A collaborative, Indigenous-led research initiative to re-envision chemical risk management in a time of environmental crisis has received $22 million in funding from the federal government’s New Frontiers in Research Fund.
Led by the Technoscience Research Unit (TRU) at the University of Toronto and in partnership with researchers and institutions in Canada and Aotearoa (New Zealand), the project — Transforming Chemical Risk Management with Indigenous Expertise — puts Indigenous experts in university and communities as leaders in designing the ways pollution risk is evaluated and managed.
The urgent need to reduce emissions of climate-changing gases and pollutants requires innovative approaches to chemical risk management. Forming sustainable environmental relationships for future generations is at the heart of Indigenous approaches to caring for land, waters, air and each other. The project brings Indigenous research methods to this challenge to profoundly transform chemical risk management in Indigenous community-based practice, university labs and classes, regulatory practices, and policy development.
As outdated methodologies are replaced with new ones, the importance of Indigenous knowledge about land, water, animals and plants is crucial. The project creates Indigenous methods for assessing chemical risk for future generations. By bringing diverse Indigenous knowledges together in solidarity and co-learning, the research program develops protocols, tools and policies for chemical risk management in Canada, New Zealand and at the international policy level. With a focus on intergenerational impact and transformation, the program will train the next generation of chemical risk professionals to lead chemical risk assessments for their communities and beyond.
This research marks an innovative shift by placing Indigenous leadership at the forefront of chemical-risk evaluation — expertise that is rarely included in frameworks under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA), EU’s Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH), and the US’s Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).
“Indigenous Peoples are not only disproportionately exposed to chemicals but also disproportionately have their bodies subjected to testing and evaluation with little control over research design,” says M. Murphy, the co-director of TRU and co-leader of the project.
Murphy is a Red River Métis from Winnipeg, a feminist anti-colonial technoscience studies scholar, and a a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Science and Technology Studies and Environmental Data Justice. They are a professor in the School for Environment and Women & Gender Studies Institute, and a member of the Acceleration Consortium.
The project includes researchers from the University of Toronto, Guelph University, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Calgary; the Manaaki Whenua — Landcare Research Institute, the University of Auckland, and Cawthron in Aotearoa (New Zealand); Indigenous elders and knowledge holders from multiple Indigenous communities in Canada, as well as collaborators at Health Canada and Environment and Climate Change Canada; New Zealand’s Environmental Protection Authority; the Policy Manager at New Zealand Ministry for the Environment and the New Zealand Parliamentary Commissioner; and Te Ao Mārama Inc., a mandated Māori organization that supports local tribal members in environmental matters including mitigating chemical pollution.
This funding offers an urgent and precious opportunity for Indigenous communities in this time of growing environmental crisis. It will create tools, methods, and expertise that serve Indigenous peoples own needs and visions. The project innovatively takes the approach of learning on the land. It features Indigenous community researchers as experts in their own lands and lives in Aamjiwnaang First Nation and across the Robinson Huron Treaty Territory and Aotearoa.
Along with Murphy, project leads include Sue Chiblow (Garden River First Nation) of Guelph University, and Gunilla Öberg (recent settler from Sweden) of UBC.
Research at the University of Toronto will be co-led by Kristen Bos (Red River Métis) and will focus on collaborating with community researchers and scientists to build an Indigenous chemical risk platform, change curriculum, and develop lab protocols, collaborating with scientists Milica Radisic, Élyse Caron-Beaudoin, and Alán Aspuru-Guzik.
Bos is co-director of TRU and a citizen of the Manitoba Métis Federation. She is an assistant professor of Indigenous Science & Technology Studies in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga and is appointed to the Women & Gender Studies Institute.
The TRU is an Indigenous-led lab home for critical and creative research on the practice and politics of technoscience and houses the Environmental Data Justice Lab, Indigenous Science & Ethical Substances Lab, and the Indigenous Science, Technology & Environment Hub. The TRU draws together social justice approaches to science and technology studies from across the university with an emphasis on Indigenous, feminist, queer, environmental, anti-racist and anti-colonial scholarship. The TRU is supported by the Faculty of Arts & Science, with its start in the Women & Gender Studies Institute.
With files from Technoscience Research Unit.