Category: Current Projects

The goal of this new research project is to identify, document, and critically understand and analyze how Huu-ay-aht citizens are experiencing the first decade of implementation as the Nation prepares for the 2026 ‘Periodic Review’ of the Maa-nulth Treaty.

This three-year project (2022-2025) aims to establish a new Indigenous-led land stewardship program and community of practice in the Capital Regional District (CRD) and Salish Sea / ṮEṮÁĆES region based on a community-driven research, policy program and governance system that is intended to transform and mobilize public schools and higher education systems and assets.

The health of our planet, all Peoples, and all living entities is in crisis. The drivers of this crisis are colonization, capitalism, extractivism, globalization, and racism, underpinned by concomitant policies, systems, and structures that reinforce this worldview. If we want collective futures that sustain all planetary life, we must respond with urgency and creativity across political and epistemic boundaries toward reconciling the damage we have done to the planet’s health, our health, and the health of all our relations.

Each year the Chief Public Health Officer of Canada (CPHO) produces an independent report on the health of Canadians that is provided to the Minister of Health and Canadian Parliament. This report is an opportunity to examine the state of public health in Canada and to stimulate dialogue about public health priorities. This year’s CPHO report focuses on the role of public health systems related to climate change. The HEC Lab’s Scientific Director, Heather Castleden has been commissioned to meet with about key informants (via interviews and focus group discussions) and produce a supplementary “What We Heard” report. The data gathered as part of this process will be helping to inform the CPHO annual report. The CPHO will use this report to create awareness and catalyze actions. The What We Heard report will be publicly available and posted on the CPHO website alongside the annual report later this year. Heather is working with her research associate, Isaac White, on this project.

We are facing a crisis with respect to human-induced climate change, which is impacting the land, water, and air around us. The link between healthy lands, waters, and people has been known, embodied, and taught in Indigenous societies since time immemorial, yet these knowledge systems have been largely delegitimized, ignored, or dismissed in the natural sciences in our pursuit to solve environmental problems.

After a decade of research efforts towards decolonizing the Settler-dominated academy I found renewed inspiration from reading Adam Gaudry and Danielle Lorenz’s 2018 publication “Indigenization as inclusion, reconciliation, and decolonization: Navigating the different visions for indigenizing the Canadian Academy”.

For many Indigenous Peoples, Ceremonies have always been a part of everyday life for individual and community health and wellbeing. As a global pandemic, COVID-19 has impacted all of us; but some are impacted more and others less given pre-existing inequities, disparities, injustices.

To date we have been researching the impacts of the pulp and paper mill in the estuary adjacent to the community of Pictou Landing First Nation, known as A’se’k, which provided us with the foods, medicines, transportation, shelter, and tools we have needed to survive and thrive since time immemorial.

The Achieving Strength, Health, and Autonomy through Renewable Energy Development for the Future (A SHARED Future) program of research is about reconciliation between knowledge systems is about reconciliation between knowledge systems; it must be foundational to our work together

The goal of this new research project is to identify, document, and critically understand and analyze how Huu-ay-aht citizens are experiencing the first decade of implementation as the Nation prepares for the 2026 ‘Periodic Review’ of the Maa-nulth Treaty.