On September 19, the Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation announced the 2017 recipients of their annual fellowship. Among the five recipients, UBC professor of geography Dr. Karen Bakker and her team were recognized for their collaborative efforts in acknowledging the decolonization of water governance and improvement of Indigenous people’s water security.
The team includes various Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, advisors and fellow activists such as John Borrows, a professor at the University of Victoria, Aimee Craft, an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa, and Michelle Dangle, an assistant professor at UBC.
The research behind the award sets out to foster the resurgence of Indigenous water law and grant Indigenous communities more equitable access to water security.
Originating from colonialism, there has been a process of expropriation of not only land, but of water as well. As a result, about a third of Indigenous communities in Canada do not have secure water supplies. This issue is prevalent in all of Canada, but primarily British Columbia because of BC’s high proportion of water insecurity for Indigenous communities when compared to the national average. The consequences of colonial expropriation also relate to longstanding legal issues.
“Here in British Columbia we have a water rights regime, ‘First in Time First in Rights,’ established around 100 years ago by the colonial government. But Indigenous communities were prohibited from applying to water rights,” said Bakker.
In America, under the Clean Water Act, US bands have the right to manage their water and set their own water quality standards like any sovereign state would, using legal apparatuses such as the Winters Doctrine behind them to set out water rights. But in Canada there is no such equivalent.
“There is, embedded in our regulatory system for water rights, a historical injustice that should be addressed, a primary step to decolonization. One of the main focuses is to look at what would it mean to reform the Canadian Water Act to have something like [the Clean Water Act] in place,” said Bakker.
The Canadian government’s signing of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in May 2017 may have implications for Indigenous water rights. Bakker and her team have written a disposition paper setting out what they think the obligations are under UNDRIP — the Canadian government has now signed up to the international legislation and the awarded project hopes to shed insight on the implementation of it.
Said Bakker, “The proposal focuses on Indigenous water governance. The idea is that you can decolonize water governance in Canada, much in the spirit of reconciliation, and the proposal speaks to some of the calls to action in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”
As a recipient of the Trudeau fellowship, members are granted an honorarium of $225,000 to expand research opportunities and continue their productivity in their respective disciplines. Bakker and her team, as well as an assembly of web designers and video developers, are constructing an online portal with an outreach strategy to extend media awareness on her project’s academic research.
“It was a grateful and humbling experience for our entire team to receive this award,” said Bakker. “It was a very exciting experience, because we’re now able to give a lot more opportunities for Indigenous students at all our partner universities, this just expands our chance to do that.”