Session Description
Impact assessment is increasingly expected to support reconciliation, Indigenous rights protection, sustainability, and credible environmental decision-making. Yet many assessment processes still begin after project design, regulatory pathways, and technical baselines have already shaped what counts as relevant evidence and what will later be assessed as an impact. As a result, the intertwined aspects of cultural significance, cumulative disruption, Indigenous rights, social-ecological relationships, and long-standing responsibilities to place may all be considered too late, too narrowly, or in isolation from one another. Traditional culture evolves through sustained relationships with place, embedding knowledge of local environmental conditions, seasonal changes, resources, and natural patterns within social cycles and activities.
This session brings together Indigenous Traditional Knowledge (ITK) and impact assessment (IA) practitioners to examine fragmentation, dislocation, and timing. Drawing on perspectives from Mi’kma’ki, the Confederacy of Mi’kmaq Nations, Māori, and other Indigenous traditions, it explores how IA can be restructured by “looking back” to Indigenous cultural knowledge baselines as a foundation for “moving forward” through Indigenous-led assessment capacity. ITK and cultural studies ground assessment in culturally significant species, seasonal land and water use, harvesting practices, access patterns, spiritual values, cumulative disruption, and knowledge transmission. The session also considers how Indigenous-led IA can function as a social enterprise, enabling Indigenous peoples to move beyond procedurally limited participation to lead assessment
Session Summary
The session explores how cultural knowledge baselines and Indigenous-led IA capacity can strengthen assessment, monitoring, legitimacy, and reconciliation. It links “looking back” through Traditional Knowledge and cultural studies with “moving forward” through knowledge governance, skilled employment, and decision-making.
Additional Information
This session will include open and invited papers from Indigenous nations and organizations internationally to provide a broad discussion on the importance of cultural knowledge and its benefits to effective impact assessment.
Session Chair
Angeline Gillis
Confederacy of Mi'kmaw Nations
Canada
Session Co-chair
Christopher Milley
Nexus Coastal Resource Management
Canada