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| Shore Gold signs agreement with Red Earth Cree Nation |
| Friday, May 21, 2010 |
| By: nipawinjournal.com |
Shore Gold signed an information gathering agreement with Red Earth Cree Nation last week as part of the company's process to prepare an environmental impact statement for its proposed Star-Orion South Diamond project in the Fort à la Corne forest.
The agreement was signed in Nipawin on Wednesday afternoon, May 12, between Shore Gold Vice President for Corporate Affairs Eric Cline and Chief Miller Nawakayas of the Red Earth Cree Nation.
Other dignitaries who were present and who signed the agreement on behalf of the Red Earth community were Vice Chief Ina Whitehead and headmen Curtis McKay, Charlie McKay and Harold Head.
"We are hopeful that this will not be the last agreement we would sign with Red Earth," Cline said. "If we're successful in our environmental assessment and government give us the authority to proceed, then we would hope to involve First Nations and Métis people in the mining activity."
Chief Nawakayas commended Shore Gold for talking to his community and entering into an agreement.
"Shore Gold is the first company that has come to Red Earth and offered something to us," he said. "This is an opportunity for the Red Earth community to get into the mining sector, an opportunity for the leadership and our people down the road to get into jobs and training programs."
Shore Gold is currently collecting information for its environmental impact statement that will be submitted later this year to the Saskatchewan Ministry of the Environment and federal authorities. It is part of the environmental impact assessment requirements by the two levels of government for proposed developments.
The agreement with Red Earth is similar to Shore Gold's recent agreements with Sturgeon Lake First Nation and Métis Nation - Saskatchewan Eastern Region II and Western Region II. Through this process the communities will be able to build a database of traditional knowledge to record the history of their activities in asserted traditional territories.
"Part of preparing an environmental impact statement is also to ask how would it effect the human environment, and a very important aspect of that is how would it impact the ability of aboriginal people, First Nations and Métis, to carry out these traditional activities," Cline said.
In terms of the agreement with Red Earth, Shore Gold will pay for the appointment of a consultant chosen by the community to guide the process of information gathering. Representatives of Hobbs and Associates out of Winnipeg, who has been selected by Red Earth, were present at the meeting.
Cline said Shore Gold will also finance the involvement by First Nation peoples themselves. They would have community coordination and elder involvement at community level. Red Earth would then report to Shore Gold this summer through their consultants what information they would like to see included in the environmental impact statement.
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"One of the advantages of this kind of agreement for a First Nation would be that they can build the internal capacity to train some of their own members to interview the elders and obtain information in an appropriate way," Cline said. "The fact that you start documenting the knowledge and wisdom of the elders in a place where traditional sites may be is beneficial."
Cline emphasized that it would be up to the Red Earth community to decide what information they want to be in the public domain.
"It's important for us to appreciate that some of that information is private information and we don't need to have it disposed to us," he said. "But with all the First Nations we're dealing with we're hoping that it will begin to allow them to put this database together."
The information that will be provided to Shore Gold through the agreement will help the company to eliminate or mitigate any adverse impacts of the proposed mining project.
"You try and look at the impacts, if you can mitigate or avoid them you do and if you can't, then at least you're aware of them and what attempted accommodation might be appropriate for a First Nation," Cline said.
With reference to future cooperation with Red Earth if mining goes ahead, Cline said Shore Gold would want to train and hire people to work for them as well as purchase services from First Nations companies.
"At the end of the day we believe that the only way that we can be successful is if the benefits are spread throughout the community, which includes everybody," he mentioned. "We have to be inclusive and ensure that First Nations and Métis people are represented in our workforce and our contractors."
Chief Nawakayas mentioned that there are limited opportunities for employment at Red Earth, and he estimated that the unemployment rate in the community is close to 75 per cent.
The consulting company Hobbs and Associates recently completed an economic development planning initiative for Red Earth. Project Director Steffen Knippel told the Northeast Sun the community can benefit in different ways from this information gathering agreement.
It can lead to changes in the curriculum at the local school to provide more local history content. It can also help with Cree language programming, because a lot of elders will prefer to do their interviews in Cree.
"If you record that, you have a teaching tool available to you, as long as the participating elders don't mind that it is used in that way," he said.
One can also set up a geographic information system (GIS) capability within the community to maintain the data that are collected from a cartography standpoint and add to it over time, because where traditional activity occur will change over time as a result of developments and other factors.
"Traditional territories are not necessarily a static thing with a static boundary," he mentioned.
During the project Sydney McKay will work as project manager within the community to help them develop a process on the local level. It involves the identification of elders with knowledge that might be relevant to Shore Gold's project and interviewing those elders in a formal way using anthropological best practices. The interviews will be recorded and the relevant elements will be converted to a GIS database that can produce maps to summarize the community as a whole and their interests in their traditional territories that overlap with Shore Gold's project area.
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