Anishinabek Nation mining policy analyst featured on Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada panel
By Sam Laskaris
TORONTO – Money should not be the driving force.
That was a key message delivered by Jenny-Lou Campbell, mining policy analyst for the Anishinabek Nation, at this year’s Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) conference.
The four-day PDAC conference, held Mar. 3-6 in Toronto, is the world’s largest and most influential international mining gathering. About 30,000 attendees from more than 130 countries took in this year’s event held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
Campbell, a member of Serpent River First Nation, was on a panel titled, Decarbonization: New avenues for Indigenous participation, and was part of the conference’s Indigenous programming.
Campbell said she’s noticed a significant shift in the mining industry over the past five to seven years.
“There’s more opportunities being presented to our [Indigenous] communities to have an active participation in the industry and bring greater value back into the communities themselves,” she said. “It’s not just about the financial aspect of mining. You also have look at the environmental and the cultural aspects of it as well because those are our values. And that is what is most important to me.”
Campbell said she’s a firm believer that when it comes to developing new projects, money should not be the one and only determining factor.
“It’s not always about the dollars,” she said. “Dollars are really important, I get that. But I think that what needs to be learned, if we are going to truly decarbonize our industry, is that needs to be brought further to the forefront and given equal playing grounds with the financial aspects.”
Though more and more Indigenous people have been getting involved in the mining industry, Campbell would welcome even greater participation numbers.
“What I’ve been hearing from our community members is historically, we’ve been excluded from the mining industry,” she said. “So, there’s some catch-up that we need to play to further amplify our voices and our presence within the industry itself. And I think that we can do that by focusing on learning more about each other and our cultures and what we value.”
Campbell added non-Indigenous partners should be cognizant of the fact Indigenous communities are not always on an equal playing field. And she hopes non-Indigenous partners try to help out with deficiencies.
“I think what is really important is recognizing the struggles that First Nations have right now with capacity, with core capacity, lack of administrative support, lack of technical IT infrastructure,” she said. “It’s all those simple things that I realize I took for granted working for industries and coming back to First Nations and seeing them.”
Saga Williams, a member of Curve Lake First Nation, was also on the Decarbonization panel. She owns A.S. Williams Consulting and is a frequent advisor on First Nations’ involvement in the critical mineral and energy sectors.
“One of the things we might want to do in terms of an innovative approach to protecting the environment is creating an economic benefit for communities who want to protect green space where the decarbonization happens naturally,” Williams said. “And we need to talk about those things in terms of what are the economic benefits for us in protecting areas and doing it in a way that we have oversight over that and that we are financially rewarded for that protection and that stewardship.”
The Decarbonization panel was moderated by Karen Restoule, a member of Dokis First Nation, who is a vice-president with Toronto’s Crestview Strategy.