Indigenous Principles of Wild Harvest and Management: An Ojibway Community as a Case Study

In colonial nations such as Canada, there have been increasing requirements for governments to engage directly with Indigenous communities regarding their rights and interests in natural resource management generally, with specific focus on the role of Indigenous knowledge systems in harvest management decision-making (Tikina et al. 2010 ). Canadian courts have repeatedly focused on two factors with extremely important consequences for the Nation-to-Nation relationships that exist between the Crown and the Indigenous communities: (1) Indigenous rights must be reconciled with other government responsibilities including justified infringements for the often ill-defined concept of ‘conservation’ (Crawford and Morito 1997 ; Ayers 2005 ; Nadasdy 2005 ), and (2) the ‘honour of the Crown’ must be maintained when consulting Indigenous communities, especially with regard to management decision-making about their natural resources (Morito 1999 ; Slattery 2005 ). Given the legal necessities for a Eurocentric government to engage in honorable and meaningful consultation with Indigenous communities about conservation ethics and natural resource management, it remains to be seen how these Indigenous-Western science cross-cultural consultations should be undertaken (Crawford et al. 2010 ). The trend to date has largely been the domination of Western Science over Indigenous knowledge systems (in the sense described by Pentland 1995 ); circumstances in which Indigenous knowledge holders might be requested to provide information to scientists/managers who would evaluate it for reliability and utility before deciding whether to incorporate in a science-based management program (McGregor 2004 ; Clark and Slocombe 2009 ; Lyver et al. 2009 ). Some scholars have suggested that conflict caused by this kind of cultural domination could be reduced if governments and Indigenous communities re-initiated their discussions with an examination of similarities and differences in principles regarding ‘conservation’ and ‘natural resource management’ (Ratner and Holen 2007 ; Ebbin 2011 ; Watson et al. 2011 ). In this way, the communities could develop a structured and respectful dialogue about wild harvest management in the spirit of reconciliation and productive collaboration.

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