"Ecosystem-Based Conservation Planning with Canadian Indigenous People: Using GIS to Facilitate Ecologically and Culturally Sustainable Land Use" Herb Hammond

Last Updated on Thursday, 11 March 2010 08:00

My friend and colleague Herb Hammond is visiting this week from Canada and will be presenting about his work doing ecosystem-based planning with First Nations, with the use of GIS mapping. Here are the essentials:

Presenter: Herb Hammond, Forest Ecologist and Forester, Silva Ecosystem Consultants Ltd., http://silvafor.org/
Topic: "Ecosystem-Based Conservation Planning with Canadian Indigenous People: Using GIS to Facilitate Ecologically and Culturally Sustainable Land Use"
Date & Time:  Friday, March 12, 1-2pm
Location: UC Berkeley, 111 Mulford Hall, Conference Room
Co-sponsored by the Indigenous Mapping Network and the Geospatial Information Facility at Berkeley (http://gif.berkeley.edu/about/geolunch.html ).
Thanks to Maggi Kelly & Kevin Koy for your support!


All info is available at http://silvafor.org/ 
The sections on Ecosystem-Based Planning, Appreciate Inquiry, and his publications are a great introduction to the methods.

Background on Silva Forest Foundation (SFF):
SFF has worked with many communities throughout Canada to create ecosystem-based conservation plans and ecosystem maps. These communities include Harrop-Procter, the Slocan Valley, Creston, the Fraser Headwaters, Yalakom Valley, Cortes Island, Denman Island, the Xeni Gwet’in First Nation, Xaxli’p, Haida Gwaii (all in British Columbia), North Central Saskatchewan, and the Innu Nation (Labrador). Each community uses its plans and maps in ways unique to that community. Harrop-Procter and Creston use the information as the basis for their ongoing community forest operations. Xaxli’p has combined their ecosystem-based plan with their traditional use study to manage a community forest in culturally and ecologically appropriate ways.

The Innu Nation used their ecosystem-based and protected areas design mapping to negotiate protection of a large portion of their traditional lands in cultural and ecological reserves, and to apply an ecosystem-based approach to the use of lands outside protected areas.

Review "Na to rourou, na taku rourou, ka ora ai te iwi" Hauiti Hakopa - Maori, Cultural Geographer

Last Updated on Wednesday, 10 March 2010 21:20 Wednesday, 03 March 2010 00:00

On February 25th and 26th, down in Mountain View, is the Indigenous Mapping Network/Google Tribal Geo Tech Workshop. Over 75 attendees engaged in indigenous mapping received training on Google's mapping tools and discussed issues such as information security. Up at Berkeley, we were lucky to have some of those attendees make the trek up on Wednesday night, February 24th, including our speaker, Hauiti Hakopa. We were pleased to have these visitors make the trip, and also pleased that so many of our campus participants came out to hear Hauiti speak. We had a mix of undergraduates and graduates, mostly from Environmental Science, Policy and Management, but also from Archeology and from the Energy and Resources Group. Researchers and visiting scholars also joined us, along with our visitors from the conference including board members of IMN, Laura Harjo, Darlene Jenkins and Rosemarie McKeon and our speaker and his wife from New Zealand. Our attendees included Navajo, Hupa, Coast Miwok, Creek, Hawaiian, and of course Maori. We were blessed with such a diverse group. Thank you for coming!

Hauiti Hakopa is a PhD student in Information Science at the University of Otago, in Aotearoa/New Zealand. His current work involves mapping songs: listening to songs sung to children, pulling out placenames and locating them on a map. Sometimes this involves mapping based on winds and currents! In particular, the stories he shared with us are mostly from the east coast of the North Island. Some experiences are hard to capture in words, and this was one of them for me; ironically words were the point of this presentation! I am now faced with trying to describe to readers what Hauiti talked about, and what it was like to hear him speak, and I find that I was so engaged in listening that it is hard to summarize. But I'll do my best!

