Compensating aboriginal cultural losses: An alternative approach to assessing environmental damages
Introduction
Cultural losses experienced by aboriginal communities are widely viewed as a pressing social issue. Many of these losses are due to environmental impacts affecting land, water, and air resources that are associated with the spread of industrial development over the past 100 years. For some people this issue is recognized as fundamental, with important implications for how society should move forward over the next decades: the unique perspective of Aboriginal cultures, their greater emphasis on sustainability, and the close integration of environmental, social, and economic concerns all speak to a new path forward. For others, the problem of aboriginal cultural losses is viewed as a source of guilt and embarrassment, with implications for how the benefits and costs of past and future resource development on aboriginal lands should be shared. For others, there is no problem: the employment and revenue benefits offered by industrialization are seen to more than offset the environmental and cultural losses related to an outdated, albeit traditional, way of life.
Understanding the complex changes and implications of loss experienced by Aboriginal people is challenging for both native and non-native societies. In this paper we argue that conventional approaches for estimating cultural losses experienced by aboriginal populations are ethically illegitimate, methodologically incorrect, and simply don't make sense. We briefly review the pros and cons of conventional methods and then turn to a different approach, based on insights and techniques drawn from the decision sciences and participatory deliberative processes based in structured decision making (Gregory et al., 1993, Keeney and Raiffa, 1993). We demonstrate the advantages, along with some possible disadvantages, of this new approach using several examples from North American aboriginal communities. We conclude with a discussion of key issues, including the important question of the extent to which compensation is able to address the types of cultural losses often experienced by aboriginal populations in North America.
Our focus is specific to the choice of methods for incorporating cultural losses due to changes in the natural environment. We acknowledge that many individuals—including Aboriginal peoples themselves, along with anthropologists, lawyers, philosophers, geographers, planners, and biologists—have written persuasively and elegantly about the topic of cultural loss in Aboriginal communities.2 We owe them a profound debt, but our focus in this paper is more narrow: We seek to advance an improved methodology for assessing cultural losses from environmental damages in a way that makes sense simultaneously from the standpoint of the Aboriginal communities and from the perspective of governments, policy analysts, and the law. Although much of what we say in this paper will apply to traditional cultures in other countries and to resource-based losses experienced long ago, our focus is on cultural losses experienced by Aboriginal populations currently living in western Canada and the U.S. Pacific Northwest (referred to as First Nations, First Peoples, Inuit or Metis in Canada and Native Americans in the U.S.) who have experienced detrimental changes to their traditional lands and lifestyles.
Section snippets
Cultural losses due to environment change
Throughout North America there is a renewed interest on the part of Aboriginal populations for increased control or self-governance of traditional lands. This takes a range of forms, from outright management of natural resources to sharing in the benefits derived from resource extraction (e.g., jobs and revenues from mining, oil & gas production, forestry operations, rangeland, or fisheries). A spate of new legislation and court decisions echoes and reinforces this interest.
The emphasis on
What's wrong with conventional compensation approaches?
Conventional approaches to estimating cultural losses from environmental damages typically fail to reflect many components of value that matter to the affected indigenous populations. Yet despite widespread criticism, the reliance on market-based approaches persists: we can think of four possible explanations. First, there exists a strong legacy of decisions made by the courts from a time when cultural losses were viewed very differently than they are now. This has led to an unfortunate record
What's right about decision-focused compensation approaches?
A structured decision making (SDM) approach builds on the methods and insights of multi-attribute utility theory (or MAUT) and decision analysis (Keeney and Raiffa, 1993) along with findings from behavioral decision research (Kahneman and Tversky, 2000). The approach provides a way to assess compensation for environmental damages that takes account of multiple dimensions of value and that establishes endpoints that reflect the informed experience of the affected community. As further discussed
Concluding discussion
Issues that arise as part of compensating Aboriginal populations for losses incurred as the result of damages to their resource base are among the most fundamental facing industrialized societies. They reach to the heart of how we define ourselves, as representatives of one culture in relation to another. Compensation helps to affix meaning to this relationship, in a way that is tangible because it involves the possibility of transfers between people of physical things that matter—money, land,
Acknowledgements
Funding for the writing of this paper was received from the U.S. National Science Foundation through Awards SES 0451259 and 0725025 from the Decision, Risk, and Management Science (DRMS) program to Decision Research. We thank Jamie Donatuto, Lee Failing, Michael Harstone, Tim McDaniels, Bill McEllhenny, Terre Satterfield, and Nancy Turner for helpful discussions on this topic. Responsibility for the ideas expressed in this paper rests with the authors alone.
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