Talk: The Magic of the Muskeg, conversation with Janelle Baker
*Please note: this is a hybrid event. Janelle will join us online, with her presentation streamed live into the space at LE18.
Join at this Link
In this talk, Janelle Baker describes two spheres of ethnographic research that intersect lively landscapes and more than human species in what is now known as Alberta, Canada.
Water joins these spheres and as the basis of life, is the being that First Nation communities are the most concerned about being contaminated by chemicals and introduced species. Drawing on her long-term research, Janelle will explore and share how community-based monitoring programmes are one way that communities are caring for water.
_
Janelle Baker is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Athabasca University in what is now known as northern Alberta, Canada. Her research is on sakâwiyiniwak (Northern Bush Cree) experiences with wild food contamination in Treaty No. 8 territory, an area of extreme extraction of bitumen (oil sands) and forests. In this context, Janelle collaborates with Bigstone Cree Nation environmental monitors using community-based methods and ethnoecology to test moose and water samples, while partnering with toxicologists and microbiologists who study sources of potential harmful contaminants. Janelle is also co-PI with Métis anthropologist Zoe Todd on a project that is restor(y)ing land use governance and bull trout population health in a contested area of the Rocky Mountain foothills in Alberta, Canada.