Abstract
The Canadian government has long excluded Aboriginals from the governance processes of protected areas. However, today Aboriginals peoples, thanks to several judgments of the Supreme Court of Canada have now access to legal tools enabling them to participate equality on park management councils. Despite these legal advances not all co-management models give the same space to Aboriginals people and to their knowledge. As a result management councils express different levels of satisfaction with co-management. Co-jurisdiction is the form of co-management favoured by Aboriginals because it creates legal conditions for an egalitarian partnership based on recognition of their land rights and knowledge that they wish to pass on to future generations.
This chapter examines the management plans of 13 national parks of Canada located in the Arctic. Our study reveals that Aboriginal people feel that culture is the essence of nature and that humans are therefore part of the ecosystem. The protection of nature is therefore part of the duty of men and women. That being said, the environmental protection requires the maintenance of hunting and fishing activities; as such a park must first be a place where Aboriginal culture is living and practiced and not a “pristine natural setting”.
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Notes
- 1.
The official name of all parks in Canada is always formed in the same way, with the name of the park, such as “Wapusk,” “Tuktut Nogait,” etc., followed by “National Park of Canada.” To simplify reading, we have abbreviated park names. Hence the “Tuktut Nogait National Park of Canada” becomes “Tuktut Nogait Park.”
- 2.
We proceeded as follows. We first consulted all documents concerning each of the circumpolar parks and identified the various themes that appeared directly concerning Aboriginals: job creation, indigenous knowledge, tourism, land occupancy, elders. We then identified the topics that reappeared in each master plan, and job creation and tourism benefits that appeared only in certain master plans or only marginally were not considered part of the factors that Aboriginals considered essential in the fabric of their society. The analysis consisted of identifying the importance and reasons these topics appear repeatedly.
- 3.
That said, nothing in the text explains how a non-Aboriginal can “enjoy this relationship.”
- 4.
The expression “earth guardian” is a quote from one of the Aboriginal members of the Management committee, Donald Saunders, York Factory First Nation (Wapusk Park 2007: 6).
- 5.
This is Canada’s 37th national park; it is situated in northern Manitoba in a polar-bear cubbing zone.
- 6.
This difficult collaboration originates in the fact that the “partners” had to overcome many and varied obstacles. Indeed, unlike certain Arctic parks that are created in areas with undeveloped tourist potential, Wapusk Park was created in a region where tourism is significant. The park is accessible from the city of de Churchill, nicknamed the « Polar Bear World Capital » which receives some 20,000 visitors annually. By way of comparison, Nunavut’s three national parks receive fewer than 1,000 visitors per year between the three of them (i.e., an average of 300).
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Martin, T. (2016). Beyond the Protection of the Land, National Parks in the Canadian Arctic: A Way to Actualized and Institutionalized Aboriginal Cultures in the Global. In: Herrmann, T., Martin, T. (eds) Indigenous Peoples’ Governance of Land and Protected Territories in the Arctic. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25035-9_9
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