Case Study: Read the following case study and then answer the questions below.
J.M. Baker worked as a traditional land use researcher and consultant for seven years between her MA and PhD degrees in Anthropology, and she continues to occasionally assist First Nations in the traditional land use research and consultation process. During the summers of 2008 and 2009 she worked for the Bigstone Cree Nation in northern Alberta as a consultant performing traditional land use research and assessments. One particular oil and gas company with a large oil sands lease was proposing a pilot project to develop technology to extract difficult to reach in situ deposits of bitumen and so approached Bigstone Cree Nation to traditional land use assessment. At the time, [Company X's] activities were top secret: they held a smaller start-up company with a different name, they were extremely paranoid about Chinese spies, and the very trappers they were consulting were not allowed to know anything about what [Company X] was doing or exactly where they were doing it. Baker was working with Bigstone Cree Nation members mostly from the remote community of Chipewyan Lake, whose hunting and trapping areas are within the company's lease.
Several Bigstone Cree Nation members and Baker spent most of that summer visiting important hunting, trapping, ?shing, camping, and plant and medicine gathering places within Bigstone Cree Nation territory. They walked a once well-worn trail from Chipewyan Lake to the Wabasca River that took several days. On one of the ?nal days, they crossed the new road to Chipewyan Lake and encountered the startling noise of construction transforming it into an all-weather road for industrial use. They noticed that after having spent days with the subtler sounds of the boreal forest, the construction sounds were startling, alarming, and even stress-inducing. The trappers in the group explained that this kind of noise pollution also affects animal movements. At first it scares away animals; then in time animals such as moose start to come back, but predators like wolves have an advantage over them because the moose can no longer hear them approaching. Additionally, roads create "corridors" that change animal movements (Brody 2004[1981]) and further act to open up the landscape. When Baker submitted the traditional land use report to the [Company X], they claimed there is no scientific evidence proving noise affects animals and in fact there are studies on domestic sheep from the UK that show that noise from traffic has no impact on animals.
[Company X] had also hired a social science and health research firm to look at capacity building, income, and health in the small community of Chipewyan Lake. Baker sat in on one of their meetings. The consultants flew up to Wabasca and back in the same day in a chartered plane from Calgary and asked a couple of representatives from Chipewyan Lake, in a local Wabasca restaurant, about what kind of research they could do and whether or not people ate wild meat or had jobs. Baker felt uncomfortable for everyone sitting around the table, especially the Chipeweyan Lake residents, whom she knows to be quite gregarious, but who were now staring at their soup and not saying a word. The consultants eventually hired Bigstone's environmental monitors to travel to Chipewyan Lake and go door to door to survey people on how much bush meat they were eating and what their work capacities were. One of the monitors later said that she could not do the work because she was from Wabasca, not Chipewyan Lake, and she was not comfortable knocking on strangers' doors and asking them personal questions. So, in the end she simply did not do the assigned task, and so the number of questionnaires that were completed is uncertain.
Based on the results from these surveys, the research ?rm claimed that the proposed in situ oil sands developments would have no significant impact on harvesting in the region, since people in Chipewyan Lake no longer eat bush food. Baker found the opposite while working with the trappers from Chipewyan Lake. The majority of people from the area preferred to eat wild food and still do so. In fact, many Elders have never eaten store-bought meat, especially considering there are no grocery stores in Chipewyan Lake. Surely people from Chipewyan Lake had told strangers at their doors with surveys in hand that they do not hunt because they did not trust the researchers (potential government co-conspirators) and feared loss of hunting and harvesting rights, considering the past and current government activities in limiting rights and movements of Aboriginal peoples in Canada. In describing Aboriginal consultation for mines in the Northwest Territories, Stevenson explains, "many [A]boriginal people view this extraction of their knowledge...as a form of theft and, understandably, have been reluctant to share the depth and breadth of their knowledge with out- siders" (1996:282).
