The Justice, Economic Development, Sports and Recreation and Social Working Tables were all approved for funding. The Project Fund will subsidize each working table’s projects.

In the coming months each working table will be rolling out their plans – we look forward to seeing the results and wish them all the best in their endeavours.

Read on for some general information on each working table’s project entails.

Sports and Rec

The Sports and Recreation Working Table’s project is a bid to increase community wellbeing by increasing the participation of Mi’kmaq women and girls in meaningful sport, recreation and physical activity opportunities.

This will be carried out through a forthcoming Mi’kmaq Women and Girls Participation in Sprot, Recreation, and Physical Activity Action Plan. This plan will be drafted with the help of a consultant, tasked with gathering information, engagement and writing.

Social

The Social Working Table is planning a Homelessness Symposium with its Project Fund support.

The Homelessness Symposium, focused on Mi’kmaq communities and helping the most vulnerable in the community, will identify gaps and barriers, creating an actionable, decolonized approach to dealing with homelessness.

The symposium – expected to include 100 attendees – will bring together Community Members who are experiencing (or who have experienced) homelessness or housing insecurity and the people who work with them those people and their communities.

Ec Dev

The Economic Development working table is going to use its Project Fund support to host an Economic Knowledge and Capacity Symposium.

The two-day event aims to inspire and equip those who attend with relationships and knowledge to bring positive change in their communities.

The symposium aims to find economic development and employment opportunities in the critical miners, green hydrogen, renewable energy and tourism sectors – and it will involve economic development officers, Indigenous employment officers from the 13 Nova Scotian First Nation, the Economic Development Working Committee, Indigenous organizations and federal and provincial funders.

Justice

The Justice Committee’s Glooscap Stories (Gluskabewimk) Project aims to establish Mi’kmaq laws and legal principles based on ethics, rules, principles values and laws found within the teachings of traditional Glooscap stories.

The committee will work with L’nuwey Tplutaqan Wikuom (the Indigenous Law Lodge) at Dalhousie’s Schulich School of Law to analyze the Glooscap stories and discern teachings that can be codified into laws.

At its April 18^th meeting in Membertou, the Justice Committee passed a motion to refer Gluskabewimk (the Glooscap Stories Project), as submitted, to Project Fund Coordinator Brad Sullivan.

From this point, Brad will be bringing it to the Forum’s Oversight Committee, if it gains Co-chair support.

The $145,200 Glooscap Stories Project is an effort to recognize and establish a more traditionally Indigenous justice system, following the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls To Action #42 and 50, which call for recognition of Aboriginal justice systems and Indigenous law institutes for the development, use and understanding of Indigenous laws.

The Glooscap Stories Project is an initiative to revitalize Indigenous laws and governance practices in the Atlantic region, based on Mi’kmaq mythology surrounding Glooscap (Kluscap, Gluskap).

Glooscap’s teachings offer advice and guidance on ecological and moral principles, relating to how people should treat one another and the world in the form of stories. The Glooscap Stories Project aims to use methods that include story briefing, linguistic and deliberative methods (including community discussions) to analyze and discuss those stories.

Analysis and discussion of stories will focus on fundamental processes, values, principles and rules to determine how they can be applied to contemporary law, governance and policy.

A series of story discussions will take place, involving a core group of Mi’kmaq people who will help identify themes (such as leadership attributes, treatment of the vulnerable, respect of individual and collective rights, etc.) in a series of meetings over the course of a year.

The findings from these discussions will lead to the formation of frameworks of legal principles. What will follow are draft reports on the discussions and frameworks.

This project is being led by Naomi Metallic, an associate Professor of Law and Chancellor’s Chair in Aboriginal Law and Policy at Dalhousie, Tanisha Blackmore, the project’s outreach coordinator and counsel based in Halifax and Kristan Belanger, the project’s research assistant and a data analytics officer with Canadian Heritage’s International Copyright Team.

The work associated with the Glooscap Stories Project will entail a partnership between:

• The Halifax Lnuwey Tplutaqan Wikuom law lodge
• Dalhousie’s faculties of Law and Management
• The Union of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq (UNSM), the Confederacy of Mainland Mi’kmaq (CMM)
• The Kwilmu’kw Maw-Klusuaqn Negotiation Office (KMKNO)
• The Tripartite Forum’s Justice Committee Mi’kmaq Co-chair.

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