Co-design of Water Infrastructure for Indigenous Canada
The treatment of Indigenous communities in Canada has been colonial and patriarchal in a variety of contexts including the provision of educational and social services, and in the legal system. There is a need to change the way we work together to ensure a better future.
In our review, we looked at the research on how water infrastructure on reserves was typically designed and created, and whether there were ways of collaborating with people living in Indigenous communities to make infrastructure that was sociably accepted and culturally appropriate. We did a wide search, or scoping review, for any published research articles about designing water and wastewater infrastructure on reserves in Canada and abroad.
Over the last two decades, only 13 articles could be found about processes of collaboration with Indigenous communities to fund, design, and build water infrastructure in an engaged and inclusive way. Even though some studies involved or consulted with people from Indigenous communities on these tasks, only three studies really collaborated in an in-depth and respectful way. None of the studies were led by members of the Indigenous communities themselves.
Four processes of collaboration were described, but only one non-Canadian study used a process that we would categorize as truly inclusive and overcame the hierarchical, unequal power dynamics that occur when working across different government and local levels of decision makers. All four processes, however, met funding, timing, and local contextualized-factor barriers such as language differences, climate change factors, very poor source water, and differences of core values.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada findings encourage all Canadians to seek out ways of fully adopting the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. The Commission also encourages Canadians to take actions such as building student capacity for intercultural understanding, empathy, and mutual respect. This paper provides some guidance to engineers, researchers and their students, and government agents on how they can support the universal value of clean drinking water for Indigenous people, and enhance how water infrastructure on reserves is designed to be more collaborative and reflective of the unique cultural values where the infrastructure is being built.
Read the full paper — Co-design of water services and infrastructure for Indigenous Canada: A scoping review by Lori E.A. Bradford, Tim Vogel, Karl-Erich Lindenschmidt, Kerry McPhedran, Graham E.H. Strickert, Terrence A. Fonstad and Lalita A. Bharadwaj on the FACETS website.
