Confronting epistemic blinders in impact assessment and environmental health risk assessment processes

Abstract

The driving epistemology of settler-colonial society in Canada is socially structured around the elimination of Indigenous Peoples’ access to territory to expropriate its resources for their own purposes, active within state legislation and policies that disproportionately harm Indigenous Peoples through the continual extraction of resources and control over territory. Impact assessment (IA) processes have been pivotal in this strategy, deployed to rationalize settler colonial rule over land and people under the guise of probabilistic risk assessment. This epistemology is critiqued for its propensity, particularly in environmental health risk assessment (EHRA) processes, to reduce Indigenous Peoples’ complex lives and land-based relations into reductive environmental exposures that serve to sanitize, homogenize, and normalize continued colonial violence on their bodies, to ‘talk away’ how Indigenous Peoples are impacted. This Perspective offers insight into how Indigenous Peoples’ epistemological frameworks for health and wellbeing are neglected in IA processes. We add our voices to others who insist that EHRA must reflect the diversity of place-based relationships and epistemological ways of approaching Indigenous health and wellbeing. Government and industry must remove their epistemic blinders to recognize the need for multiple approaches, knowledges, and value systems to reflect and measure the cultural, social, and ecological consequences of development on Indigenous Peoples.