Dene Tha’ Guardians mobile application is designed to record ecological, cultural, and industrial features on the landscape in a Western scientific format.

https://canada.ca/nature/


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MATT MUNSON (Dene Tha’ First Nation Field Technician):
When we steward the lands, we protect the lands. When we protect the lands, we promote our identities. When we promote our identities, we are living in a way that is consistent with the traditional knowledge that has been passed down for many generations, and also we are celebrating our unique cultural identity on this very important landscape. Within communities there are our origin stories, there is history, there is traditional knowledge, there is family history, there’s a whole bunch of information that communities have that tie their cultures to the land. There is a history here. Even within this place, there’s the ancestral connections, there’s the natural connections, there’s identity and place and belonging here. There’s also a history of the technical tools that we use to identify community needs, to identify community values. So, in my community, I work with my elders, I work with trappers, I work with harvesters, I work with the leadership, and also the administration. There were a few projects that we had developed around environmental monitoring; developed a couple of projects about creating some data collection tools that community members could use out in the field that didn’t require a lot of technical knowledge; so basically, phone applications that you can just use anywhere on people’s cell phones. And we worked with our community members and built this data collector that you can upload to your phone -- anyone can upload it to their phone -- and as long as there’s a current subscription to the service, we are able to use custom forms, lists, traditional knowledge values and western scientific values as well. This was a year-long project, and we developed this app based on community information and based… also based upon our existing traditional use study geodatabase, which was… which is a collection of about three decades-worth of traditional land use studies, field work, interviews. And so, we have a lot of information that we had compiled from existing data, validated that with the community and also our partners. I would say certainly that a cell phone running this type of app is pretty cutting-edge. I think that we’ve developed one of the supports that I think is necessary here, having a good data collection and monitoring capacity. And then how that information is going to be used within an adaptive management cycle that’s encapsulated within an adaptive management plan. And as the guardians of Bistcho Lake, in our Indigenous protected and conserved area, being the principal actors, and with our partners, in making sure that this place remains a really important and special and sacred area for us for a long time to come.