Jodi Koberinski MES is a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Environment, pursuing a PhD in Geography and Environmental Management. This site provides some insights into Jodi's academic works and current research focus. The following is the working abstract for Jodi's PhD program:
ABSTRACT
Canadian governments and citizens occupy land as a nation amongst nations, with complex treaties governing territory sharing (Manuel and Derrickson 2015). Despite treaty relationships between the Crown and some Indigenous peoples, the Crown’s historic and contemporary dismissals of Indigenous socio-political institutions and world views impedes emergence of new Canadian norms required to support nation-to-nation cooperation -- a central premise of treaty-making as understood by Indigenous treaty rights holders (Venne 2017). Indigenous peoples invest cultural, social, spiritual, and heritage values in forests. Canada’s governments approach forests as resources to be commodified. This commodification leads to practices that undermine Indigenous food sovereignty (LeBlanc 2014). Through this research program, I question the impacts commodification has on the “Crown” meeting treaty obligations to protect Anishnaabek food traditions, lifestyles, and culture in the Robinson Huron Treaty Territory. I engage Indigenist researchers and publications to examine tensions between commodification and commons approaches to land management. Anishnaabe gikendaasowin (synthesized knowledge) has long recognized concepts socio-ecological systems researchers are only in the past few decades articulating (Chiblow 2020; Goodchild 2020; Pine 2020; Geniusz 2009). My research program seeks to further develop a Tri-Governance framework for collaboration in Nation to Nation contexts by centering Anishnaabe Gikendaasowin (knowledge) (Bell 2013; Pine 2020). I make an original contribution to knowledge by adapting the tri-governance model found in the food commons literature (Vivero Pol 2017) and the doughnut economics framework (Raworth 2014; 2017) to the Robinson Huron Treaty context, in order to examine recent changes to the 1994 Sustainable Forestry Act in light of Treaty rights holders’ food sovereignty guarantees enshrined in the Treaty. The merging of Vivero Pol and Raworth’s frameworks with the Robinson Huron Treaty as it is understood by Indigenist scholars and Traditional knowledge keepers challenges the epistemological singularity that currently informs Canada’s extractivist approach to land management – an approach the TEK Elders Group contests compromises the health and well-being of Anishnnaabek Nations.
Jodi Koberinski is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
