Indigenous lands management, cultural landscapes and Anishinaabe people of Shoal Lake, Northwestern Ontario, Canada.

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to generate a dynamic description of cultural landscapes that moves current thinking beyond cultural landscapes as artifacts that are considered to be final products. In this paper, "cultural landscape" is defined as the physical expression of the complex and dynamic sets of relationships, processes and linkages between societies and environments. A society's environmental perception, values, institutions, technologies and political interests will result in particular planning and management goals and objectives for a specific landscape. Indigenous resource management systems often result in different cultural landscapes than those of managerial ecology. The process of how an indigenous cultural landscape is replaced by a cultural landscape of managerial ecology is documented in this paper. The restoration of indigenous cultural landscapes will first require recognition of the custodial responsibility of indigenous peoples for the beings with whom they share the land. This can then lead to alternative indigenous lands management institutions and organizations and the restoration of indigenous landscapes in northwestern Ontario. The developmental context established by indigenous land management institutions and organizations could also allow for a flourishing of novel resource management practices and technologies.

L'objectif de cet article est de fournir une description dynamique des paysages culturels qui depasse l'idee actuelle voulant qu'il s'agit d'artefacts consideres comme des produits finis. Dans cet article, le << paysage >> culturel est defini comme etant l'expression physique d'un ensemble complexe et dynamique de relations, processus et liens entre les societes et les environnements. La perception de son environnement par une societe, ses valeurs, ses institutions, ses technologies et ses interets politiques, produiront une planification et des objectifs de gestion particuliers pour un paysage specifique. Les systemes de gestion des ressources indigenes produisent souvent des paysages culturels differents de ceux de l'ecologie de gestion. L'article examine la facon dont le paysage culturel indigene est remplace par un paysage culturel associe a une ecologie de gestion. La restauration des paysages culturels indigenes exige d'abord la garde par les peuples indigenes des etres avec lesquels ils partagent la terre. Cela pourrait mener des institutions et organisations indigenes de gestion des terres et a la restauration des paysages indigenes dans le nord-ouest de l'Ontario. Le contexte developpemental etabli par les institutions et organisations indigenes de gestion des terres pourrait aussi permettre l'epanouissement de nouvelles pratiques et technologies de gestion des ressources.

Keywords

Indigenous lands management, cultural landscapes, restoration, Anishinaabe, Northwestern Ontario

Introduction

What are meant by natural resources are game, fur, fish

and their supplementary adjuncts, such as wildberries, rice,

roots, maple sugar &c., which contribute to or entirely

provide the maintenance of a large proportion of the Indian

population, not only directly as food and covering, but

further as articles of commerce (The Annual Report of the

Department of Indian Affairs 1905: xxix).

What makes the study of natural resources and environmental management so interesting is how it brings together societies, environments and resources. This can be seen in the quote from the 1905 Department of Indian Affairs Annual Report. The report's author defines natural resources--in the context of Aboriginal society--as the things that are drawn upon for food, covering and commerce. He does not, of course, include minerals, used to make pipes, nor timber, used to make houses and generate heat--a principle means of survival in a northern climate. The way in which a person, such as an agent of the Department of Indian Affairs in 1905, views the linkages between society, environment and resources is often based upon the cultural perceptions, values and political interests of the person's society. Some of the ways in which these linkages have been analyzed and portrayed by western, scientific societies have been reviewed in Davidson-Hunt and Berkes (2003). Many found that a useful concept for probing the complex dynamics of "humans-in-nature" systems is that of a cultural landscape.

In this paper, "cultural landscape" is defined as the physical expression of the complex and dynamic sets of relationships, processes and linkages between societies and environments. Cultural landscapes are an expression of societies writing their history upon the land or, as Ingold (2000) has said, the landscape is social history congealed for a specific place and time. While Ingold (2000) does not utilize the term cultural landscape, many of his observations regarding landscape and temporal dynamics are relevant to the concept. Cultural landscapes have a biogeophysical endowment. The cultural perceptions, values and political interests of a society will lead to different technological innovations and possible modifications in the biogeophysical endowment. Likewise, cultural perceptions, values and political interests will change how a society perceives things as resources that can provide for a secure and meaningful life (Butz 1996). The cultural landscape of one society is not always visible to members of another society due to differing perceptions, values and political interests. Perceptually, a cultural landscape only becomes visible as you move within the landscape under the guidance of people who are intimately aware of the forms, functions and processes of a specific landscape (Davidson-Hunt 2003).

The strength of the cultural landscape concept is that it provides a strong metaphor for the two-way relationship between people and place for a specific time in history, it corrects the assumption that people--especially indigenous peoples--lived off the bounty of nature with little expression of agency. The weakness of the concept is that it may be used to freeze the history of the relationship between society and environment in time. The pieces of the cultural landscape that can be restored are then extracted from the fabric of the cultural landscape and preserved as an artifact of the past. Little thought is given to their role in developing innovative indigenous cultural landscapes that could provide secure and meaningful indigenous livelihoods for the future (Ingold 2000). If we are not to abandon the concept of cultural landscapes, we need to infuse it with a consideration of the ongoing processes of cultural adaptation through the interactions of societies and environments (Ingold 2000). A society's environmental perception, values, institutions, technologies and political interests will result in particular planning and management goals and objectives for a specific landscape (Scott 1998).

There are many authors who have contributed to this emerging consensus on dynamic cultural landscapes. One of the first to bring forward the idea of human agency in relation to the shaping of the environment was Carl Sauer (1956). A contemporary of Sauer was Omer Stewart (1954) who looked specifically at how fire was used by humans to shape their environment. Henry Lewis (Lewis and Ferguson 1988) and Stephyn Pyne (1982) continued to explore the relationship between human agency, fire and landscapes. Now it is not uncommon to see complete books challenging the assumptions of "natural" landscapes (Boyd 1999). This work has provided extensive support to the notion that many, if not all, landscapes are dynamic, cultural expressions, related to perception, values, institutions, technologies and political interests. Cronon (1983) provided one of the first dynamic descriptions of the process by which cultural landscapes change through the interactions of societies and environments. He demonstrated that as colonial perception, values, institutions, technologies and political interests became dominant, the cultural landscape of the New England Indians began to dissipate into the mists of history. The cultural landscapes of colonial and industrial societies increasingly excluded indigenous peoples of New England from pursuing their planning and management goals and objectives to secure a meaningful livelihood.

Bavingtion and Slocombe (2002) draw upon the concept of managerial ecology to characterize systems of resource management that displaced indigenous North American systems. Managerial ecology, they suggest, emerged from a complex set of historical relationships that favoured centralized command and control. The pathologies of the command and control model of resource management have been well documented (Bavington 2002, Holling and Meffe 1996, Szabo 2002). One of the central problems of managerial ecology is that it has managed for a single commodity at the expense of the biological diversity of landscapes. The simplified cultural landscapes of managerial ecology have not provided indigenous communities with the resources necessary to secure meaningful livelihoods (Rangan and Lane 2001).