Research Activities

Our education projects are a cross-cultural exchange led by community members to show the affects, impacts, and responses to hydro development.

The Hydro Alliance moves forward with a spirit of renewed hope and action, in part looking back and documenting impacts on affected environments and Indigenous peoples.

The Hydro Alliance is bringing together communities and building networks. We are creating lines of communications that are rarely supported, so that community leaders can participate in public decision-making and licensing processes. These network will grow with time to include more communities and create actions that include local, provincial and international stakeholders.

The Alliance will empower Indigenous communities and others Partners within the Alliance by providing relevant research outcomes, expertise and opportunities for community leaders to dialogue and strategize with each other and with outside stakeholders. The research will be long term, spanning years, and will be community led, and accountable. Research will explore how and to what degree this Alliance might enable meaningful and desirable social and environmental change. It will follow the protocols of decolonizing and participatory action research, in which we include the OCAP (Ownership, Control, Access and Possession) principles.

It was unanimous that Truth and Reconciliation be adopted as a central pillar of our work as a network. Using a truth and reconciliation frame in this Partnership allows us to reflect, process, and heal. Links to other atrocities such as missing and murdered Indigenous women, natural resource appropriation and the larger context of colonial violence and oppression are included in the truth and reconciliation process. By opening the definition of truth and reconciliation to include modern and historic oppression it also allows us to explore how the trauma associated with the residential school experiences affects trauma related to hydropower projects and other factors including gendered violence. In conducting our public outreach in Manitoba and beyond, we will extend the work of the TRC and show decision-makers and the public alike that all Canadians need to engage in an allied solution to past and ongoing oppression.