On the surface, Hauiti says that these are songs sung to children (moteatea). In one summary of his talk, I saw the term lullaby (oriori) used. I fondly remember my grandmothers singing me to sleep with songs; but this is a different sort of lullaby. These songs are a way of teaching children from a very young age the important things: who they are, who their ancestors are (which are really the same thing), how to read the stars and how the heavens were created, where to find good food, details of tribal war history, who the important people in their community are, and much more. These are teaching songs, sung when the child is going to sleep and when they wake up in the morning – a sort of sleep-teaching. As he told us some of the stories and showed us pictures of some of the important related places, a picture took shape of all the different groups of Maori on the island, their relationships with each other, with the land, their language, and their ancestry... stories of famous and infamous ancestors, told with humor and pride. One gets a feeling for the depth and length of the stories for each tribal group. He showed us pictures of the ancestral houses (whare tipuna) and described how knowledge is represented in all the carvings and in the structure itself; how the ancestor of that group is represented at the top of the structure (tekoteko), for example. Hauiti also told us of schools of learning known as wananga, each had a very specific curriculum: navigation, boat-making, cosmology, genealogy (whakapapa). Every curriculum has a particular karakia (ancient esoteric chants), whakapapa (genealogies), tikanga (protocols for living) and korero purakau (stories). Some knowledge and some of the place names are ancient and came from the ancient lands known as Hawaiiki.

In Maori society, knowledge was held by key people known as tohunga. This is one of the ways in which knowledge was preserved and handed down from generation to generation; this seems to be a common thread in many indigenous cultures. I raise the question: how do we, all of us in the 'modern' age, balance between protecting and respecting those traditions, without losing the knowledge and stories if the right person is not available for it to be taught to? Hauiti said that he himself is an outsider to other Maori groups, and that there is a right way to ask them to share their knowledge. This is another important point for us to take home to our own mapping endeavors. He told several stories of elders who would simply stop in the middle of a story, or in some other way challenge him to think about what he was learning; to go and do some homework, so to speak. To work to remember or reconstruct what they are telling him for himself. Knowledge is earned, in some sense, by really working to understand what you are hearing and to check it. This is not so unlike university education, in my opinion.

In the discussion following Hauiti's presentation, several topics came up. I just want to highlight one of them: the important issue of information security. In California, one of our attendees told us, we have the problem that mapping done with federal money results in information being available to the public. At that point, unscrupulous individuals go 'pot hunting' – essentially illegally digging at sites which have now been revealed by the mapping, presumably to sell cultural artifacts. This is an important consequence to mapping, and I think we should continue to discuss how best to protect sensitive information.  There are laws protecting sacred sites in California, but even with those in place, sites may still be vulnerable. The question was put to Hauiti as to whether this is a problem in his country. First of all, he responded, the locations are not precisely specified. In addition, and maybe more importantly, the names, even the stories, wouldn't be enough for an outsider (even another Maori from a different tribe) to locate the place precisely. So publishing the names alone does not reveal enough to locate the places – the key to understanding where they really are is in the true understanding of the names. "The language is the key to understanding the land."

A few more pictures of the event can be found at: http://bit.ly/aYTcnd


Melissa V. Eitzel, PhD Student, Dept of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, UC Berkeley

Indigenous Mapping Network and Google to host Indigenous Mapping Workshop

Tuesday, 23 February 2010 19:47

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
 
BERKELEY, Feb, 23, 2010- The Indigenous Mapping Network (IMN) and Google will welcome map makers to Google’s Mountain View California campus, February 25-26, 2010 for a free geospatial and mobile technologies workshop entitled Indigenous Mapping Network/Google Tribal Geo Tech Workshop. Participants working with native communities will be trained in accessing, using and benefiting from Google’s free mapping technologies.  Many indigenous communities are financially strapped and need low cost, relevant mapping approaches to address their planning, policy and advocacy needs. “They are mapping the cultural and natural aspects of their communities, which is tied to issues of sovereignty, cultural protection, and land use management,” said Rosemarie McKeon, IMN board member and event team member.

Google experts will train participants to use Google Earth, Google Maps, and Android phones running Open Data Kit.  The workshop will address geospatial issues specific to indigenous communities: privacy and security of cultural and community data, collecting mobile data, and converting data from proprietary formats to open formats.

