Traditional Knowledge: Considerations for Protecting Water in Ontario
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18584/iipj.2012.3.3.11Abstract
In Canada, the water crisis increasingly felt around the world is being experienced primarily in small, usually Indigenous, communities. At the heart of this issue lies an ongoing struggle to have Indigenous voices heard in the decision-making processes that affect their lives, lands, and waters. As part of ancient systems of Traditional Knowledge (TK), Indigenous people bear the knowledge and the responsibility to care for the waters upon which they depend for survival. A series of internationally developed documents has supported Indigenous peoples’ calls for increased recognition of the importance of TK in resolving environmental crises, including those involving water. Ontario provincial and Canadian federal governments have been developing legislative and regulatory documents to help fend off further water-related catastrophes within their jurisdictions. Despite such efforts, a number of barriers to the successful and appropriate involvement of TK in water management remain. Based on years of community-based and policy-related research with First Nations people involved in water-related undertakings, this article highlights progress made to date, and provides Indigenous viewpoints on what further steps need to be taken. Key among these steps are the need to restore and maintain Indigenous access to traditional territories and ways of life, and the requirement for mutually respectful collaboration between TK and Western science.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2012 Deborah McGregor
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
In keeping with IIPJ's Open Access policy, IIPJ has a shared approach to copyright. A shared approach means that authors do not have to waive all of their rights to the work published in IIPJ. By submitting to IIPJ, the author(s) grant(s) IIPJ the right to:
- Copy edit the article,
- Display the article in perpetuity, and
- Enforce the conditions of the Creative Commons license associated with the article.
All articles published in IIPJ carry the Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives license (click here for the human-readable summary and here for the legal code).
This means that the article can be copied or redistributed without written permission from the author(s) or IIPJ if the following conditions are met:
- IIPJ is appropriately credited as the original source. The reference should include the article's DOI (Digital Object Identifier), which helps us track the dissemination of articles published in IIPJ.
- The article is not being used for a commercial purpose. Users must be able to access the reprinted or republished article without paying any fee.
- The article is not altered from its original form. This means it cannot be edited, transformed, remixed, or truncated in any way. This policy protects our authors from having their work or intent misrepresented.
Any reprints, republications, or distributions that do not meet all of these conditions must be approved in writing by the author(s) of the article and IIPJ.
IIPJ will not grant permission to any publisher that requires authors or IIPJ to waive any of their rights to the article.
Authors who wish to reprint, republish, or distribute their article published in IIPJ for any commercial purpose must obtain written permission from IIPJ and provide appropriate attribution.
IIPJ will consider accepting articles that have been previously published. However, authors submitting articles of this nature must:
- Indicate that the article was previously published,
- Provide details of all previous publications (that is, source, publication date, format, etc.),
- Describe how their IIPJ submission differs from the original publication, and
- Provide written permission to republish the article from the copyright holder(s) if applicable.