'We wanna be involved': Indigenous groups collaborate with researchers to grow wildlife monitoring in N.W.T.

Indigenous community leaders are collaborating with the federal and territorial governments, as well as several academic institutions to increase community-based wildlife monitoring programs across the territory.

Jon McDonald is a field worker and environmental coordinator with the Fort Smith Mtis Council.

He said the council worked with Environment and Natural Resources (ENR) last fall learning how to set up the remote wildlife cameras and audio recorders in selected protected areas. By winter, they were setting them up on their own.

"Anything to do with the environment, anything to do with wildlife, fish, water, air, we wanna be involved in," said McDonald. "It's been a great experience to learn about it."

He said it will take a year to get the images back and the council's field monitoring team will work with ENR again to learn how to analyze the data. Moving forward they want to be able to share the data they collect with the people in the community.

"Just to give people the confidence that the wilderness is gonna be able to sustain whatever is being thrown at it," said McDonald.

One of their goals is to increase and improve communication with trapline owners and Indigenous groups. He also said it's important to work with local Elders during the process of deploying cameras and retrieving data.

"They know the land better than anyone else," said McDonald. "To have the local knowledge and Indigenous knowledge holders involved in the process is super key."

It's a full-circle moment for McDonald who grew up in Fort Smith and graduated from the Environment and Natural Resources Technology diploma program at Aurora College 20 years ago.

He said it's important to him to be at the forefront of any changes in the environment, especially being downstream from the oilsands.

"It's key to be able to tell the people that 'Hey the water is safe to drink, the fish are safe to eat and the animals are safe to hunt'," he said.

The collaboration includes the federal and territorial governments, Wilfrid Laurier University, the University of British Columbia, the University of Alberta, the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute and Aurora College.

An upcoming webinar on May 5 hosted by Aurora Research Institute will showcase that work.

McDonald will be co-presenting with Jessica Jumbo from Sambaa K'e Dene First Nation at the webinar.

Highly collaborative initiative

Samuel Hache is a landbird biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service. He is responsible for monitoring the status and trends of forest landbirds in the N.W.T.

He said it's important to work together with community groups for a variety of reasons. The shared knowledge resulting from the partnerships will allow the groups to address areas of priority by leveraging individual sources of funding and capacity.

"The N.W.T. is a vast area that one single agency cannot realistically work in silos and expect to be able to meet their mandate. We need to partner up," he said.

Hache also said that partnerships are important given most of their fieldwork takes place on traditional territories. His goal is to continue to empower and support Indigenous partners so they can be as independent as possible.

"Community-based monitoring can be a hundred percent Indigenous lead and implemented," he said. "We also have a responsibility to build meaningful partnerships."

He hopes the webinar will provide a good opportunity to learn from each other and that other communities will be interested in using these tools to implement their own community-based monitoring program.

Claudia Haas is a Ph.D. student at Wilfrid Laurier University. She initially got involved with wildlife monitoring through her work with the government of Northwest Territories as a biologist.

She said the partnership makes sense because there is a mutual interest in understanding the wildlife, the land, and how climate change might affect that in the future. But also the knowledge the community can offer is vast.

"A lot of these Indigenous governments have guardian programs and they know the areas better than we do," she said. "They have a massive vested interest in maintaining that land."

Haas said she is looking forward to the webinar and thinks people will be impressed with what the community presenters will have to say. She said Jessica Jumbo has been deploying cameras in her community of Sambaa K'e First Nation for the last couple of years.

"[She] has been really taking this project and running with it," said Haas. "She's been engaging the Elders and the youth in the community. She's got amazing sound bites and amazing stories."

For more information on the webinar, visit the Aurora Research Institute's Facebook page.