March 19, 2020: IRES Student Seminar with Anthony Persaud and Luis Felipe Melgarejo Perez (Cancelled)

IRES Seminar Series

Time: 12:30pm to 1:30pm (every Thursday)

Location: AERL Theatre (room 120), 2202 Main Mall

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Please note that due to COVID-19, the IRES Seminar Series have been cancelled for the rest of the term.

Counter-Institutionalizing First Nation-Crown relations in British Columbia

In Canada, the advance of industrial resource extraction has been moderated by a series of key legal decisions which have found that development activities within the traditional territories of Indigenous groups may infringe on aboriginal and treaty rights, requiring a duty to consult and potentially accommodate those affected. In British Columbia this duty is primarily satisfied through the crown referrals process, whereby affected First Nation groups are notified by the crown regarding potential rights-affecting decisions and are given an opportunity to formulate a response. This form of institutionalized engagement presents an ongoing challenge for First Nation groups who struggle to manage the influx of crown referrals as well as a dilemma for those who question its fairness and inherent colonial structure. For others, it is seen as an opportunity to leverage the duty to consult and accommodate in order to strengthen territorial self-governance. In this presentation I explore the ways in which the crown referrals process has been utilized and redrawn by First Nation groups in order to achieve their territorial goals, and the trade-offs involved.

Anthony Persaud

IRES PhD Program

Bio:

Anthony is a PhD candidate and community development practitioner with a broad focus on the intersections between community well-being, economic ‘development’, and Indigenous territorial self-governance. Under the supervision of Dr. Terre Satterfield at IRES-UBC, his action-based research seeks to understand how institutional innovations in relation to housing, natural resource management, and consultation and accommodation processes enable First Nation groups to achieve their visions for economic futures. Anthony brings to his work more than a decade of experience working directly with rural and Indigenous communities and authorities in British Columbia and internationally in West Africa and Latin America. He approaches all of his work utilizing decolonizing, community-based participatory methods with the aim of enhancing Indigenous self-determination.