Promised Land, Stolen Land

In the face of the climate crisis and the decarbonisation strategies moving forwards in our thermo-industrial societies, the Quebec Government and multinational corporations seek partnerships with Innu First Nation communities to build additional hydroelectric dams and wind farms on their ancestral lands.

However, these renewable energy structures come at great ecological costs, and Innu peoples do not benefit equally from the economic revenues generated by such project partnerships.

In a time of truth and reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, we must question ourselves whether the ongoing socio-ecological and energy transition towards low-carbon economies is equitable, and what we can do to ensure justice in climate action.

This film is part of an ethnographic research-creation project carried out by Guillaume Bury in collaboration with the Indigenous Friendship Centre of Sept-Îles, in the winter of 2024.

It was produced in the context of his Master programme in Cultural Anthropology & Development Sociology at Leiden University.

Environmental justice, as conceptualised by Belaïdi and colleagues (2023), is a multidimensional and intersectional concept that allows to appreciate the interconnectedness and interdependency of the social, multi-cultural, ecological, and intergenerational factors associated to the environment. This entails the consideration of human and non-human beings in ecosystems, the diversity of relations between humans and their non-human environment, notably Indigenous ancestral cosmologies that support kinships with non-human beings as sentient, and a long-term – multigenerational – perspective as is central to Indigenous ancestral philosophies. These dimensions are entangled between each other in the land and through the human and non-human beings inhabiting it. As such, environmental justice highlights the intersectionality undergirding the socio-cultural challenges of the climate crisis and for a just transition to carbon-neutral economies, and thus needs to be considered in climate action frameworks.

The acknowledgment of those interconnected dimensions in climate adaptation and mitigation, and the associated legal rights, have made social impact assessments for industrial development projects on Indigenous ancestral lands quintessential (Minter, Naito, & Sunderland, 2023; Vanclay, 2020). This also motivated the emergence of Indigenous impact assessments for projects affecting First Peoples (O'Faircheallaigh & MacDnald, 2022). However, such assessments require full transparency from industrial developers regarding their practices of land-use.

References:

Belaïdi, N., Chlous, F., Cormier-Salem, M., David, B., Perthuis, C., Deldrève, V., Domenach, H., Guilyardi, E., Larrère, C., Lecointre, G., Porcher, E. (2023). Manifeste du Muséum: Justice Environnementale. Paris: Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Reliefs.

Minter, T.G., Naito, D., & Sunderland, T.C. (2023). A Call for a Wider Perspective on Sustainable Forestry: Introduction to the Special issue on the Social Impacts of Logging. International Forestry Review, 25, 1 - 16. https://doi.org/10.1505/146554823836902644

O'Faircheallaigh, C., & MacDonald, A. (2022). Indigenous impact assessment: A quiet revolution in EIA?. In Routledge Handbook of Environmental Impact Assessment (pp. 221-238). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429282492-14

Vanclay, F. (2020). Reflections on Social Impact Assessment in the 21st century. Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal, 38(2), 126–131. https://doi.org/10.1080/14615517.2019.1685807