Aboriginal Land Use Planning – Balancing the Words and the Images Prepared for AACIP Planning Digest Prepared by:
Ken R. Johnson ken.johnson@earthtech.ca 780 453 0910
Revised: 2003 05 08
The increasing demand, and need for aboriginal communities to complete community land use plans is creating a dilemma for professional planners, senior government departments, and most importantly the aboriginal communities. From a traditional aboriginal community perspective, a land use planning document may be viewed as just another report that is the product of outsiders to their community. Aboriginal communities want to develop their communities in a way that is consistent with and reflects their inherent right to self government, their culture, their values and their traditions (Reference 1), and planning documents must convey this in an appropriate manner. From a senior government perspective, a land use plan provides a singular presentation of information regarding community growth, which ultimately translates into the necessary capital, and operation and maintenance funding a community requires. The funds available to individual communities are competing against each other, therefore senior governments not only need a means to identify the funding amounts, but also a priority to attach to these limited funds. Professional planners are now faced with the challenge of satisfying the fundamental needs of both groups, which in some respects are quite far apart. The solution to this challenge may rest with the recognition that one of the basic cultural elements of aboriginal communities is that written language is not fundamental to the culture, but rather a supplement of the past century from European cultures. Applying this concept suggests that the written word should be equally balanced with images in the community planning document. These images, which include photographs, drawings, and maps, should be integral to the planning document, and not part of an appendix to the document. The graphic technology made available over the past ten years will make the application of this concept much easier (Reference 2). Powerful computer processors, versatile graphic software, scanners, digital cameras, and colour plotters are the tools that planners must use in working with aboriginal communities to create planning documents that are culturally relevant, and administratively functional. The written words are necessary for living in a modern global society, and are essential to an aboriginal community for communicating with those who have financial and administrative responsibilities to their communities. However, the ultimate success of the planning work may be judged by its relevance and appropriateness to the entire community, and not just the community administration, or the senior government officials. Land use planning has become, for the most part, an inherent part of community growth in urban and rural settings. Not only is it a legislated aspect of community growth, but it has to some extent become an expected part of a public process to sustain the demands of a transparent process on things in the public domain. Clearly in the “western� culture, where written language has evolved over a period of thousands of years, and mass written communication has evolved in excess of 500 hundred years, a written expression of planning related work is essential to the process.