Still, the authors find significant overlap between the model’s core conservation values and those that many Indigenous worldviews hold, such as safeguarding wildlife for future generations, using best available knowledge to solve problems and prioritizing collaboration between nations. Indigenous peoples’ intergenerational knowledge and growing political power to enact bold conservation policies are invaluable.” “This exclusion is problematic,” he said, “because Indigenous people have been managing and stewarding wildlife for thousands of years. “There’s a colonial view that holds back the best potential of the North American Model.”įor example, while the North American Model describes wildlife as a public trust, it does not mention how Indigenous governments are included in that relationship, Hessami said. “It’s a narrow-focused model that was really developed from the ‘good ol’ boys’ lens in the 20 th and early 21 st century,” he said. The North American Model has worked well for many users over the past 100 years, Hessami said, but it’s not without shortcomings. Hessami belongs to the Wyandotte Nation and has been involved in TWS’ Native American Student Development Program since 2016. “We really made the more holistic,” said TWS member Mateen Hessami, a master’s student studying wildlife biology at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. This graphic showing overlaps and revisions to the Indigenizing the North American Model. The authors developed what they consider a more inclusive approach to wildlife management they call “Indigenizing the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation.” They believe the approach could reduce conflicts over land use and management that have arisen in recent decades, including hunting rights and conservation decision making. In a new perspective piece in the journal FACETS, a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scientists argue that wildlife agencies and biologists would benefit from a wider approach that can better coexist with widely held perspectives from Indigenous communities. For some scientists, though, the model could be improved by better weaving in millennia of Indigenous knowledge that preceded the settlers’ arrival. It’s a concept that grew from conservationists witnessing the impact of market hunting after European colonization. Courtesy Mateen Hessamiįor many wildlife biologists in the United States and Canada, the approach to wildlife management is embodied by the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation-a concept that wildlife is held in trust for the public to use and enjoy.
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