Indigenous Peoples, National Parks, and Protected Areas: A New Paradigm Linking Conservation, Culture, and Rights

Chapter 5. National Parks in the Canadian North: Comanagement or Colonialism Revisited? - John Sandlos

133 chapter five National Parks in the Canadian North Comanagement or Colonialism Revisited? John Sandlos There is a widespread consensus among wildlife conservationists that parks and protected areas offer the last best hope for preserving biodiversity on a regional scale. Borrowing insights from new scientific subdisciplines such as landscape ecology and conservation biology, environmental advocacy groups have promoted increasingly sophisticated plans for preserving native flora and fauna in networks of protected areas representative of a full range of habitat types within selected regions. In relatively uninhabited areas with an abundance of public lands, such as the Canadian North, efforts to establish protected areas have taken on added urgency as the conservation constituency appeals to governments to “get it right” before the encroachment of industrial development despoils the relatively untouched wilderness character of the region (Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna 1994; Peepre and Jickling 1994; Nowlan 2001; Canadian Council on Ecological Areas 2003; Wiersma et al. 2005). The jubilation among conservation groups over victories in northern Canada such as the protection of a broader expanse of the Nahanni River watershed from mining development in August 2007 (Jackson 1998; Langford 2003; Anonymous 2007a: 1; De Souza 2007: 1; Parks Canada 2007b) and the announcement in November 2007 of a new national park surrounding the East Arm of Great Slave Lake (an area that had been subject to intense mineral exploration), suggests that environmentalists still regard 134 • Complexity and Critiques the establishment of protected areas as an unmitigated good, the pinnacle of what they can hope reasonably to achieve through their efforts to protect remaining pockets of natural habitat in Canada’s hinterland regions (Anonymous 2007b; Struzik 2008).1 A broader historical view of parks and protected areas suggests they have not always been the product of the most noble or beneficent motivations of their human creators. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the establishment of national parks and other types of protected areas had major social and economic impacts on Indigenous peoples, many of whom were displaced from the environs of the new forest and wildlife preserves in colonized territories in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa (chapters 1, 9, 11; Anderson and Grove 1987; Guha 1989; West and Brechin 1991; Peluso 1992, 1993; Stevens 1997a). Displacement of Indigenous peoples from protected areas was not limited to colonial situations in Africa and Asia, but also occurred in neo-colonial or Fourth World contexts (chapter 1). In North America, Native and non-Native inhabitants of hinterland regions were routinely removed from national parks and other nature preserves, particularly during the late nineteenth-century period of westward expansion in Canada and the United States. The motivations for creating these national parks differed according to national and regional priorities, with protected spaces devoted to disparate goals such as wilderness preservation, tourism development, sport hunting, the conservation of endangered species, and resource extraction. But regardless of the specific purpose behind each park, human communities were often expelled, sometimes violently, from within the boundaries of the new protected areas (chapter 1; Cronon 1986; Catton 1997; Stevens 1997a; Keller and Turek 1998; Spence 1999; Burnham 2000; Sandlos 2005; Binnema and Niemi 2006; Manore 2007). On a broader scale, recent historical scholarship has suggested that the retinue of government fish and wildlife conservation initiatives (for example, parks, hunting regulations, gear restrictions ) introduced beginning in the late nineteenth century were one of the primary means by which the state was able to assert control over subsistence-oriented communities inhabiting the hinterland regions of colonized societies (Tober 1981; Warren 1997; Parenteau 1998; Parenteau 2004; Loo 2006). The conflict between the state and local systems of wildlife management has been central to the politics of the territorial north since the inception of the Canadian government’s attempts to regulate the hunting and trapping in the region beginning in the 1890s. The prevailing National Parks in the Canadian North • 135 cultural, demographic, and ecological contexts for conflicts over access to game, however, were fundamentally different in northern Canada than other parts of North America. A harsh climate, limited agricultural opportunities, the presence of a majority Aboriginal population in many areas, the geographically scattered nature of settlement and development , and the overwhelming economic importance of subsistence hunting and trapping to many Aboriginal communities all suggest that northern Canada was not subject to the same processes of wholesale ecological transformation that historians have associated with ecological imperialism farther to the...