Janelle Baker
My research is on sakâwiyiniwak (Northern Bush Cree) experiences with wild food contamination in Alberta’s oil sands region. My academic work is inspired from doing applied research as a traditional land use consultant for First Nations in the region since 2006. I continue to be involved in community-based environmental monitoring projects with Bigstone Cree Nation and Fort McKay First Nation. I am also working on new research that celebrates traditional foods and Boreal forest identities. My specializations include ethnography of contamination, environmental and ecological anthropology, ethnobiology and ethnoecology, post-humanism and the anthropocene, anthropology of food, community-based research methods, political ecology, and ethnographic writing. As a female academic and a mother, I am also interested in feminism in academia and anthropology, and feminist research about landscapes and food procurement.
less
InterestsView All (36)
Uploads
Papers
Reviewed by Janelle Marie Baker
Reviewer address: Department of Anthropology, McGill University, 855 Sherbrooke Street West, Montréal, Québec H3A 2T7, CAN.
Email: janelle.baker@mail.mcgill.ca
Written by leaders in the field, Innovative Strategies for Teaching in the Plant Sciences is a valuable resource for teachers and graduate students in the plant sciences.
Talks
With a Masters degree in environmental anthropology I have spent the past 6 years working for First Nations in northern Alberta performing traditional land use studies and assessments. Traditional land use assessments are used as a way for the government and companies to consult First Nations regarding the impact that industrial development is having on their treaty rights to harvest from their territories. During these studies, I’ve had the honour to learn from people and go out on the land with them. I regularly hear from Elders and harvesters that they are concerned about contamination to the wild food supply, and I can see that they have incredibly nuanced indicators to determine that contamination is occurring. Who else would be able to tell that there are changes in the environment, but the people who live directly from it, who respect and honour it and have spent endless generations doing so? I spent 6 years writing up reports about people’s concerns. Companies and the government file the reports as a part of the Environmental Impact Assessment process and people’s words and concerns are closed away in those reports. Besides, the company-hired scientists say that there are no problems of contamination in the wild food supply. “No significant impact” is the term they prefer to use.
So this is why I am here at McGill pursing a PhD. I am responding to what people have been telling me - I am recording their indicators for contamination, their stories about the changes that they have seen, how they know what is contaminated, and locating where they are no longer able or willing to harvest any more. My core objective is to investigate First Nations indicators for wild food contamination by exploring how their traditional ecological knowledge informs the concept of contamination (rather than simply locating and lab-testing foods). First Nations ability to observe, manage and survive from the land is a fundamental dimension of cultural and biological diversity in the subarctic. My goal to elucidate the First Nations meaning of food contamination based on their cosmological and ethnoecological system will lead not only to a better understanding of the changes in plant and animal populations that they are observing as a result of industrial development; it will document their changing relationship with these populations in this development context. I intend to publish my results for a wider audience, but also to share them with companies, government and organizations in the oil sands region to educate and inform practice and policy.
Conference Presentations
Reviewed by Janelle Marie Baker
Reviewer address: Department of Anthropology, McGill University, 855 Sherbrooke Street West, Montréal, Québec H3A 2T7, CAN.
Email: janelle.baker@mail.mcgill.ca
Written by leaders in the field, Innovative Strategies for Teaching in the Plant Sciences is a valuable resource for teachers and graduate students in the plant sciences.
With a Masters degree in environmental anthropology I have spent the past 6 years working for First Nations in northern Alberta performing traditional land use studies and assessments. Traditional land use assessments are used as a way for the government and companies to consult First Nations regarding the impact that industrial development is having on their treaty rights to harvest from their territories. During these studies, I’ve had the honour to learn from people and go out on the land with them. I regularly hear from Elders and harvesters that they are concerned about contamination to the wild food supply, and I can see that they have incredibly nuanced indicators to determine that contamination is occurring. Who else would be able to tell that there are changes in the environment, but the people who live directly from it, who respect and honour it and have spent endless generations doing so? I spent 6 years writing up reports about people’s concerns. Companies and the government file the reports as a part of the Environmental Impact Assessment process and people’s words and concerns are closed away in those reports. Besides, the company-hired scientists say that there are no problems of contamination in the wild food supply. “No significant impact” is the term they prefer to use.
So this is why I am here at McGill pursing a PhD. I am responding to what people have been telling me - I am recording their indicators for contamination, their stories about the changes that they have seen, how they know what is contaminated, and locating where they are no longer able or willing to harvest any more. My core objective is to investigate First Nations indicators for wild food contamination by exploring how their traditional ecological knowledge informs the concept of contamination (rather than simply locating and lab-testing foods). First Nations ability to observe, manage and survive from the land is a fundamental dimension of cultural and biological diversity in the subarctic. My goal to elucidate the First Nations meaning of food contamination based on their cosmological and ethnoecological system will lead not only to a better understanding of the changes in plant and animal populations that they are observing as a result of industrial development; it will document their changing relationship with these populations in this development context. I intend to publish my results for a wider audience, but also to share them with companies, government and organizations in the oil sands region to educate and inform practice and policy.
community’s berry patches have been removed through mining, and others that remain are avoided because of people’s concerns about contamination. This means that those individuals who are fortunate enough to travel long distances, often by float plane, to collect cranberries then have the responsibility of distributing them to community members who need them as medicine. We we discuss the implications of this shift in berry availability for Fort McKay, the determinants for safe cranberries, and how they are distributed and used as medicine.