A Community Based Monitoring System in the Slave Geological Province

Case Study Lutselk'e

Organization / Researcher: Lutselk'e Dene First Nation / Brenda Parlee

Length of Project: 1 year (1996-97)

Personnel involved: A community researcher, many community members as well as nine members of the Lutselk'e Land and Environment/Social Development Committees

Total Project Expenditures: $43,027

In this project, researchers guided by the Lutselk'e Band Council and Wildlife, Land and Environment Committee worked with the community to develop a set of indicators to measure changes to community health using the community's own knowledge and understanding. Aboriginal community members have a lot of knowledge about the health of their communities, gained from their everyday experiences, traditions and beliefs. This project is based on the idea that if the community members are going to truly benefit from mines developed close to their communities, it will be important to keep track of changes in their communities' health from their own perspective.

An important first step was to develop Chipewyan terms for ideas like "community health" and "monitoring". Meetings with various community groups, the band council and committees, and a community workshop, took place to define monitoring from the community's perspective. Monitoring translates from Chipewyan to English as "watching, listening, learning and understanding about changes in the community," while indicators are "the things that are changing." All households in the community, and several additional small groups, were interviewed (more than 100 interviews in all) to determine community priorities for monitoring and ideas about appropriate indicators. The result was 39 potential indicators, falling into three general categories: self government, healing and cultural preservation. Each indicator is divided into quantitative and qualitative components. Examples include: ability to take leadership to address problems in the community, number of job opportunities in the community, rates of disease such as cancer, reported incidents of poor mental/emotional health, opportunities to learn the Chipewyan language in the home and the community and changes in harvesting patterns and use of animals. A process for monitoring was also developed and a brief manual was produced to assist other communities to implement their own community based monitoring.

This project has been followed up with two other projects in Lutselk'e: one developed a baseline for community health using traditional knowledge, and the other implemented the monitoring program described below.

A Community Based Monitoring System in the Slave Geological Province, May 1997