Increasing Response Rates on Face-to-Face Surveys with Indigenous Communities in Canada: Lessons from Pictou Landing

Abstract

Sharing lessons learned in this project are intended to have positive implications for future CBPR projects wanting to collect primary health survey data involving Indigenous communities.

Governmental Fiduciary Failure in Indigenous Environmental Health Justice: The Case of Pictou Landing First Nation

“…The NWG is comprised of a collective of women from PLFN who approached the first author, a Mi'kmaq woman from a neighboring First Nation, who had just earned a master's degree in Resource and Environmental Management at Dalhousie University in the spring of 2010 (Lewis et al, 2016). The first author invited the fourth author, a community-based participatory researcher (CBPR) with years of experience working with other Indigenous communities on environment and health studies, to meet with the NWG to explore the possibility of a research partnership .…”

“…The first author invited the fourth author, a community-based participatory researcher (CBPR) with years of experience working with other Indigenous communities on environment and health studies, to meet with the NWG to explore the possibility of a research partnership . This research formed part of a multi-year CBPR project, co-led by the second author, who at the time was the President of the NWG, and the fourth author (for further details on the research partnership that ensured research was pertinent to and respectful of PLFN needs, see Castleden et al, 2017;Lewis et al, 2016Lewis et al, , 2020Pictou Landing Native Women's Group et al, 2016). The research received both Dalhousie University Health Sciences Research Ethics Board and the Mi'kmaq Ethics Watch approval.…”

“…Pictou Landing First Nation (PLFN) is a Mi'kmaw community of approximately 490 on-reserve members located on the northern shore of Nova Scotia, Canada (Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, 2019). Since 1967, the provincial government of Nova Scotia has allowed a pulp and paper mill to pump 85 million litres of effluent per day into a lagoon that was once a culturally significant place known as A'se'k, and which borders the community (Castleden et al, 2017;Lewis et al, 2016;Pictou Landing Native Women's Group et al, 2016). The women in the community were concerned about the health of their families, and in 2010, the Pictou Landing Native Women's Group (NWG) initiated a research collaboration with researchers at Dalhousie University that would help them determine whether the health of their community has been impacted.…”

“…The women in the community were concerned about the health of their families, and in 2010, the Pictou Landing Native Women's Group (NWG) initiated a research collaboration with researchers at Dalhousie University that would help them determine whether the health of their community has been impacted. Of the many health concerns addressed by the research collaboration (see Castleden et al, 2017;Lewis et al, 2016Lewis et al, , 2020Pictou Landing Native Women's Group et al, 2016), the NWG were concerned about what they perceived to be an increase in the incidence of cancer in the community since 1967, possibly as a result of the effects from air emissions from the mill's stacks and exposure to the waters and sediments of the Boat Harbour Effluent Treatment Facility (BHETF) (Pictou Landing Native Women's Group, 2010). This concern has also been raised in several other public venues (Andreatta, 2013;Hoffman et al, 2015).…”

Review of remedial options for the Boat Harbour remediation project in Nova Scotia, Canada

“…There is a long history of mistrust and conflict between the PLFN community, provincial government, and mill operators. The PLFN community was often not consulted during decision making and offered broken promises, fueling multiple lawsuits and conflicts between the parties over the decades (Hoffman et al, 2015;Lewis et al, 2016Lewis et al, , 2020. Before the mill's development, the tidal estuary was a culturally significant area to the PLFN community, known for its highly productive medicinal, recreational, and subsistence functions.…”