Our Approach: Mapping is a critical foundation of our work with communities, especially in our traditional knowledge and use studies and ecology studies. We work with community members to map out the locations they and their families rely on for hunting, trapping, fishing and other important activities. Using state-of-the-art software, we analyze this information to clearly show a community’s rights and interests on the land, and how these could be affected by industrial development or land management policies.

Expertise: Firelight’s mapping and GIS team includes professional cartographers with decades of experience working with Indigenous communities to map their knowledge and land use in culturally appropriate ways. We also have extensive experience providing training and workshops to communities.

Capacity Building: We provide one-on-one and small group mapping training and on-going support to enhance communities’ research and data collection capacity. We also co-host large-scale Indigenous Mapping Workshops, during which we have delivered technical training on Google mapping tools so participants can collect, manage, share and publish their own map data.

Sample Projects: [anything more recent? – full text may be on separate pages]
On territory mapping: Firelight supported an On Territory Mapping project to develop a process for documenting community knowledge in the field. The methods focused on elder field visits, and included a field reporting form and data collection manual.

Resource: Direct to digital guide [brief description and link]

Quotes: “When we sit down with community members, the first thing we say is that we work for them – nobody else… This is especially important when people are sharing information about the land; they must have the opportunity to control what is said or not said.” Steve DeRoy, Firelight Cartography team lead