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Josko Osredkar, PhD josko.osredkar©kclj.si Sponsors I Platinum Sponsor i Graph I Silver Sponsors i Graph I The 46th ISOBM Congress is also sponsored by these organisations/institutions i Graph Graph Graph Scientific Committee Barak Vivian (ISR) Chapman Caroline (UK) Chechlinska Magdalena (POL) Cree Ian (UK) Diamandis Elephterios (CAN) Duffy Joe (IRL) Ecke Thorsten (GER) Fritsche Herbert (USA) Holdenrieder Stefan (GER) Jansa Rado (SLO) Kulasingam Vathany (CAN) Lanisnik-Rizner Tea (SLO) Marc Janja (SLO) Moro Ricardo (CAN) Nicolini Andrea (ITA) Oehr Peter (JAP) Osredkar Josko (SLO) Podgornik Helena (SLO) Sell Stewart (USA) Topolcan Ondrej (CZE) Organizing Committee I Co-Presidents i Osredkar Josko (SLO) Barak Vivian (ISR) I Vice-president i Lanisnik-Rizner Tea I Members i Mlinaric-Rascan Irena Fabjan Teja Kumer Kristina I Contact details i Prof.dr. [Extracted from the article]

This article defi nes ahkamimohwin and how it can be practised in education. Ahkamimohwin is a Northern Cree word that means resilience (ahkameyimowin in Plains Cree, y dialect). It is a word that is commonly used to describe “persistence” or “never giving up.” Residential school trauma has affected northern Canadian communities such as Beauval, Saskatchewan, and it has continued even years after the school was closed. Today, many communities in Northern Saskatchewan suffer from addictions, poverty, and other challenges that impact negatively on ahkamimohwin and miyo-pimatisiwin (living a good life). By incorporating knowledge of traditional culture into our schools, as shared by Elders and Knowledge Keepers in the community, along with incorporating an awareness of place and belonging through connections to the land, family, community, and spirituality, ahkamimohwin will be integrated into education and will lead to miyo-pimatisiwin. Through this integration I believe our Beauval community can heal from the trauma of the residential school experiences and can build resiliency with our youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article details Saskatchewan's first environmental impact assessment, which took place in the 1970s over a proposed dam on the Churchill River at the Wintego Rapids. The Wintego Dam, which would have been the largest hydroelectric dam in the province at the time, was controversial because of the environmental repercussions and impacts on the local Indigenous communities, particularly the Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation. We show that the Blakeney ndp government did not initially intend to create a robust environmental impact assessment, and then explain how and why such an assessment was ultimately undertaken. Using archival material that was previously unavailable, the article recounts the governmental study, the Indigenous-led studies (after they rejected the governmental process), and the final Board of Inquiry report. The Wintego saga should be understood within the context of a growing resistance to northern development projects whose benefits accrued mostly to the southern white population. Ultimately, the Blakeney government decided not to build Wintego because of the economic, environmental, and social impacts, as well as concerns about unsettled treaty claims. This could be considered the first attempt – even before the Berger Inquiry – by a provincial government to fully assess the impacts of a natural resource project before final approval, and it was the earliest incorporation of Indigenous-led studies into the assessment process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ongoing colonization of the environment and natural resources has negatively impacted environmental heritage rights in many parts of the world, particularly Indigenous environmental rights and their relationships with the environment. For many Indigenous communities, the history of colonialism became a history of dispossession for Indigenous peoples, their land, water, traditional knowledge, and practices. This paper addresses the ongoing environmental heritage conflict between the Cree First Nation communities' traditional environmental heritage practices and developmental energy projects in Saskatchewan, Canada. Drawing from a relational research framework, we (Cree First Nation Knowledge Keeper and settler scholar of color) shared our learning reflections from Cree First Nation communities on how energy projects (particularly pipeline leaks) have negatively impacted Indigenous land, water, and traditional heritage and practices. In this paper, we focus our learnings from the Cree First Nation communities on the following questions: Why and how do developmental projects neglect Indigenous heritage rights, particularly environmental heritage rights? What can be or should be done about it? What are our responsibilities as researchers and educators? In this study, we learned about traditional-knowledge-based consultation and solutions to the ongoing challenges of incorporating Indigenous interests into environmental heritage to foster Indigenous environmental heritage rights. We also highlight how Indigenous perspectives on their environmental heritage rights are interconnected with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from our learning reflections, particularly Goal 3, Good Health and Wellbeing, Goal 10, Reduced Inequalities, Goal 13, Climate Action, Goal 15, Life on Land, and Goal 16, Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research shared in this article seeks an understanding of Indigenous resilience within the context of a culturally responsive land-based initiative, Project George, led by the Moose Cree First Nation, also known as the Omushkego people. The initiative centres core Cree values, community engagement, and land-based skills to ensure the well-being of youth. Their