Grant: Alliance Grants

Indigenous reserve lands across Canada (and worldwide) are disproportionately used for commercial and industrial activities that often contribute to a large and growing number of contaminated sites on-reserve. Pollution arising from such contaminated sites impairs the environmental quality, economic potential and health of communities/ecosystems, and these impacts are particularly amplified in Indigenous communities which have strong cultural ties to the land. Contaminated sites assessments rely on outdated risk assessment methods that are expensive, inefficient, and unethical, and there is now a paradigm shift in regulatory science calling for "New Approach Methods - NAMs". Next generation tools for contaminated sites assessments are now being designed, tested, and implemented by researchers. Now (versus decades from now) is the time to ensure that such NAMs are properly designed for use in Indigenous communities AND by the communities themselves. The overall goal of this project is to learn lessons from on-going environmental assessment projects at the Kanien'kéha:ka community of Kanesatake (and beyond) that are conducted using typical institutionalized approaches, and to use these lessons learned to purposefully design, build, and test NAMs to contaminated sites assessments at Kanesatake (and more broadly, in other Indigenous Communities). The ultimate goal of this project is to derive NAM-IKs (New Approach Methods - Indigenous Knowledge) - including tools, methods, knowledge, etc. - that are co-designed by academic researchers and Indigenous partners for use in community-based contaminated sites assessments on-reserve. In doing so, we directly address a real-time situation at Kanesatake while also directly addressing new regulatory interests in Canada (for testing approaches that are more ethical and resource-efficient). All of this is also ensuring that NAMs are more equitable, sustainable, and trusted i.e. they place communities first and meet Indigenous peoples right to self-determination and governance.