Mountain View is located in the ancestral homelands of the Ohlone, and Ann Marie Sayers, Tribal Chairperson, Indian Canyon Nation of the Ohlone People, will honor the event with a special opening blessing. Participants include approximately seventy-five indigenous mapping community members, tribal leaders, technical developers, and mapping specialists.  The participants hail from the U.S.; British Columbia and Ontario, Canada; Peru; Ecuador and New Zealand.
 
In 2008, students at the University of California, Berkeley organized a student chapter of IMN.  Since the chapter’s inception, they have hosted a series of speakers covering indigenous applications of mapping. The Indigenous Mapping Network - Google Tribal Geo Tech Workshop was first conceptualized by Mano Marks, a Google Geo Developer Advocate and Rosemarie McKeon, to be a short presentation at one of the chapter’s meetings last October. It has evolved into a major outreach event, supported by the Google Earth Outreach team, Google Geo Developers and Google.org. “Our Google Earth Outreach team first started working with indigenous tribes in the Brazilian Amazon in 2008 - the Amazon Surui tribe is now using Google Earth and Android phones to preserve their culture, protect their rainforest territory and create a sustainable economic future. We’re honored and excited now to collaborate with IMN in offering an enhanced version of this training to scores of tribes and First Nations peoples around the world,” said Rebecca Moore, Manager, Google Earth Outreach.

“This event has evolved and grown enormously over the course of a few months and it’s still not big enough to accommodate everyone that wants to participate,” said, Joshua Arnold, IMN Board member. The event Is full to capacity.

The call for participants went out in December and there was a large outpouring of applicants from all parts of the globe ranging from grassroots community folks to government agencies and university researchers.  Interested individuals can look forward to the IMN2010 conference, “Restoring our Home Places” hosted by the Suquamish Tribe, taking place June 2-4 2010. 

Conference information can be found at indigenousmapping.net/imnconference.html
 
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The mission of Indigenous Mapping Network, and affiliate of Seventh Generation Fund for Indian Development, is to connect native communities with the tools needed to protect, preserve, and enhance our way of life within our aboriginal territories. This endeavor often requires an amalgamation of traditional "mapping" practices and modern mapping technologies.

Rosemarie McKeon
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Hauiti Hakopa, Maori Geographer WED24FEB 6-8 UC Berkeley

6-8p WED24FEB 103 Mulford Hall, UC Berkeley
Sponsored by Indigenous Mapping Network at Berkeley Student Chapter



Title: "Na to rourou, na taku rourou, ka ora ai te iwi"

Means: "your basket of knowledge & my basket of knowledge - combined our tribe will thrive & survive!"


(when asked about the title: "we have baskets made out of flax, we call them 'kete' and kete often refers to "sacred baskets of knowledge" given to our ancestors from the gods when the world created)

Subject words:  Geographic information systems • Maori • land tenure • land titles • information storage and retrieval systems

Hauiti will share his experiences about how "we think of land, how we feel about land and how we relate/connect to land - then i must express those thoughts in the language of my forefathers - for therein lies the mana of the whenua (prestige of the land)"

"Many have said this, but one elder with i spoke with about a week ago expressed his concerns this way - "if you cannot speak your own language then you cannot understand fully the land, for the land is clothed in the language of your forefathers"

"He also said: Mena ka tu koe ki te korero, me whakatutu koe i te puehu. Mena kaore, me noho!"

"If you stand to speak, then you must stir the dust. If you don't, then sit"

The poster above features a rock carving to the right of Hauiti, of Hauiti's ancestor, Ngatoroirangi,  who claimed the region of Taupo for his people.

Hauiti arrived Monday to Sunnyvale from New Zealand for the Indigenous Mapping Network/Google Tribal Geo Tech Workshop which starts Thursday. He will share what brings him to this training as well as what he has been doing as a graduate student in geography in his community.

FYI, Hauiti Hakopa was our keynote speaker for IMN2009. It was the first time he'd visited the U.S. He and his elders became aware of Indigenous Mapping Network and the IMN2009 conference through twitter.

Should you be in the bay area and meander to Berkeley on Wednesday evening, swing by!

Hauiti Hakopa, Maori Geographer twitter.com/24retoa