NWT RESEARCH DATABASE

Regions: South Slave Region

Tags: wood bison, socioeconomics

Objective(s): This follow up research has two inter-related goals: 1) Acknowledge and include rightsholder and stakeholder voices in addressing bison health by understanding their attitudes and preferences. 2) Provide an opportunity to get feedback from rightsholders and stakeholders on our past and ongoing bison health socioeconomic work.

Project Description: This licence has been issued for the scientific research application No. 5585. This follow up research has two inter-related goals: 1) Acknowledge and include rightsholder and stakeholder voices in addressing bison health by understanding their attitudes and preferences. 2) Provide an opportunity to get feedback from rightsholders and stakeholders on our past and ongoing bison health socioeconomic work. The researchers began forming relationships with rightsholder groups in 2022 through interviews, open houses, and a workshop. The follow up research will include the collection of survey responses from the Fort Smith community. An initial attempt at response collection was made through social media advertising under the previous research license. Going forward, the researchers will continue these advertisements in combination with hiring local research assistants through the Fort Smith Metis Council. These research assistants were expected to assist with response collection previously but there were timing issues. The survey is short at approximately seven minutes and includes general questions about the respondent’s knowledge of the disease issue, their preferences for managing it, and broad demographic information (e.g., age). The survey does include an optional question about Indigenous group affiliation as all anonymized data and results will be provided to the appropriate rights holder groups. The local research assistants will help to advertise the survey in public areas (e.g., parks) and private areas with permission of establishments (e.g., grocery stores). The researchers also plan to continue our conversations with local elders and land users as our past conversations have been highly informative. They will be conducting a workshop in Fort Chipewyan in June of 2023. Once we have the results of all surveys and workshops, the researchers hope to go back to the elders and land users we have worked with previously to discuss our results and interpretations. These discussions could be at an additional formal workshop or one on one conversations depending on the availability of elders and land users as well as our own resources. Rightsholder feedback on our conclusions will be incorporated into our final report to Parks Canada that also will be supplied to all rightsholders and stakeholders. These researchers are endeavouring to build two-way relationships with the communities around the park so that information on the project can be easily shared with all interested parties. The research activities have allowed us to form these two-way relationships with representatives of the Fort Smith Indigenous groups. They are expecting to have additional conversations and meetings once closer to the end of our project to share our results directly with members of the Fort Smith community. The project has a website that will be updated as the work progresses and we will use social media to update stakeholders and rightsholders. We will publish and distribute project summaries through the above mentioned modalities as well as scholarly research articles journals. The fieldwork for this study will be conducted from: June 01 - December 31, 2023