Compensating aboriginal cultural losses: An alternative approach to assessing environmental damages

Abstract

We first identify six primary problems with conventional practice: lack of context, inadequate participation from aboriginal communities, exclusion of important losses, reliance on market-based measures, neglect of uncertainty, and inadequate treatment of time. We then propose a different approach to compensation, based on insights from the decision sciences and structured decision making. Using case-study examples, we discuss how the proposed approach might address common sources of cultural loss and, in a concluding section, summarize some of the implications for compensation agreements and for environmental management practices.

Introduction

Cultural losses experienced by aboriginal communities are widely viewed as a pressing social issue. Many of these losses are due to environmental impacts affecting land, water, and air resources that are associated with the spread of industrial development over the past 100 years. For some people this issue is recognized as fundamental, with important implications for how society should move forward over the next decades: the unique perspective of Aboriginal cultures, their greater emphasis on sustainability, and the close integration of environmental, social, and economic concerns all speak to a new path forward. For others, the problem of aboriginal cultural losses is viewed as a source of guilt and embarrassment, with implications for how the benefits and costs of past and future resource development on aboriginal lands should be shared. For others, there is no problem: the employment and revenue benefits offered by industrialization are seen to more than offset the environmental and cultural losses related to an outdated, albeit traditional, way of life.

Understanding the complex changes and implications of loss experienced by Aboriginal people is challenging for both native and non-native societies. In this paper we argue that conventional approaches for estimating cultural losses experienced by aboriginal populations are ethically illegitimate, methodologically incorrect, and simply don't make sense. We briefly review the pros and cons of conventional methods and then turn to a different approach, based on insights and techniques drawn from the decision sciences and participatory deliberative processes based in structured decision making (Gregory et al., 1993, Keeney and Raiffa, 1993). We demonstrate the advantages, along with some possible disadvantages, of this new approach using several examples from North American aboriginal communities. We conclude with a discussion of key issues, including the important question of the extent to which compensation is able to address the types of cultural losses often experienced by aboriginal populations in North America.

Our focus is specific to the choice of methods for incorporating cultural losses due to changes in the natural environment. We acknowledge that many individuals—including Aboriginal peoples themselves, along with anthropologists, lawyers, philosophers, geographers, planners, and biologists—have written persuasively and elegantly about the topic of cultural loss in Aboriginal communities.² We owe them a profound debt, but our focus in this paper is more narrow: We seek to advance an improved methodology for assessing cultural losses from environmental damages in a way that makes sense simultaneously from the standpoint of the Aboriginal communities and from the perspective of governments, policy analysts, and the law. Although much of what we say in this paper will apply to traditional cultures in other countries and to resource-based losses experienced long ago, our focus is on cultural losses experienced by Aboriginal populations currently living in western Canada and the U.S. Pacific Northwest (referred to as First Nations, First Peoples, Inuit or Metis in Canada and Native Americans in the U.S.) who have experienced detrimental changes to their traditional lands and lifestyles.