Indigenous Principles of Wild Harvest and Management: An Ojibway Community as a Case Study

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In colonial nations such as Canada, there have been increasing requirements for governments to engage directly with Indigenous communities regarding their rights and interests in natural resource management generally, with specific focus on the role of Indigenous knowledge systems in harvest management decision-making (Tikina et al.2010). Canadian courts have repeatedly focused on two factors with extremely important consequences for the Nation-to-Nation relationships that exist between the Crown and the Indigenous communities: (1) Indigenous rights must be reconciled with other government responsibilities including justified infringements for the often ill-defined concept of ‘conservation’ (Crawford and Morito 1997; Ayers 2005; Nadasdy 2005), and (2) the ‘honour of the Crown’ must be maintained when consulting Indigenous communities, especially with regard to management decision-making about their natural resources (Morito 1999; Slattery 2005). Given the legal necessities for a Eurocentric government to engage in honorable and meaningful consultation with Indigenous communities about conservation ethics and natural resource management, it remains to be seen how these Indigenous-Western science cross-cultural consultations should be undertaken (Crawford et al.2010). The trend to date has largely been the domination of Western Science over Indigenous knowledge systems (in the sense described by Pentland 1995); circumstances in which Indigenous knowledge holders might be requested to provide information to scientists/managers who would evaluate it for reliability and utility before deciding whether to incorporate in a science-based management program (McGregor 2004; Clark and Slocombe 2009; Lyver et al.2009). Some scholars have suggested that conflict caused by this kind of cultural domination could be reduced if governments and Indigenous communities re-initiated their discussions with an examination of similarities and differences in principles regarding ‘conservation’ and ‘natural resource management’ (Ratner and Holen 2007; Ebbin 2011; Watson et al.2011). In this way, the communities could develop a structured and respectful dialogue about wild harvest management in the spirit of reconciliation and productive collaboration. There have been numerous attempts by Western scientists to reach internal consensus on general principles for natural resource management (Holt and Talbot 1978; Christensen et al.1996; Mangel et al.1996; Dale et al.2000), habitat management (Lindenmayer and Nix 1993; Botsford et al.2003; Naiman and Latterell 2005), harvest management (FSC 1996; Heissenbuttal 1996; Lauck et al.1998; Fowler 2003; FAO 2001; Gonzalez-Laxe 2005; Utne 2006; Shelton and Sinclair 2008; Francis et al.2007; MSC 2010) and biodiversity/endangered species management (Walters 1991; Tilman 1999; Ebbin 2011). Although the practice of ‘defining principles for resource management’ is not something that Indigenous societies typically engage in, there have been many attempts to survey and understand Indigenous values and social norms in this regard (Ratner and Holen 2007; Turner and Berkes 2006; Watson et al.2011). For example, Alcorn (1993) offered a general treatise on the relationship between Indigenous worldviews and the Western idea of ‘conservation.’ Berkes et al. (1998) explored fundamental properties of ecosystem-like concepts in Indigenous cultures. In the 2011 ‘Principles of Tsawalk,’ Umeek (E. Richard Atleo), a hereditary Nuu-Chah-Nulth chief, discussed his culture’s principles of Recognition, Consent, and Continuity and their important role in maintaining balance—in contrast to the global consequences of Western ‘sustainable’ development. Prober et al. (2011) characterized the principles of Australian Aboriginal ecological calendars and indicators and evaluated their possible interaction with Western social-ecological systems for natural resource management. Over the past decades, a growing body of community-based collaborative studies has provided more depth and insight into the structure and function of traditional Indigenous knowledge systems and their associated decision-making processes for harvest management (e.g., Feit 1986; Brightman 1993; Horstman and Wightman 2001; Ayers 2005; Castleden et al.2009; Lyver et al.2009; Moller et al.2009; Bilbao et al.2010). However, as Jones et al. (2010) caution, researchers must always be careful to consider Indigenous community-based value systems as spatially and temporally local expressions of their culture. Efforts to identify general Indigenous ‘principles’ of natural resource management must be tempered by conscious recognition that (1) ‘principles’ are social constructs which are deeply embedded in cultural and social norms that are typically complex and subtle to the outsider (Houde 2007; Peloquin and Berkes 2009), and (2) Indigenous cultures and worldviews are inherently more diverse than the relatively homogenous standards of Western science (although see a provoking challenge of this assumption about scientific homogeneity by Watson-Verran and Turnbull 1995). The goal of our investigation was to develop and demonstrate a process for engaging with Indigenous communities to inquire about the structure and function of social norms in their culture that could relate to Western ‘principles’ for natural, renewable resource management. In order to achieve this goal, we worked in partnership with a sponsoring Ojibway community on a case study to employ community-based, participatory research methods with traditional people who were most familiar with social norms for harvest management.