Creative Conservation: Multi-layered Protection and Anishinaabe Land Management in Pimachiowin Aki
Samuel Anthony
In 2018, UNESCO granted world heritage status to Pimachiowin Aki, Canada’s first mixed natural and cultural world heritage site. Beyond this, Pimachiowin Aki is remarkable for its multi-layered systems of legal protection and land management. This blog looks at how Pimachiowin Aki’s four Anishinaabe communities creatively used diverse legal tools to protect their land and culture.
A two-hour drive northeast of Winnipeg, the paved road ends in the town Manigotagan. If you continue along the gravel road, you soon enter Pimachiowin Aki, just under 30,000 square kilometers of intact boreal forest, stretching North between Lake Winnipeg’s shore and Ontario’s border.[1]
I first learned about Pimachiowin Aki while working as a backcountry canoeing guide in Eastern Manitoba. When I applied for a provincial permit to run trips on Pimachiowin Aki’s Bloodvein River, my application required Bloodvein First Nation’s approval. After a brief meeting, their Land Planning Council confirmed we could canoe there, but this experience stoked my interest in this community’s hands-on approach to land planning and management.
Through research, I learned more about the unique systems that protect and manage Pimachiowin Aki. Faced with increasing industrial development pressure,[2] Pimachiowin Aki’s four Anishinaabe communities cooperated to develop multiple mechanisms that each enhance protection on their own and address the others’ blind spots. These mechanisms include: (1) Anishinaabe traditional land management customs, (2) UNESCO World Heritage status and (3) provincial land management agreements. Collectively, these three protective layers create a more complete and durable conservation framework than any single system could achieve.
Dustin Silvey
Layer 1: Ji-ganawendamang Gidakiiminaan – Anishinaabe Traditional Land Management
Although Pimachiowin Aki remains largely untouched by modern extractive or industrial development,[3] it is not ‘untouched’ by humans. Pimachiowin Aki is home to four Anishinaabe communities: Bloodvein, Little Grand Rapids, Pauingassi, and Poplar River First Nations.[4] These nations share a long cultural and governance tradition called Ji-ganawendamang Gidakiiminaan, meaning “keeping the land”[5]. Ji-ganawendamang Gidakiiminaan promotes collaborative and responsible community resource use.[6] Examples of Ji-ganawendamang Gidakiiminaan include planting wild rice beds, controlling shoreline burns, and practicing rotational hunting and harvesting.[7]
Although Pimachiowin Aki’s UNESCO status and land management agreements each weave in recognition of Ji-ganawendamang Gidakiiminaan,[8] this practice also acts alone as the area’s first protective layer.
By 2002, this customary land management practice no longer sufficed to defend Pimachiowin Aki. Both provincial and federal governments were encouraging resource development and development activity in the area had increased. [9] To resist these external threats, Pimachiowin Aki’s First Nations agreed to work together to seek UNESCO world heritage status and create provincially recognized land management plans.[10]
Dustin Silvey
Layer 2: UNESCO World Heritage Status
In 2018, Pimachiowin Aki became Canada’s 19th UNESCO world heritage site.[11] Traditionally, UNESCO recognizes either cultural or natural heritage sites. Pimachiowin Aki was Canada’s first recognized mixed heritage site, nominated both for its ecosystem’s natural value and for Ji-ganawendamang Gidakiiminaan’s cultural value.[12]
Although UNESCO world heritage status grants UNESCO no direct regulatory power over development, it remains meaningful. First, it brings international attention to this area’s value. Moreover, UNESCO’s Sites in Danger list, contained in the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage[13], effectively creates an indirect transnational regulatory tool. While this list cannot prevent the province from pushing forward development projects, the threat of being labelled “In Danger” may do so indirectly through international attention and disapproval, making the label a “reputational sanction”[14]. According to UNESCO, various threats require it to put sites on this list: notably, ineffective land management planning and encroachment by development projects, including hydroelectric dams.[15] In fact, even before full inscription on the World Heritage list, Manitoba scrapped plans to build a hydroelectric transmission line through Pimachiowin Aki, due in part to the region’s recent shortlisting for world heritage status.[16] This demonstrates the UNESCO designation’s concrete force.
Dustin Silvey
Layer 3: Land Management Agreements
A few years after Pimachiowin Aki was shortlisted for World Heritage Status, Manitoba’s Legislature enacted the East Side Traditional Lands Planning and Special Protected Area Act (“Act”)[17]. This Act empowers Pimachiowin Aki’s First Nations to establish land use planning councils and develop land management plans in collaboration with the provincial government on their traditional territories.[18] These agreements may incorporate traditional, cultural, and social aspects,[19] and subsequent agreements feature Ji-ganawendamang Gidakiiminaan resource management principles.[20] By integrating Ji-ganawendamang Gidakiiminaan into provincial land management plans, these agreements make traditional land management practices legally enforceable even against industry threats, filling the first two protective layers’ enforcement gaps.
