Kitigan Zibi Anishinābeg working to protect, restore parts of territory

A new project aims to conserve ecosystems and restore those which have "degraded" across Kitigan Zibi Anishinābeg (KZA) First Nation's traditional territory. 

The project, called Kidjīmāninān ("our canoe" in Algonquin), is led by the KZA Natural Resources and Wildlife Office (NRWO) in partnership with the City of Gatineau and other municipalities in what's now western Quebec, according to a media release.

"We believe that we live together with the land, not on the land," wrote Jonathan Cote, a KZA spokesperson and land guardian. "Our lands and waters are part of who we are."

This project aims to align KZA's conservation efforts with the commitments made by Canada at COP15 in 2022, including conserving 30 per cent of ecosystems and restoring 30 per cent of degraded ecosystems by 2030.

Currently, just 10.2 per cent of the Outaouais is officially protected, according to NRWO manager Erik Higgins. 

"While our project aims to help Quebec and Canada meet their objective, the 30% for us is arbitrary," Higgins wrote in an email to CBC.

"What is more important to us is protecting the areas that need it the most due to them being biodiversity hotspots or culturally significant areas."

Cote said the current goal is "ambitious," but some elders in the community would like the number to be even higher.

"We have a lot of territory and there are certain areas that are culturally significant to our people," he told CBC's Ottawa Morning. "We get a lot of feedback [from the community] on things like that, of places we have historically occupied."

Dividing up the work

In the project's first phase, a working group will gather knowledge and consult with stakeholder groups to create a roadmap for the future of the project. The second phase will "focus on enforcing protections."

Higgins told CBC that this project is focused on the Outaouais, though KZA traditional territory also spans Quebec's Laurentians and parts of the Ottawa Valley in Ontario.

The project's three main goals are:

• Performing a biodiversity assessment to map out the species and ecosystems in the Outaouais, an essential step toward knowing what needs to be protected or restored.
• Talking to members of the community to access and share their knowledge, and building educational programs in schools and beyond.
• Building a roadmap detailing how ecosystems will actually be protected through their efforts. 

Cote said that collaborative governance model like the one used for this project — involving KZA, local governments and non-Indigenous institutions — is a "first." 

"It's groundbreaking, in a sense that at the local levels relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous have not always been perfect, but we're hoping this is something that we can all work together on," he said. 

He said with a chuckle that approaching those conversations with so many levels of government can be "interesting," but that the biggest obstacle to achieving their goal is the sheer size of KZA's territory, so working with other groups is essential.

"I like to take the wholistic view, so again taking our cultures and traditions of everything being interconnected," he said. "I let them know that we need to think outside the box and start thinking holistically about environmental protection."

Ottawa Morning6:05Kitigan Zibi Anishinābeg launches biodiversity conservation initiative

A guardian of the community explains how a new plan to prevent the loss of biodiversity in the Outaouais region is taking shape.