Approaches of Centering Indigenous Concerns in The Context of Material Science and The Environment

Indigenous communities are often disproportionately affected by environmental pollution, either because of nearby resource extraction in remote areas or due to industrial and transport emissions in urban areas, amongst other reasons. The latter is the case for the Mohawk community of Kahnawà:ke, located on the South Shore of Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal, where major sources of air pollution such as car/ship/train traffic arteries converge towards a bridge across the St. Lawrence River and the St. Lawrence Seaway passes very close to the centre of daily activities. Furthermore, major industrial installations are located just across the limits of the community with little information about local emissions. While the community has long identified these sources of pollution and potential impact on health, little data has been collected so far due to a lack of suitable monitoring systems. Together with community members, we as scholars working in fields as different as Material Science, First Peoples Studies, Science Education, Decolonizing Curriculum and Pedagogy, Environmental Science, and Science and Technology Studies, came together to explore how these issues which the community of Kahnawà:ke is experiencing, can be addressed and how science and technologies can be employed to support the community’s concerns.<br/>The establishment of a Community Science Low-Cost Air Quality Monitoring Network (AQMN Kahnawà:ke) - (together with a small number of commercial sensors -) addresses several goals formulated by the Kahnawà:ke Environmental Protection Office (KEPO) and Concordia University in the framework of the “Decolonizing Light” project. Funded by the New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) of the Government of Canada, the Decolonizing Light project explores different ways to contribute to anti-colonial scientific practices and to center Indigenous issues and concerns. The theme of the project exemplarily focuses on light (rather than optics) because light is ubiquitous in every society, language, and culture. In everyday life, light is a key element that defines familiar aspects like color and warmth. In physics, light is exploited as the primary carrier of information about nature (e.g., in astronomy), used as the primary probe for the fundamental properties of matter (e.g., in spectroscopy). Therefore, “decolonizing light” can be seen as a metaphor for anti-colonial science and technological development that reflects on the broader social impact as well as on the politics of science and technology.<br/>The goals of AQMN Kahnawà:ke include (i) making the monitoring of hyper-local pollutant concentrations available to the community, (ii) installing a representation of regional air quality due to a dense network of stations (much denser than government or municipality operated networks) to represent regional air quality, (iii) studying the potential to study the impact of specific installations and infrastructure, and, (iv) democratizing scientific expertise by raising awareness and scientific knowledge about air quality and its measurement within the community at large, rather than among experts alone.<br/>To date, fourteen air quality monitors have been built by community members during workshops held in Kahnawà:ke in 2022 and 2023. Locations are chosen across the community following local knowledge available across the community. This project provides tools for data management, processing, and visualisation to make concentrations and pollution maps available for the benefit of all community members and the particular air quality studies conducted by KEPO. Preliminary results, lessons learned, and conclusions for the broader material science community will be presented.