Grant: Catalyst Grant: CBR in Climate Change Priority Area - Climate Justice

The health and wellbeing of the Denesuline of Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN) is intrinsically tied to its lands, waters, air, and traditional food systems. But the extraction of oil sands in northern Alberta has been negatively impacting these systems for decades. Rapid climate change is exacerbating these impacts. Given this already threatened system, Elders and land users are increasingly concerned with the dramatic changes they are witnessing in their territory as well as their diminishing access to the lands, waters, and airs they have used to harvest, fish, trap, and hunt for millennia. Reduced access to traditional food systems due to the compounding impacts of climate change threatens not only food security and physical health but also the mental, emotional, spiritual, and social wellbeing of the whole community. As such, ACFN has identified the need to better understand these challenges and how to best mitigate and adapt to them, grounded in their own knowledge systems. Our goal is to catalyze community-led research planning centered on community-identified priorities at the nexus of food security, human health across the life course, and climate justice. Our team is co-led by Community Lead, Lisa Tssessaze, who is the executive director of ACFN Dene Lands and Resource Management, director in the Indigenous Centre for Cumulative Effects ICCE, and an active land user, together with Heather Castleden, a community-engaged settler researcher with 20 years of experience working in solidarity with Indigenous communities in meeting their own goals through research. The outcome of this project will be further developed strong relationships of respect, trust, and accountability, with a concomitant longer-term outcome of securing a CIHR operating grant to support ACFN in meeting their own goals for food security and health across the life course in the face of flagrant socio-ecological injustices.