Over the last 18 months, WSSS has had the privilege of working with the community of Conklin, Alberta to help address their homelessness crisis.  This work has included completing a qualitative analysis of the crisis, coordinating a community research project, and helping to establish a housing and homelessness committee in the community. In late 2018, using this research, the Conklin Resource Development Advisory Committee (CRDAC) along with Wood Buffalo Housing, submitted a funding application to the Government of Alberta with the hopes that the government will help to address the current homelessness crisis.  

Below are some of the research that has been developed over the last 18 months.  If you have any questions or comments please contact Peter at 780-381-9168 or peter@willowspringsss.com.

More than two years after the devastating 2016 Horse River Wildfire, the First Nations and Métis of the RMWB have released the results of a major research project about the wildfire's impact on their communities. WSSS is pleased to announce the October 30th release of the report, Rebuilding Resilient Indigenous Communities in the RMWB, and the accompanying video, Voices Around the Fire: An Indigenous Wildfire Story. 

This study was completed in partnership with the Athabasca Tribal Council, Athabasca River Métis, and the Nistawoyou Association Friendship Centre. The project—which included 10 focus groups, 40 interviews, and a survey with more than 600 responses—is the first Indigenous-controlled disaster study to bring together First Nations and Métis from an entire region. 

Links to the video, report, media coverage, and related research material are provided below. 

WSSS was proud to assist with this work, which aims to ensure that Indigenous impacts, concerns, and recommendations are heard. We hope, too, that it will help people to recover from the 2016 Horse River Wildfire and build a foundation for improved collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous governments in disaster management. 

If you have any questions or comments please us: Tim (tim@willowspringsss.com/587-890-6325) or Peter (peter@willowspringsss.com/780-381-9168) a message.

Best wishes, 

​Tim and Peter

McMurray Matters Oct 29, 2018, McMurray Métis C.E.O. Bill Loutitt, ACFN Chief Allan Adam, and WSSS Principal Dr. Timothy Clark discuss the findings from the Rebuilding Resilient Indigenous Communities Research Project. 

CBC
Fort McMurray Today
Mix 103.7
Globe and Mail
The National Post
My McMurray
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This weekend we lost one of the pillars of our community, Métis Elder Elsie Yanik.  Mrs. Yanik touched many, but there is one particular story that has stayed with me, and I think it will be the one that helps our community recover from the trauma of last summer.

She told me this story a few times, and in a few different ways; She shared it as part of her 2014 University of Alberta Convocation Address where you can still find it in print and as a video (go to June 11, 2014 and fast forward to about the 32 minute mark). She did a much better job telling it, but I will do my best to honour her story as I share it today.

Elsie was a beautiful and inspiring Elder who has accomplished so much in her long life.  She has explained to me many times that those many accomplishments are all grounded in a simple lesson she learned as a child – the importance of always being kind. 

The lesson came to her in 1925 when she was 7 years old in Fort Fitzgerald.  Her mother had been ill for almost a year and her father was away cooking on the steamboats.  Elsie was the oldest child at home, and her bed-ridden mother needed to teach her daughter to look after the family.  In that year Elsie learned how to bead and sew, how to make bannock and stew, how to look after her younger siblings.  In the fall, Elsie turned 8 and her older brothers returned home from the boats and decided they needed to take their mother to Edmonton for medical treatment, sadly this would be the last time Elsie saw her mother. 

Elsie explained that everything was fine until Christmas, when it seemed Santa Claus had forgotten the family.  When Syd Porter checked in, he discovered a crying 8-year-old girl trying to do her best for her family. 

Syd was a solitary man who lived in a little cabin in Fort Fitz.  A WWI volunteer, he had seen unimaginable scenes, though he never talked about his past to those in town.  Instead he did what he could to be kind and help those in need.

After Elsie told Syd that Santa had forgotten her and her family.  Syd left, returning a couple hours later with a gunnysack full of gifts.  He explained to the young girl that Santa had not forgotten the family, but had simply misplaced the gifts. 

Elsie explains: “You see, kindness is enduring. Kindness makes everyone feel good. The person who gives kindness feels just as good as the person receiving kindness. When we witness kindness it makes us feel good. We were not the only children that Syd Porter cared for. Syd’s old gunnysack full of gifts was repeated countless times. Whenever the need arose he was there. He did not wait to hear about it, he actively sought out opportunities to help.”

