Mushkegowuk Council - Mushkegowuk Guardian Program

The CreeGeo Mush Guardians is a Citizen Science initiative for Mushkegowuk youth to collaborate with Elders and other community members to learn about the environment and identify Indigenous place names and its history. CreeGeo Mush Guardians will work with various technologies and maps to capture the oral and pictographic knowledge and history of the traditional values and teachings. They will help to document instances and effects of climate change in their communities by observing and monitoring environmental changes on the land and water, non-Indigenous species and weather. The Guardians are gatekeepers to the land, working with local Elders, stewards and harvesters to establish research plots using GPS. This is where consistent monitoring and data capture will take place, and we will be building activities in each community as we move forward. Mush Guardians work with the six seasons in the Cycle of Life. Some examples of our work so far: In winter, the focus is on teaching youth how to take snow core samples and measure the water content of the snow. In the spring/summer, we developed a Trash Trackers initiative where students use Esri's Survey123 app to record information about garbage found on the land (and clean up the land at the same time). This data will be used in further analysis and to help inform waste management practices in the future.