Chapter 3 - Reasserting Traditional Knowledge across a fragmented governance landscape: The Mackenzie River Basin

Abstract

Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge offers important foundations for stewardship and environmental management of the Mackenzie River watershed, North America's largest Arctic drainage basin. Working from these foundations, Indigenous Peoples in the basin have engaged in generations of resistance to colonial resource use and extraction, with resurgent Indigenous involvement in co-management and community-led stewardship initiatives marking some of the pathways towards asserting their rightful roles in regional resource management decision-making. Such pathways are unevenly distributed across the basin's fragmented water governance landscape, and that same fragmentation inhibits collaboration to respond to environmental threats at the basin level, thereby limiting opportunities to scale up traditional practices of water stewardship and governance. The chapter begins by considering Indigenous involvement in basin-level and transboundary water governance, before shifting to reflections on four regional cases. Two cases from the Northwest Territories demonstrate mixed outcomes, where despite the demonstrated value of land and water co-management institutions, Indigenous governments still find themselves needing to push for their knowledge to be given full consideration in regulatory processes. Looking to Alberta and British Columbia, elevated pressure for natural resource extraction in the form of fossil fuels and hydroelectricity present scenarios where Indigenous knowledge and livelihood practices are pushed to the margins in favour of impact mitigation measures and economic benefit-sharing agreements. In the face of this ongoing imposition of colonial relations, Indigenous Peoples across the Mackenzie Basin continue to assert their rights and knowledge in the sphere water governance, challenging established orders of sovereignty, knowledge, and land use.