ID: 1830
Presenting Author: Anna Usborne
Session: 588 - Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) of Indigenous Peoples: a transparency tool to strengthen the legitimacy of Impact Assessments (IA) in the face of misinformation
Status: pending
Tahltan representatives present methods to support Tahltan’s Consent Decisions for two major mines—designed to balance the need for assessment rigour with the holistic Indigenous perspective
Though advancements have been made in Canada to acknowledge interconnections and consider cumulative effects in Impact Assessments, the basis of environmental assessments remain reductionist: breaking assessment down by valued components and determining ‘significance;’ of effects on values to guide the final decision. The resulting assessments rarely ‘speak’ to the people who will be directly affected by a project. The Tahltan Nation’s Impact Assessment Policy, supporting two Consent Decision Making Agreements with the Province of British Columbia, explicitly asked assessors to consider cumulative effects across time and space to recognize the interconnected whole that forms the basis of Tahtlan’s Indigenous perspective. Under tight timelines and high political expectations, the Tahltan team had to work to execute rigorous and defensible assessments, all the while maintaining a holistic perspective that connected to Tahltan decision makers and community members. Did we succeed? This presentation will be an honest reflection on what we tried, what we struggled with, what we did in the end, and how it supported the first legal ‘consent’ decisions by an Indigenous governing body in British Columbia.
Anna Usborne supports First Nations navigating environmental assessments in northwestern British Columbia, creating solutions to IA challenges creatively while upholding Indigenous rights.
Coauthor 1: Connor Pritty