Strategic translation: pollution, data, and Indigenous Traditional Knowledge

Abstract

This essay examines the role of data practices in the making and refuting of settler colonial environmental science. Investigating the epistemic contestation surrounding environmental contamination produced by the oil industry in Alberta, Canada, I discuss an alternative approach to toxicology: a community‐based monitoring programme that uses a ‘three‐track’ methodology to present data in three distinct forms. Using this method, First Nations communities engaged in strategic translation, balancing their aim of rendering Traditional Knowledge and community needs legible to policy‐makers against their desire to protect Traditional Knowledge from being assimilated into the dominant data paradigm. This translation, I argue, enacts a form of resistance in an era of relentless datafication: making‐things‐into‐data can reflect the exercise of agency rather than submission to external pressure. In this way, the three‐track methodology models how marginalized communities can leverage data's productive capacities for their own ends and produce scientific knowledge on their own terms.

Care-fully?: The Question of “Knowledge Co-production” in Arctic Science

“…McLachlan emphasized the importance of not subsuming Indigenous knowledge into Western knowledge, but rather keeping the two separate with a middle ground made of beliefs and practices that the communities and the government scientists curated for the other group to understand. This approach supports Indigenous communities in protecting their knowledge practices fully from outsiders, who might exploit or dismiss it as so often happens in "settler science" projects (Blacker 2021). Instead, the Indigenous communities chose what, how, and when they wanted to share in order to accomplish the goals they negotiated in common with the government scientists, which, in this case, meant identifying carcinogens in this environment and their health effects.…”

“…Developed by Albert Marshall, an Elder of Mi'kmaw First Nations, this framework has been applied in several contexts including science education, natural resource management, policymaking, and collaborative research. A similar framework is the "three-track" methodology, developed by an environmental scientist, Stephane McLachlan, whom two Indigenous communities in Canada hired to facilitate their interactions with government scientists to address industrial water pollution (Blacker 2021). This methodology involves Indigenous knowledge, Western scientific knowledge, and a middle track between the two comprised of relevant, accessible information selected by practitioners from each knowledge system.…”