Grant: College & Community Social Innovation Fund

Via this College and Community Social Innovation project, Humber College will partner with the Fort William First Nation (FWFN) and researchers from the University of Toronto on “Caring for the Thunderbird’s Nest: Geophysical and Machine Learning solutions to characterize and monitor inequitable Exposures to Ground and Air Pollution.” The project will address a health and environmental crisis in the FWFN community – a cluster of leukemia in very young community members who spent time in childhood in an area with over a century of industrial development, including pulp and paper, metallurgy, coal-fired power, rail, chemical plants, contaminated dredge, industrial disposal sites, fuelling stations and other industries. The community has noted that children under five who spent time in a residential area adjacent to the industrial lands were most likely to experience this atypically young-onset of leukemia. The industrial lands have been subject to Environmental Site Assessments (ESAs) paid for by the government and industry as part of comprehensive land claim processes. Despite dozens of ESAs over several decades, FWFNs leadership does not have relevant information in a format that is useful for the community to make decisions. They also do not trust the reporting practices of the liable parties who have been obliged by law to finance the ESAs. This project will work in a nest of collaboration with FWFN in a model of integrated knowledge translation – researchers and community learning together. The goals of this interdisciplinary collaboration are five-fold: 1) work in an ethic of care and reciprocity with FWFN and the land; 2) fully assess the industrial area to characterize it and identify prevention, management and remediation methods of the polluted sites; 3) co-produce culturally appropriate and accessible information to enable informed local decision-making now and in the future; 4) create pathways of ethical engagement with Indigenous community-driven research agendas for engineering students, enabling FWFN to become a “go-to, go through” community for student training on complex environmental problem solving, and 5) building a culturally safe nest to develop community capacity and mentor Indigenous students in environmental engineering and interdisciplinary studies in an Indigenous community setting.