These last few months I come back to this story often.  I now know how Elsie felt as a child.  Doing all she could to care for her family, but barely being able to care for herself.  As I’ve sat searching for answers after May 3, it is the kindness of our community that has helped me through the more difficult times - 88,000 Syd Porters actively searching for opportunities to help and 88,000 Elsie Yaniks overwhelmed by individual acts of kindess.

So now, as days stretch to months, and our community’s patience and understanding are pushed to new limits, please remember Elsie’s lesson and be kind, our community needs it.

The objectives of this report are twofold. First, it will contextualize the CEMA ITK Framework within the larger history of Indigenous participation in oil sands monitoring and by so doing, show that there has been a distinct and real disconnection between previous program learnings and the commitment to implement the use of ITK into Governmental monitoring programs. Second, the report will make a series of recommendations regarding how the Alberta Environmental Monitoring, Evaluation, and Reporting Agency (AEMERA) might implement the CEMA ITK Framework key findings, in alignment to it’s mandate, into effective processes that will integrate ITK in a manner that is culturally appropriate and strengthen the role of Indigenous communities in environmental monitoring in Northeastern Alberta.

Willow Springs Strategic Solutions (WSSS) is pleased to announce that Dr. Timothy David Clark has been made a Principal at our firm, effective immediately.  Dr. Clark has a wealth of national and international experience in the areas of extractive and resource industries, First Nation, Métis, and Indigenous rights, impact assessment, community economic development, and macroeconomic and regulatory policy.  Since first joining WSSS as Research Director in 2014, Timothy has carried out numerous cultural and socioeconomic impact assessments, traditional knowledge and use studies, third-party technical reviews, and community consultations for our clients.  With Dr. Clark in this new capacity, we will continue to provide our clients with the high-quality, on-time, and well-priced products and services they have come to expect from WSSS.


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Willow Springs Strategic Solutions (WSSS) Inc. is a social science, environmental, and management consulting company with offices in Fort McMurray and Cochrane, Alberta.  We offer our clients a variety of research products and consulting services including traditional knowledge and use studies, cultural and socioeconomic impact assessments, community consultation and engagement, community history and genealogical studies, and strategic planning, capacity building, and regulatory support.
 
For more information on our company, please visit our website: www.willowspringsss.com.

The following an abstract for a chapter by Research Associate Tara Joly that will appear in a book titled Amphibious Anthropologies: Human Lives Wet and Dry likely sometime in 2016.  If you would like to learn more about her work please email her at tara@willowspringsss.com.

In the Athabasca region of Alberta, Canada, oil companies are working with scientists to develop methods for constructing peat-producing wetlands, known locally as muskeg, in a post-mining landscape. Over half of the pre-mined boreal landscape contained muskeg, supporting indigenous peoples’ livelihoods for generations. For those communities whose homelands are disturbed by oil sands extraction, reclaiming muskeg is entangled with indigenous rights and the “spirit in the land” (Buffalo 2011). Yet indigenous concerns are often subsumed within scientific and bureaucratic discourses that favour classification and quantification. Rifts erupt between industrial, bureaucratic, scientific, and indigenous reclamation narratives. For whom and on what terms is muskeg being reclaimed?
 
The Government of Alberta requires oil companies to reclaim disturbed land by achieving “equivalent capability” of land use (Alberta 2014:97), or rebuilding the productivity of a landscape. With shifting definitions of “productive” land – economic, ecological, or somewhere in-between – reclamation practices in Alberta evolved from creating cattle ranches and agricultural lands to constructing muskeg. Oil companies continue to translate these bureaucratic definitions of reclamation by telling indigenous communities that it seeks to “put the land back”. Yet for these communities, reclamation requires not only achieving ecological or economic productivity, but also reclaiming a cultural landscape.
 
