Matawa opens new environmental office

In preparation of the Ring of Fire development in its traditional territories, Matawa First Nations opened the office of its environmental department in Thunder Bay on March 21.
Four Rivers Matawa Environmental Group was formed in January 2011 by direction of the Matawa chiefs to address the potential environmental impacts the Ring of Fire development would have in their communities.
Matawa CEO David Paul Achneepineskum said the goal of Four Rivers is to prepare its people by raising awareness, training them, and monitoring the environment.
“They will need to build capacity within our communities,” he said. “With the development that could potentially happen, our people are concerned about the impacts of those developments.”
Achneepineskum said the department combines the technical expertise of its staff with the traditional knowledge of the people within the Matawa communities.
Achneepineskum said their people have lived in the territory for centuries and have a lot of knowledge that can contribute to research.
“They say the water speaks to them, the animals speak to them,” he said. “They notice the changes that happen to them. They notice if the butterflies don’t return for one year, they notice if the migrating birds don’t come back to the land. So that’s what we want to use, that knowledge that we have in our communities, and the people we have in Four Rivers.”
The new office contains a GIS mapping system and map printing service, which Four Rivers’ environmental programs coordinator Sarah Cockerton said has been recognized as a leading program in the country.
Four Rivers, named after the Attawapiskat, Albany, Winisk and Moose Rivers that run through the Matawa region, has numerous programs to help train and educate its community members, including an environmental training program.
“For the last year we’ve been training monitors in three communities and they graduated and will receive certificates by Eco Canada as environmental monitors,” Cockerton said.
Cockerton said Four Rivers has developed its programs in response to 300 requests from community members.
“We’ve been trying to fulfill them and we’re incredibly busy,” she said. “Our outreach reached over 1,300 Matawa community members in the past year.”
The new office also has video conferencing capability linked with Laurentian University in Sudbury, where the department can access classrooms if a lecture is of interest to Matawa communities.
The grand opening also had a display of northern birds and animals that could be impacted by development, which was led by Lakehead University, one of Four Rivers’ partners.
Achneepineskum said they also want to raise awareness to the Canadian public and government of the sacredness of its territory.
“There is concern about what the public calls muskeg and, maybe to them, there’s nothing in there,” Achneepineskum said.
“But for us, our people, the muskeg is a place where they gather in the wintertime for food. In the springtime they go and harvest waterfowl. It’s a place where they can get their medicines. To them it’s a place where the caribou live for hundreds of thousands of years. So it’s a place they want to protect.”