4, Saskatchewan. The planning process followed a community-based participatory approach guided by trust, respect, and reciprocity between community members and university researchers. Community members identified threats to the drinking water source followed by restorative land management actions to reduce those threats. The result of this process produced much more than a planning document but engaged multiple community members in a process of empowerment and self-determination. The process of plan-making produced many unintended results including human–land connectivity, reconnection with the water spirit, as well as the reclaiming of indigenous planning. Source water protection planning may not correct all the current water system inadequacies that exist on many First Nations, but it will empower communities to take action to protect their drinking water sources for future generations as a pathway to local water security.

Indigenous Lessons about Sustainability Are Not Just for “All Humanity”

Indigenous peoples are widely recognized as holding insights or lessons about how the rest of humanity can live sustainably or resiliently. Yet it is rarely acknowledged in many literatures that for Indigenous peoples living in the context of settler states such as the U.S. or New Zealand, our own efforts to sustain our peoples rest heavily on our capacities to resist settler colonial oppression. Indigenous planning refers to a set of concepts and practices through which many Indigenous peoples reflect critically on sustainability to derive lessons about what actions reinforce Indigenous self-determination and resist settler colonial oppression. The work of the Sustainable Development Institute of the College of Menominee Nation (SDI) is one case of Indigenous planning. In the context of SDI, we discuss Indigenous planning as a process of interpreting lessons from our own pasts and making practical plans for staging our own futures. If there are such things as Indigenous sustainability lessons for Indigenous peoples, they must be reliable planning concepts and processes we can use to support our continuance in the face of ongoing settler colonial oppression.