Indigenous experiences of impact assessment and development projects: lessons from the Aashukan exchange

ABSTRACT How can Indigenous peoples and practitioners engage Impact Assessment as a collaborative learning process that enables communities to affect and influence the design of development projects and their management systems? How to create conversations between Indigenous peoples in order to craft a message/voice in relation to developers? This article summarizes lessons learned from ‘Aashukan’ an Indigenous exchange organized on James Bay Cree lands, Northern Québec, Canada in conjunction with the IAIA Conference in 2017. It presents the context, objectives, processes, and outcomes of this workshop in relation to the Impact Assessment community and discusses future directions.