Long Lake #58 to collaborate on research project on maintaining safety of water
By Rick Garrick
LONG LAKE #58—Long Lake #58 is one of the Matawa First Nations involved in a three-year collaborative research project on maintaining the safety of water co-led by Four Rivers Environmental Services Group and Wilfrid Laurier University.
“We have a Matawa Waters Futures project and the end goal of that is a framework for community-based monitoring,” says Sarah Cockerton, manager of environmental programs with Four Rivers Environmental Services Group at Matawa First Nations Management. “So we are working on community-based monitoring on a whole bunch of different fronts. This is a framework for kind of everything, but some communities are working hard on it themselves by actually having active programs right now.”
Long Lake #58 currently has an agreement to do environmental monitoring with Greenstone Gold Mines, located west of the community near Geraldton on Hwy. 11. The environmental monitoring is part of the Definitive Agreement that Greenstone Gold signed with Long Lake #58 in 2018.
“We go out on to the land and we do water sampling, so that is checking the temperature, conductivity, pH, et cetera,” says Anisa O’Nabigon, environmental technician with Long Lake #58. “But also, we just did fish samples with Stantec (a global design firm), and it was in partnership with MNRF (Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry). We are also doing a lot of testing around the tailings pond, to check the levels to see what kind of mitigation plans we are going to try for the new tailings pond.”
O’Nabigon says a raptor survey using a helicopter is also on the agenda.
“I’m excited about that,” O’Nabigon says. “We’re going to look for nests of birds of prey, just to see what birds are in that area. In some places, we might have to build some nests. For example, for eagles they found that when they put trees upside down, the eagles like to nest in that area. So just to see if we might have to do that if we are taking any of their natural homes away.”
The Matawa Water Futures project is part of a first step to increase capacity among the Matawa communities to actively steward over 300,000 square kilometres of watersheds within their traditional homelands.
“Since time immemorial, the Matawa member First Nations have taken care of the watersheds within their traditional territories and ancestral homelands,” Cockerton says. “Until now, there has not been an opportunity for Indigenous peoples and western science to take a step back together to look at how watersheds can be protected through a model that places the values, priorities and traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples at the forefront.”
The Matawa Water Futures project is part of six new co-led projects across Canada launched by Global Water Futures, the world’s largest university-led freshwater research program that is currently working to address urgent and growing water quality issues for Indigenous communities.
“Matawa Waters Futures brings together Elders and community members with scientists from Laurier, Lakehead and Laurentian universities to co-create community-led water research projects,” says Terry Mitchell, professor, director of Indigenous Rights and Resource Governance Research Group and faculty member at the Balsillie School of International Affairs at Laurier University. “With a strong commitment to Elder knowledge and community capacity building, this Matawa-led, Indigenous-informed water science program has regional and national potential to decolonize water science supporting Indigenous peoples in maintaining their traditional role in water stewardship.”
Global Water Futures’s goal is to deliver risk management solutions to manage water futures in Canada and other cold regions where global warming is changing landscapes, ecosystems and the water environment.