Kakekaspan to speak in France

Fort Severn Chief Matthew Kakekaspan has been invited by the French government to speak at the International Conference Polar Worlds, Jan. 26-28 in Paris, France.
“We’re presenting a paper with Harvey Lemelin about polar bear research,” Kakekaspan said. “We’d really like to point out that we have always never really had any say in what happens in our territory and we’d like to promote the idea of co-management so we do have a say in what goes on in our homelands, not just with the polar bear but with what’s happening with other species as well.”
The Co-Management of Wabusk (Polar bear) in Northern Ontario: A Perspective of the Washaho Cree Nation at Fort Severn presentation highlights some of the key findings from the ongoing research project and discusses the benefits of community-based research and the potentials of co-managing polar bears in the province of Ontario.
The six-year community-based research project is led by Fort Severn in collaboration with the Keewaytinook Okimakanak Research Institute and faculty members from Lakehead University.
“I’d just like to promote what we have been doing in our community,” Kakekaspan said. “This is an opportunity to present some of that information first-hand to whoever is interested.”
The conference will feature presentations from some of the leading polar researchers in the fields of environmental and social sciences, with the results to be published in Polar Record and disseminated through various media outlets.
Kakekaspan is looking to remind the international community that the Cree do live and interact with the polar bear on a regular basis and his community is developing strategies to co-exist with polar bears in these changing times.
“Working on this project with Fort Severn, is what every applied researcher strives for – an open and collaborative approach to research, which is driven for and by the community,” Lemelin said about the research project, which began about five years ago. “I am deeply honoured by this opportunity, and would like to thank our sponsors SSHRC, the Canadian Embassy in France, and the conference organizers from Mondes Polaires/Polar Worlds for making this possible.”
Kakekaspan, Lemelin and several other writers recently published one of the first peer-reviewed articles to document Cree knowledge of polar bears in Ontario and the world in the interdisciplinary journal of Human Ecology. The collaborative work, Wabusk of the Omushkegouk: Cree-Polar Bears (Ursus maritimus) Interactions in Northern Ontario, involved citizens from Fort Severn and Weenusk and researchers from KORI and Lakehead University’s Centre for Northern Studies.
Fort Severn was invited to share its traditional knowledge at the Polar Bear Roundtable in 2009 and the community has also been selected by the Ministry of Natural Resources to host the second polar bear recovery strategy workshop in February.