"Like Residential Schools All Over Again": Experiences of Emergency Evacuation from the Assin'skowitiniwak (Rocky Cree) Community of Pelican Narrows
Date
2019-08-23
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ORCID
0000-0002-9147-9154
Type
Thesis
Degree Level
Masters
Abstract
In Canada, northern Indigenous communities are evacuated on an annual basis due to fire and flood, but little is known about their experiences. This ethnographic community-based research relied on 56 interviews and grounded theory to uncover the experiences of residents evacuated from the Assin’skowitiniwak (Rocky Cree) community of Pelican Narrows in northern Saskatchewan due to wildfire in the summer of 2017. It was found that provincial standardization and reliance on top-down, centralized approaches stunted the community’s agency and did not address their specific needs. This led to separated families, unmet physical and cultural needs, negative emotional experiences of the evacuation, and frustration due to the lack of acknowledgement of their skills and knowledge relating to fire management. Like Scharbach (2014) this thesis found that there was incongruence between the needs of the Pelican residents and current provincial emergency management policies and suggests changes to improve the experiences of evacuations from northern Indigenous communities.
This thesis addresses issues relating to risk, vulnerability, resilience (specifically cultural resilience), and using Elders as resources. I suggest that risk and vulnerability should not be defined categorically, but rather situationally, to ensure those who need assistance get it, and those who do not are not separated from their families and communities. Keeping families and communities together in familiar settings with access to traditional food and activities and allowing them to be more involved in their own disaster mitigation efforts would help to tap into cultural resilience and would represent culturally safe policy.
Description
Keywords
disasters, emergency evacuation, anthropology, Pelican Narrows, Rocky Cree, Elders, vulnerability, risk, resilience, agency, government policy, let it burn, Red Cross, Saskatchewan, culturally safe policy
Citation
Degree
Master of Arts (M.A.)
Department
Archaeology and Anthropology
Program
Anthropology