If only they had accessed the data: Governmental failure to monitor pulp mill impacts on human health in Pictou Landing First Nation

Diana Lewis, Sheila Francis, Kim Francis-Strickland, Heather Castleden and Richard Apostle

Social Science & Medicine, 2021, vol. 288, issue C

Abstract: For over fifty years, Pictou Landing First Nation (PLFN), a small Mi'kmaw community on the northern shore of mainland Nova Scotia, Canada, has been told by a Joint Environmental Health Monitoring Committee (JEHMC) mandated to oversee the health of the community that their health has not been impacted by exposure to 85 million litres of pulp mill effluent dumped every day into what was once a culturally significant body of water bordering their community. Yet, based on lived experience, the community knows otherwise, and despite countless dollars spent on government and industry-sponsored research, their concerns have not gone away. Using biopolitical theory, we explore why JEHMC never fully implemented its mandate. We will use a Mi'kmaw environmental ‘theoretical’ framework to demonstrate that indicators of a relational epistemology and ontology that have been consistently and persistently overlooked in Indigenous environmental health research demands that Indigenous connections to the air, land and water must be taken into consideration to get a full understanding of environmental health impacts. Guided by the principle of Etuaptmumk (Two-Eyed Seeing), which brings together the strengths of both western and Indigenous knowledge, and employing a community-based participatory research approach, we use data that could have been accessed by the JEHMC that might have signaled that human health studies were warranted. Further, we developed an environmental health survey that more appropriately assesses the impacts on the community. Finally, we will discuss how an Indigenous-developed framework can adequately assess the impacts of land displacement and environmental dispossession on the health of Indigenous communities and illustrate how our framework can serve as a guide to others when exploring Indigenous environmental health more broadly.

Keywords: Canada; Indigenous; First Nation; Environment; Health; Pulp mill; Impacts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953620304032
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:288:y:2021:i:c:s0277953620304032

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
http://www.elsevier. ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113184

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian

More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().