At the completion of the traditional land use ?eldwork, the [Company X] employee managing the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) told Baker that she had to change the two sections recently described and that the company "was paying for the work, not Bigstone Cree Nation." This quote strongly reveals how the science-for-hire practice in the EIA consultation industry is anything but objective. Baker did not change her report but it is likely that the project manager made the requested changes independently. Indeed, changing consultants' results is a common practice in the EIA editing processes, as witnessed by Baker on several occasions, as well as EIA editors requiring hired "experts" to make their sections of EIAs "as confusing as possible". There apparently is not su?cient oversight from regulators, academics, and professional bodies to push back against such abuses, showing the control that fossil fuel companies - through their capture of consultants and regulators - take over the consultation processes designed to protect the public interest (and speci?cally to protect Aboriginal and Treaty rights).
While much of the knowledge that people share about their traditional territories can to some extent be forced onto maps and into scienti?c data tables in traditional land use reports, there are also "dreams" - spiritual and other forms of knowing that do not ?t into western scienti?c models of truth-making and reporting. For example, rocks are alive (see Hallowell, 2002; Povinelli, 1995) and there are also other creatures that live in northern Cree territory that are not re- cognized by western science: little people, sasquatch, dog-sized frogs, and a water snake/serpent to name a few. The water creature moves between lakes via underground rivers and muskegs. Many people have seen them surface and know where these rivers run. An Elder expressed concern for these creatures in a consultation meeting on a company's activities, regarding a new "de-watering" process where wetlands are drained so that bitumen is more easily extracted. The scientist at the meeting told him that under water serpents are just superstitions. The Elder then refused to meet with them again. Baker has been tasked with protecting rocks, sasquatch dens, and underwater trails many times while doing applied work; her only solution has been to call them spiritual or ceremonial sites, having to convert the knowledge being shared into the western paradigm so that it has authority (Nadasdy, 1999).
At consultation meetings that Westman has attended since 2005, held within the Bigstone Cree Nation, proponents faced major problems in communicating factual information, especially in a manner meaningful to isolated community members, about the scale and impact of proposed oil sands activity. Indeed, downplaying these impacts through a discourse of technical wizardry was evidently a key strategy. Donuts and door prizes seemed to be the main focus with plenty of technical experts available - many from the USA - to answer any technical questions (there were few). No Cree translation or Cree speaker was on the program at this meeting in a community where a signi?cant number of the most knowledgeable adults have no formal schooling and/or very limited pro?ciency in English. Nor did representatives at this meeting attempt to gain information about current community land use practices, in a settlement where virtually every household consumes wild ?sh and animal products on a daily basis. Rather, industry representatives (who mostly had technical quali?cations in science and engineering, rather than social science, and knew little about traditional land use in northern Canada) made promises about land reclamation, in spite of the poor record of the oil sands industry in this domain. New, experimental, extraction procedures were proposed, without a full disclosure of environmental risks, electricity sources, and other unknowns inherent in such innovations. The focus seemed to be on verifying that a meeting had actually occurred, rather than on exchanging useful information.
As with Baker's examples, the public meeting Westman attended at Trout Lake was intended to be a major consulting milestone towards the approval of an experimental megaproject that would signi?cantly modify and open up a core hunting area currently with few incursions. Other consultation processes we have witnessed, for smaller projects, were more backroom-oriented, largely focused on Elders and registered trapline holders. Frequently people initiating the meetings have come up through the industry and have no socio-cultural training. Sometimes such consultations are referred to as "meet and greets," providing some assessment of the level of information being exchanged. Nevertheless, such events are duly marked in [Company X's] consultations calendar to show support or assent for the project. Company consultants keep spreadsheets to record every time that they make any attempts at contacting First Nations (by phone, e-mail, letter, fax, etc.) that they use as proof that they have made an e?ort to consult. It is in the transition to a printed document, be it a company checklist or the transcript from an environmental assessment hearing, that consultation and public participation become distilled, re?ned, extractable, and legible (Scott, 1998).
Question: Determine and discuss SPECIFIC recommendations that will accomplishing the proposed next steps above, e.g. training, etc. What should be done and who should do it? Be specific.