Prepared independently by Robin Roth and Allison Bishop

With contributions from Clint Jacobs, Peter Lariviere, and Doug Anderson

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Publication Date: September 2024

This report was authored by Robin Roth and Allison Bishop, two Anglo/European settler-Canadians based in the treaty territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation in what is now known as Guelph, Ontario. Both Robin and Allison play various leadership roles within the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership.

This report would not have been possible without the contributions of many people. We are grateful for all the participants who attended a two-day workshop Hosted by the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership and the National Urban Park Hub at the University of Windsor. The workshop brought together legal, conservation, and urban experts along with representatives and community members from proposed NUP sites to discuss the potential for and barriers to Indigenous governance and leadership in NUPs.

We are grateful to the participants who shared their time, expertise, and guidance with us. Your insights have deeply informed this report. This report was deeply enriched through several key informant interviews, as well as a thorough review by and contributions from three experts: Clint Jacobs, Peter Lariviere, and Doug Anderson.

We are thankful for those who shared their experiences, grounded examples, and visions of what is possible for their Peoples and territories. Through our collective contributions, we hope this report will be a useful resource for Indigenous Nations, governments, and organizations that seek to elevate Indigenous leadership and governance in urban spaces.

Thank you to Megan Currie of X-ing Design for the beautiful illustrations in this report.

This report was made possible through funding provided by the Parks Canada Agency and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. In this report, we attempt to provide a resource that will support Indigenous Nations and their governments in navigating a myriad of power imbalances as they reassert their self-determination and sovereignty in the face of ongoing settler colonial violence.

When we asked Parks Canada if we could use their funding to create an open-access report for Indigenous Nations (rather than creating a report for the agency), they agreed. We appreciate the flexibility needed to write this report in a good way.

Within the context of a growing movement for Indigenous-led conservation in Canada, there is significant potential in urban spaces to elevate Indigenous leadership, governance and legal orders, with possibilities of fostering positive outcomes for diverse peoples and our more-than-human relatives. The purpose of this report is to share key considerations and resources to support Indigenous Nations, governments, and organizations who may be contemplating Indigenous-led conservation initiatives in urbanized territories.

Parks Canada recently created a new National Urban Parks (NUP) program, which offers potential benefits for Indigenous Nations, and their governments, whose territories sit within a proposed NUP. These benefits include:

• Creating conservation economies based in Indigenous knowledge systems and within Indigenous legal orders.
• Renewing relationships to and with land, waters, and more-than-human relations by practicing Land use and caretaking.
• Supporting cultural programming to strengthen connections between urban and reserve communities, and to strengthen relationships with diverse populations living within urban areas.
• Strengthening both human and ecological health through interconnected Land relationship planning.
• Elevating and asserting Indigenous governance and legal orders in urban spaces, resisting misconceptions that Indigenous Peoples were not already living in urban areas, and working towards fulfilling collective treaty responsibilities and/or right relations.

Despite these benefits, NUPs also come with potential risks. As currently designed and implemented, challenges include:

• Mandates driven by Crown and municipal governments, rather than Indigenous-led processes.
• A program that is designed to maintain the human/nature divide in ways that discourage creative approaches to delivering on both social and ecological outcomes.
• Inadequate funding for Indigenous Nations to create Land-relationship plans, which can inform a holistic approach to caring for their territories.
• Questions about long-term funding to support Indigenous Nations that may wish to take a lead role in a NUP.
• A rushed process that threatens to leave some Nations behind and exacerbate existing tensions between relationships, rather than creating opportunities to strengthen relationships.

However, NUPs are just one pathway for elevating Indigenous leadership and responsibilities for caring for Land and more-than-human relations. In this report, we look at opportunities for Indigenous Nations and governments to advance their interests by engaging the NUP process. In the second half of this report, we explore what can be done to realize the benefits of urban parks for Indigenous Peoples outside of the NUP establishment process.

Our expectation is that this report will support Indigenous Nations, their governments and communities, and Indigenous organizations to elevate Indigenous leadership in urban spaces. Our overarching vision is of a future where diverse human and more than-human life can flourish.