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Our Initiatives:
Whitefeather Forest Initiative
Started in 1996, the Whitefeather Forest Initiative is a community-based economic renewal and resource stewardship initiative. This is our most recent and most significant initiative to create urgently needed jobs for our youth while maintaining the cultural integrity of our customary relationships with our Traditional Territories. The initiative is our way to respond to the decline of the fur trapping economy and our young and rapidly growing population.
 At the core of the Whitefeather Forest Initiative is our intent to acquire commercial forest license management planning responsibilities and related opportunities for the Whitefeather Forest Planning Area. In 2000, Pikangikum First Nation received a conditional commitment from the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources with respect to our initiative conditional upon completion of a set of planning tasks. It set out the tasks that our First Nation and the MNR would each complete to realize the Whitefeather Forest Initiative. We have developed a consensus-based and cooperative Strategic Action Planning process with the MNR that is supporting the work that must be done for Pikangikum to acquire forest management planning responsibilities within the Whitefeather Forest Planning Area. Our planning work is well underway. We expect to have our planning work completed on schedule.
Our Initiative also includes planning for dedicated protected areas with the Whitefeather Forest Planning Area. As part of this planning we have entered into a partnership with our neighbouring First Nations to the west. On June 10th, 2002 the final signatures from our First Nations were added to an agreement to develop a cooperative strategy for protecting the lands linking our respective traditional territories, the Protected Areas Accord. The Accord’s goal is to create an internationally renowned World Heritage Site within our ancestral lands. In 2005, Bloodvein First Nation joined our Accord. In 2003 our Accord First Nations formed a larger partnership with the Government of Ontario and the Government of Manitoba to advance our World Heritage Site goal. We have cooperated since then in moving forward to achieve this goal. We cooperated in making submissions to a study sponsored by the World Heritage Centre at UNESCO to identify potential World Heritage Sites in the Boreal Forest. Our submissions received excellent reviews in the Proceedings of the World Heritage Boreal Zone Workshop that was held in St. Petersburg, Russia from October 10-13, 2003. The planning area of our five First Nations and two provinces has now been placed on Canada’s Updated Tentative List of World Heritage Sites.
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Slide Shows
