Centering Inuit Worldviews and Concerns for Their Communities, Environment and Future Generations in Relation to the NIRB Public Hearing Assessment Process of the Mary River Iron Ore Mine Phase II Proposal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An impact assessment process that is transparent and equitably accessible to all impacted rights-holders and stakeholders is necessary to facilitate effective and fair decision-making regarding the use, management and conservation of land, water, and resources. As of August 2024, the Mary River Iron Ore (MRIO) mine Phase II Expansion Proposal is the longest and most extensive assessment in the Nunavut Impact Review Board’s (NIRB) history. Despite a systematic, rigorous, evidenced-based and public assessment process, various factors prevented the centering of Inuit worldviews throughout the 26-days of in-person/video and teleconference NIRB public hearing process. Examining the MRIO Phase II Expansion Proposal, the purpose of this project is to understand the factors that contribute or restrict a multi-stakeholder public hearing process that equitably values Inuit and Western worldviews. This study characterizes the relationship and power dynamics between the proposal proponent, Baffinland, and Inuit, who historically have been marginalized throughout decision-making processes. Using the Public Hearing Transcripts pertaining to the proposal, I analyze the content of all participating Inuit and non-Inuit that support Inuit communities or organizations to conduct an extensive thematic analysis that reveals the enabling and restricting conditions. I apply a combination of Indigenous and qualitative methodologies to critically understand the complexity of the topic from an Inuit perspective. The following seven (7) themes were developed in the study: attendance, oral communication and style, concept of time and space, Inuit knowledge, hearing structure, transparency, and social fabric of Inuit. These themes yielded thirteen (13) restricting and eighteen (18) enabling conditions. The outweighing of restricting conditions provides a positive outlook on the possibilities of further improving the public hearing process. However, a transformation of the NIRB assessment process may be required to change the restricting conditions identified in this study and achieve the balancing of Inuit and Western perspectives in the public hearing process of a mining project. A series of recommendations are provided to address restricting conditions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".