Unfortunately, the Act leaves a gap in protection too. Whereas the province must usually send management plan amendments to the land planning councils for review and approval, it may bypass their approval for amendments made in the public interest.[21] This broad public interest exception allows the province to override local authority. Concerningly, hydroelectric development is a major development risk, and other provinces have approved controversial hydroelectric projects on public interest grounds.[22] Thankfully, UNESCO’s reputational sanction threat helps fill this gap by making it politically difficult to put the province’s only recognized world heritage site’s status at risk.
Dustin Silvey
Conclusion
In Pimachiowin Aki, three protective frameworks interact in vital ways. The customary practice of Ji-ganawendamang Gidakiiminaan, UNESCO world heritage site status, and provincially recognized land management plans each leave significant gaps in protection, rendering Pimachiowin Aki vulnerable to destructive development. However, by creatively layering and interweaving these three different systems, Pimachiowin Aki’s First Nations created a robust and durable framework protecting not only the ecosystem, but also the Anishinaabe society that is inseparable from the land itself.
Samuel Anthony is a 1L BCL/JD student at McGill University’s Faculty of Law. With a BA in Geography and a prior career in outdoor education and backcountry tourism, Samuel’s interest in sustainable development law is rooted in a love of nature and outdoor spaces. He spends as much time as possible outside of the city but is happy with a walk along the urban shores of the St-Lawrence River when the obligations of student life get in the way of grandiose weekend adventures. Special thanks to Sofia Watt Sjöström for their support in writing this article.
[1] See Nomination for Inscription on the World Heritage List, 19 December 2016 at iv, online (pdf): Pimachiowin Aki <pimaki.ca/wp-content/uploads/nomination-document.pdf> [Nomination].
[2] See Don Sullivan, “Where the Creator Sits: The Quest to Protect The East Side of Lake Winnipeg” (2021) at 3, online (pdf): Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives <policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/Manitoba%20Office/2021/03/The%20Quest%20to%20Protect%20The%20East%20Side%20of%20Lake%20Winnipeg.pdf>; Agnieszka Pawlowska-Mainville & Peter Kulchyski, “The Incalculable Weight of Small Numbers: Hunters, Land Use, and the Poplar River First Nation Proposal for a World Heritage Site” (2015) 52 Intl J Canadian Studies 133 at 139.
[3] See Nomination, supra note 1 at 175.
[4] Ibid at iv.
[5] See Management Plan Appendix I (2016) at 37, online (pdf): UNESCO: World Heritage Convention <whc.unesco.org/en/list/1415/documents/>.
[6] See Nomination, supra note 1 at vii, 116.
[7] See Nomination, supra note 1 at 25–28.
[8] See Nomination, supra note 1 at 174; East Side Traditional Lands Planning and Special Protected Areas Act, CCSM c E3, ss 10(3)–(4) [East Side Act].
[9] See Protected Areas and First Nation Resource Stewardship: A Cooperative Relationship Accord, 18 March 2002 & 5 April 2002, at 2, online (pdf): Pimachiowin Aki <pimaki.ca/wp-content/uploads/Accord.pdf>.
[10] Ibid at 5 (terms of agreement 8 & 9).
[11] See Rhiannon Johnson, “Newest UNESCO World Heritage Site is boreal forest important to First nations cultures”, CBC (1 July 2018), online: <www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/unesco-heritage-site-pimachiowin-aki-1.4728561>.
[12] Ibid; Nomination, supra note 1 at iii.
[13] See Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, UNESCO, 16 November 1972, 1037 UNTS 151 at 156 (art 11.4) (entered into force 17 December 1975).
[14] Herdis Hølland, Evan Hamman & Jessica Phelps, “Naming, Shaming and Fire Alarms: The Complication, Development and Use of the List of World Heritage in Danger” (2018) 8:1 Transnational Environmental L 35 at 54.
[15] Ibid at 41.
[16] See Sullivan, supra note 2 at 9.
[17] See East Side Act, supra note 8.
[18] See East Side Act, supra note 8, ss 5(1), 9(2), 10(1).
[19] See East Side Act, supra note 8, ss 10(3)–(4).
[20] See e.g. Bloodvein First Nation Land Use Plan (25 September 2014) at s 4.5, online (pdf): Pimachiowin Aki <pimaki.ca/wp-content/uploads/Bloodvein-First-Nation-Land-Use-Plan.pdf>.
[21] See East Side Act, supra note 8, s 16(2)(b).
[22] See “Site C Dam granted environmental assessment approval”, CBC News (14 October 2014), online: <www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/site-c-dam-granted-environmental-assessment-approval-1.2798543>.