Contemporary Land-based Practices of Iskatewizaagegan Anishinaabeg: A Household Survey

Iskatewizaagegan No. 39 Independent First Nation is located on Shoal Lake in the Province of Ontario, Canada. Increasingly the First Nation has undertaken projects to document their knowledge of the watershed. Recently, they initiated a project with the Natural Resources Institute at the University of Manitoba to quantify the contemporary use of the watershed by their people to compliment earlier ethnoecological documentation. In this presentation, we will present our conceptual framework that links biodiversity through land-based practice to household economies. We will also present the household survey that was developed to document contemporary land-based practice and the results from surveys undertaken for the summer and fall harvest seasons. The methodology is quantitative and as such households were selected randomly and surveyed at the end of each season. Preliminary results indicate that the majority of community members continue to actively practice resource harvesting for direct consumption, sharing and knowledge transmission.