First published on 10/05/2014, and last updated on 03/05/2018
By: Eli Enns, Regional Coordinator, North America
A new model of Tribal Parks is emerging in Canada under the leadership of the Tla-o-qui-aht and Tsilhqot’in Indigenous Peoples in cooperation with Local Communities. Building on significant court victories and adapting age old ecological governance systems these progressive partnerships are innovating an Indigenous Watershed Governance model that marries the old with the new to form a sustainable livelihoods program that promotes environmental security. The keystone of this approach is a dramatically different social contract which extends ideas of justice to the environment we all share and depend on, and through time to the future ancestors that we are ultimately accountable to.
This social contract is captured in works of art such as the totem pole in the photograph below. The crests function as symbolic memory devices that are associated with various knowledge patterns that have been encoded in story. The stories provide a moral education for the people, guiding their behaviour towards others in their human community, as well as other beings they share the environment with. This advanced system of active participation in a social contract ensures that stories with encoded knowledge patterns about Natural Law are an ever present visual characteristic of the built environment. Far from being just beautiful art, these crests and stories continue to influence ecological governance applications in modern times, such as the Tribal Parks initiative.
