NWT RESEARCH DATABASE

Regions: Dehcho Region, North Slave Region, South Slave Region

Tags: social sciences, fish population, fisheries, Great Slave Lake, food sustainability

Objective(s): To understand how the fishers and other different groups think about the fishery and what a sustainable fishery should look like.

Project Description: This licence has been issued for the scientific research application No.5329. Our objectives on Great Slave Lake are to understand the current governance framework around the fishery in Great Slave Lake (GSL), its benefits, its distribution, and the historical trends; and, to identify commonalities and differences among rights holders, actors and organizations involved in the fishery. Together, the objectives should help to understand how the fishers and other different groups think about the fishery and what a sustainable fishery should look like. Such knowledge will help Arctic Research Foundation to build an even stronger research program in cooperation with communities around Great Slave Lake for the foreseeable future. The Principal Investigator (PI) will rely on interviews to help understand the fishing industry on Great Slave Lake further. The research team intend to interview 20 fishers and people associated with the fishery around Great Slave Lake in Hay River, Katl’odeeche First Nation, and Yellowknife. The questions will assess fishers’ relationships with institutions associated with the fishery. The research team will ask the fishers, for example, to talk about what are the most important relationships they have in the fishery? How satisfied they are in those relationships? If not satisfied, how would they like to change those relationships? These interviews will give the research team a deeper understanding of the fishery, including its technical and socio-ecological dimensions. The team tend to involve the communities throughout the research project, and will not exclude any community organization that is willing to participate in the project. The PI has already had an initial conversation with organizations in Northwest Territories such as the Katl’odeeche First Nation, North Slave Metis Alliance, AAROM technical advisor at the Akaitcho government, and Tlicho government as well. The PI has laid down the research proposal and with them for further feedback. At the beginning of the research, the PI hopes to have a conversation with community leaders about the research and how the research can fulfill the community’s needs. When the PI travels to Great Slave Lake, the team plan to host a series of workshops with each of the communities to introduce our project and seek any input from members on how to improve the research to accommodate the community’s needs even better. During the data collection itself, the research team will be engaging with community members on a continuous basis to talk about the fishery, and to bounce ideas off them to see if there are issues that are not being addressed in the work that need to be included. Lastly, when the data collection is complete, the PI will call another workshop (meeting) with the community members to present an initial result and allow community members to have input or feedback on the work. This would be a perfect opportunity to have a real conversation with everyone to make sure that the project is still in line with the community’s needs and that the project is conveying the message of the fishers correctly. The fieldwork for this study will be conducted from January 13, 2023 to December 31, 2023.