Sustainable Practices of Communities, Including First Nations, Métis and Inuit Communities

Remember from Grade 7

In Grade 7 you learned about Two-Eyed Seeing (Etuaptmumk), the idea shared by Mi'kmaw Elder Albert Marshall of seeing with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges through one eye and Western science through the other. You also met Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, stewardship and co-management. In this lesson you will investigate specific practices and explain, using the science of this unit, why they keep ecosystems in dynamic equilibrium.

Let's start with a question

What do a field of corn, beans and squash, a canoe gliding through wild rice, and a rule about how many fish you may catch have in common?

Each is a practice: a way people use an ecosystem that has been tested over time. When practices take only what an ecosystem can replace, keep nutrients cycling, protect biodiversity and look far into the future, the ecosystem can stay in dynamic equilibrium while still supporting people. Many First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities have developed and refined such practices over thousands of years, and continue to use and adapt them today.

What makes a practice sustainable?

Using what you know about dynamic equilibrium, a sustainable practice:

1. Harvests no faster than the population regenerates (stays below the level that would drive a population down; Lesson 8).
2. Keeps matter cycling (returns nutrients to the soil or water; Lessons 3 and 4).
3. Protects biodiversity (Lesson 6), so the ecosystem stays resilient.
4. Monitors and adjusts: people watch for changes and change their actions in response, a form of negative feedback.
5. Thinks long term, beyond one season or one lifetime.

The Three Sisters

Indigenous farmers in North America, including the Haudenosaunee in what is now southern Ontario and New York State, developed the practice of growing corn, beans and squash together. In Haudenosaunee teachings, these crops are known as the Three Sisters.

The science of why it works:

• Nitrogen cycling: beans are legumes. Bacteria in their root nodules fix nitrogen from the air, adding it to the soil for the corn, which needs a lot of nitrogen.
• Structure: corn stalks give bean vines a natural pole to climb toward sunlight.
• Soil and water: squash's large, prickly leaves shade the soil, keep it moist, reduce erosion and block weeds.
• Biodiversity: three crops together (a polyculture) are less vulnerable to one pest than a single-crop field.
• Nutrition: together, the three foods provide carbohydrates, protein and vitamins.

The practice keeps soil fertile year after year with fewer inputs, reflecting an understanding of nutrient cycling and interdependence.

Manoomin (wild rice)

Manoomin grows in shallow lakes and slow rivers in northwestern and central Ontario and nearby regions. For Anishinaabe peoples it is a sacred food and an important part of culture, and it is still harvested by many communities today.

Traditional harvesting reflects an understanding of the plant's life cycle:

• Harvesters move through the rice beds in a canoe, gently bending stalks over the canoe and tapping them with wooden knocking sticks. Only ripe grains fall into the canoe.
• Many grains fall into the water instead, reseeding the bed for next year.
• Grains on a stalk ripen over several days, so harvesters return to the same beds repeatedly rather than taking everything at once.
• Communities pay close attention to water levels and water quality, because manoomin is sensitive to changes in both.

This practice harvests within the plant's ability to regenerate, keeping the rice bed, and the ducks, muskrats and fish that use it, in balance. Many communities are now working to protect and restore manoomin beds threatened by changing water levels, pollution and development.

Long-term thinking and respectful harvesting

• The Seventh Generation principle, a Haudenosaunee teaching, asks people to consider how today's decisions will affect those living seven generations from now (well over a century).
• Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her book Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), describes the Honourable Harvest, guidelines shared in many Indigenous traditions, such as: take only what you need, never take the first one (or the last), ask permission, use everything you take, share it, and give thanks. From a science point of view, "never take the first" and "take only what you need" leave enough individuals to reproduce, keeping harvests below the population's regeneration rate.
• Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit includes the principle of environmental stewardship (avatimik kamattiarniq). In Nunavut, wildlife decisions are made through co-management boards (such as the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board, created under the Nunavut Agreement) that bring together Inuit knowledge and scientific surveys.
• Métis harvesters in Ontario follow community harvesting rules; the Métis Nation of Ontario's harvesting policy includes Captains of the Hunt, who help oversee harvesting in each region and pass on responsible practices.

Fire as a tool

For generations, many First Nations used controlled fire to renew landscapes: clearing underbrush, encouraging berries and grasses, and keeping fuel from building up. In southern Ontario, oak savannas and tallgrass prairies, such as those at Rice Lake Plains and in Toronto's High Park, were kept open in part by Indigenous burning. Today, land managers and First Nations use prescribed burns to restore these rare ecosystems. Fire keeps them in their natural dynamic equilibrium (Lesson 8); without it, trees and shrubs slowly take over.

Other communities' sustainable practices

• Sustainable forestry: in Ontario, the Crown Forest Sustainability Act (1994) requires forests harvested on public land to be regenerated, and forest plans to maintain biodiversity.
• Watershed management: Ontario's conservation authorities manage whole watersheds, protecting wetlands and floodplains.
• Fishing quotas and seasons set limits based on population surveys.
• Composting and community gardens in towns and cities return nutrients to soil.
• Farmers using crop rotation, cover crops and buffer strips (Lesson 15).

The best practices often combine knowledge systems: Indigenous knowledge of long-term change and relationships, and scientific monitoring and experiments, as in Two-Eyed Seeing.