Truth and Reconciliation at the Bay: Environmental Discourse, Contested Notions of Human-Creation Relations in Mnidoo Gaamii/Georgian Bay, and Indigenous-Cottager Relations

How does environmental conservation land use planning, an endeavour that seeks to provide tools to combat climate change and protect habitat from destruction through development, contribute to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands/waters in Mnidoo Gamii/Georgian Bay? Through an exploration of the links between environmental planning, cottager conservation activism, and colonialism in Georgian Bay (and North America, broadly speaking), my dissertation explores the ways that conservation land use planning continues the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands. As a springboard for this exploration, I examine particular communities in Georgian Bay - Moose Deer Point First Nation, the nearby cottage community of the Madawaska Club at Go Home Bay, and the Georgian Bay Land Trust with properties along the eastern coast of Georgian Bay – their establishment, influence, and impacts on one another. While the surface layer of this dissertation is focused on environmental conservation planning and Indigenous rights, another layer is focused on how settler and Indigenous ideas of human-earth relations are formed by fundamentally different cosmologies and legalities. For this reason, I interview members of the First Nation, as well as members of the cottage community who are also volunteers for the Land Trust, to gain insight into Indigenous and settler perspectives on human-earth relationships and Georgian Bay and the undercurrents that shape the ways that lands and “resources” are managed through settler land use planning systems. This research provides insight into the impacts of land use planning in Georgian Bay on Indigenous communities, and enhances an understanding of how land use planning undermines processes of truth and reconciliation. My research is guided by Indigenous research paradigms, thus I work to "unsettle" my own settler worldview, exploring one way that decolonisation praxis can look and feel. I situate land use planning within the context of Indigenous ways of knowing, such as Creation stories, ceremony, and rooted law, giving non-Indigenous readers an opportunity to reflect on the ways that endeavours such as environmental conservation, which can seem universally beneficial, can in fact be harmful.

This research adds to the literature by bringing into dialogue two different communities’ stories about identity in relation to land. I explore the historical context and cosmological foundations that help problematise certain assumptions and narratives. Secondly, as I do so, I employ a semi-auto-ethnographic approach, which both reveals my own relationship to this history, and sheds light on my own journey of trying to follow Indigenous research methods. I hope that this research can contribute to the discourse around settler researchers engaging with Indigenous methodologies.