Drawing on ethnographic and archival research with wetland scientists and the Fort McMurray Métis community, this chapter discusses how contested, converging, and entangled narratives of muskeg reclamation are rooted in competing legal systems (Borrows 2010, Merry 1988). I begin the chapter by outlining indigenous and settler histories in the Athabasca region. I describe how settler colonialism (Wolfe 1999) in Canada served to reframe the land in terms of its productivity or utility value, analogous to a Lockean labour theory of property that holds ownership is born from the exertion of human labour upon natural resources. I then trace how this labour theory perpetuates through historical and contemporary government narratives about muskeg and reclamation, often in terms of “improving” muskeg’s productivity for valued uses: roads, forestry, and, more recently, biodiversity and traditional land use. Finally I explore how a Lockean framework of “productivity” can be at odds with indigenous perspectives of land use. To illustrate, I describe how muskeg reclamation requires communities to grow with environments, compelling attention to indigenous legal orders (Napoleon 2013) and relationships of reciprocity and ethical relationality (Donald 2009, Couthard 2015). I explain how reclaiming muskeg involves more than just returning ecological productivity for indigenous communities: it is a process of healing and resurgence in which culture and ecology must grow together.
 
I conclude by reflecting on the importance of incorporating multiple narratives of land use for indigenous participation in reclamation efforts. For muskeg reclamation to be successful for indigenous communities, reclamation policy and practice must reconcile their reflections of historically contingent settler colonial conceptualisations of utility, which continue to inscribe indigenous homelands as resource territory. Indigenous legal orders, including recognition of indigenous rights and growing with environments (both wet and dry), must be a key component of mine reclamation policy in Canada.
 
 
Bibliography
Alberta, Government of.
2014. Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act. Edmonton: Alberta Queen’s Printer.
 
Borrows, John.
2010. Canada’s Indigenous Constitution. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
 
Buffalo, K., C.E. Jones, J.C. Errington, and M.I.A. MacLean
2011. Fort McKay First Nation’s Involvement in Reclamation of Alberta’s Oil Sands Development. In 35th Annual B.C. Mine Reclamation Symposium. Lake Louise, Alberta.
 
Coulthard, Glen.
2015. Conference Keynote Presentation. In The State of Extraction: Corporate Imperatives, Public Knowledge, and Global Struggles for Alternatives. March 28.  Simon Fraser University Harbour Centre: Vancouver. https://www.youtube.come/watch?v=oE1oAYsqeE8, accessed 19 October 2015.
 
Donald, Donald. T.
2009. Forts, Curriculum, and Indigenous Métissage: Imagining Decolonization of Aboriginal-Canadian Relations in Educational Contexts. First Nations Perspectives, 2(1), 1–24.
 
Merry, Sally Engle.
1988. Legal Pluralism. Law & Society Review 22(5): 869–896.
 
Napoleon, Val.
2013. Thinking About Indigenous Legal Orders. In Dialogues on Human Rights and Legal Pluralism. René Provost and Colleen Sheppard, eds. Pp. 229–245. Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice, 17. Springer Netherlands. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-007-4710-4_11, accessed 13 October 2015.
 
Wolfe, Patrick.
1999. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. London and New York: Cassell.
 

In July 2015, Peter Fortna from WSSS was invited to give a presentation at the University of Aberdeen, Northern Colonialism Research Program regarding his work with the McMurray Metis.  The talk touched on a number of topics with contributions from fellow researchers interested in finding a better way to understand the cumulative impacts of industrial development on Indigenous Communities in Northeastern Alberta.  The talk was recorded and is now available for download below.  We hope you enjoy, and if you have any comments please send Peter an email at peter@willowspringsss.com. 

Details about the event can be found here. 

The presentation's accompanying PowerPoint can be viewed here.

The presentation can be downloaded to here.

The presentation can be listened to here.
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Recently I made a presentation at the Métis Economic Development Symposium in Fort McMurray on the history of Traplines in Northeastern Alberta.  This presentation is one attempt to grapple with a bigger question that I have been considering about the history of the region:  How has Northeastern Alberta been transformed from effectively being an Aboriginal space to a non-Aboriginal or Western geographical and cultural space from the time of the Treaty/Scrip commissions (1899) to the present?  As I argue in the presentation, modern state development and intervention - as expressed through Government policies to make the land "productive" - played a key role in the transformation of the region. For the Métis in particular, the domain in which the state has expropriated space and promoted commodity development has been trapline modernization. The response from the Métis has been an increasing awareness of and mobilization around Aboriginal rights. In future work I hope to explore additional examples of how the power of the state has been used to promote economic development based on resource extraction resulting in large-scale environmental change and the transformation of Northeastern Alberta from Aboriginal space into non-Aboriginal space.  For now I hope you enjoy the presentation and if you have any questions please feel free to send me a note.

Cheers, 
Peter

Audio File