Homeland is located in the waterways and on the western shores of the Hudson and James Bay Lowlands in Ontario, Canada. The methodology involved researcher participation and engagement as part of a 4-month field presence; informal conversations and visiting; as well as formal semistructured interviews with community members over 4 years from 2012 to 2015. The research explores the benefits and challenges of a land-based program by highlighting the experiences and voices of community and program participants who directly engaged with Project George. The findings show that land-based learning initiatives inspired and driven by Indigenous people foster a regenerative approach to wellness based on relation to land, culture, and identity. A return to land-based learning responds to the ongoing colonial complexities affecting the health and wellness of Indigenous youth in Canada and draws strength from the people's resilient practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I discuss how being a student of Northern Bush Cree traditions has revealed some possibilities for understanding how berries listen, and respond to, living in, and on, the edge of areas of extreme extraction. Members of Fort McKay First Nation and Bigstone Cree Nations tend to their relationships with the sentient landscape and its entirety of living beings through respectful speech, behaviour, and harvesting practices. The agency of those living beings is expressed through their decisions as to whether or not humans can encounter, harvest, and share in their substance. By examining relationships of reciprocity between the human and other-than-human animal world from a post-humanist perspective, this paper seeks to expand upon traditional indicators of contamination resulting from the large-scale industrial development of the Athabasca oil sands in First Nations' traditional territories, and to value and share some observations and knowledge of Cree Elders and knowledge holders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Participation in on-the-land programs that encourage traditional cultural activities may improve health and well-being. The Income Security Program (ISP) - a financial incentive-based on-the-land program - for Eeyouch (Cree) hunters and trappers in Eeyou Istchee was created as a result of the 1975 James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement to help mitigate the effects of hydroelectric development on the Cree people of northern Quebec, Canada. Beyond the ISP's financial incentives, little is known about the health measures of those who are eligible to participate in the ISP (i.e. spent ≥120 days on-the-land during the previous year). Therefore, this paper's objective was to assess the health measures of northern Quebec Cree, who were eligible for participation in the ISP.Methods: Using participant data (n = 545) compiled from the Nituuchischaayihtitaau Aschii Multi-Community Environment-and-Health Study, we assessed 13 different health measures in generalized linear models with the independent variable being the eligibility to participate in the ISP.Results: Participants in the present study who were eligible for the ISP had significantly higher levels of vigorous and moderate activity per week, and higher concentrations of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids in the blood compared to those ineligible for the ISP (i.e. spent ≤119 days on-the-land during the previous year). Encouragingly, following model adjustment for age and sex, participants eligible for the ISP did not have higher blood concentrations of mercury than those who were not eligible for the ISP.Conclusions: Our results suggest that the participants eligible for participation in the ISP are likely to be healthier than those who are ineligible to participate - and are promising for on-the-land programs for Indigenous peoples beyond a financial incentive - with no apparent higher risk of increasing contaminant body burden through traditional on-the-land-activities (e.g. fish consumption). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses a wide range of media--including an 1853 Albion Cree Press, a Cree typewriter, and contemporary Indigenous artworks--to create a sense of the multiplicity of Indigenous technologies available for study today and the vastness of the visual record. While older art historical studies would be limited to so-called high art, namely paintings and sculpture, this essay takes an expansive approach to consider multiple examples of visual culture in the formation of Indigenous literacy traditions. The work considers the importance of birchbark biting and moss in the pictorial record, for example, as a form of Indigenous technology. This essay has also been inspired by recent conversations with my mom and colleagues in the discipline of contemporary art and for that I am thankful and try to reflect a more conversational approach to the media discussed herein as a methodology of upending binaries and tensions of spoken and unspoken and not-as-yet written stories. The research engages in visual analysis of Indigenous literary artifacts and images. By Indigenous literacies I mean the way Indigenous people have engaged and engage technologies and media to move ideas forward, to create art and culture. The essay takes a speculative approach, using some stories about artworks and narrative approaches to honor a history of Métis and Cree paths to knowledge that are based on storytelling rather than definitive histories. As a person of Mé tis ancestry on my maternal side, I write this essay not as a fluent Cree or Michif speaker, but as one who is in a life-long process of language learning. Analysis of visual imagery expands staid notions and simplistic understandings of Indigenous literacies as solely based on writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]