Indigenizing Environmental Assessment
Forthcoming, Aimée Craft & Jill Blakley, eds, “In Our Backyard” – The Legacy of Hydroelectric Development in Northern Manitoba: The Keeyask Experience (University of Manitoba Press, 2019)
31 Pages Posted: 14 Sep 2018 Last revised: 24 Sep 2018
Date Written: August 15, 2018
Abstract
This chapter examines the fundamental flaws inherent in Canada’s approach to environmental assessment, and pays particular attention to how these flaws adversely affect Indigenous peoples. But critique on its own, however important, is insufficient. Following the analysis of environmental assessment’s failures to address — much less vindicate — the rights and interests of Indigenous peoples, this chapter proposes a different way forward for environmental assessment, and for Canadian environmental law more generally.
Specifically, this chapter discusses three mutually-supportive directions that stand out as particularly promising: (1) a policy of honouring treaties with Indigenous peoples; (2) recognition of, and rapprochement with, revitalizing Indigenous legal orders; and (3) respecting modern regulatory reality.
Keywords: Indigenous rights, environmental assessment, treaties, Indigenous legal orders
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