Lost in translation: overcoming distinctions in worldviews in environmental impact assessments in Canada and Russia
Faculty Advisor
Date
2023
Keywords
Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs), Sakha Republic (Yakutia), Alberta, Indigenous languages, Indigenous epistemologies
Abstract (summary)
How would the usage of Indigenous languages contribute to overcoming the epistemological gap between Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Environmental Impact Assessments? This article examines incommensurabilities that arise in Sakha-Russian and Cree-English translations of EIA through the translations of the most common words in samples. Without being embedded in Indigenous languages, TEK and other knowledges are easily decontextualized, and results in the loss of layers of meaning. This study adopted a linguistic anthropological approach to language combined with content analysis and guided by a poststructuralist mode of analysis. We argue policies around EIA/EAs must be shifted to center Indigenous languages as the source of TEK and ensure that there is space for these languages to be used in the consultation processes.
Publication Information
Sidorova, E., & Ferguson, J. (2023). Lost in translation: Overcoming distinctions in worldviews in environmental impact assessments in Canada and Russia. The International Indigenous Policy Journal, 14(2). https://doi.org/10.18484/iipj.2023.14.2.14942
Notes
Item Type
Article
Language
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND)
