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In considering risk forecasting in light of anthropological and interdisciplinary impact assessment literature, this article demonstrates that impact assessment in Canada's tar sands sector is about designing the future, legitimizing future energy development, and rendering defense of foraging economies into technical, rather than political, channels. Impact assessment is a future-oriented, modeling-based practice, with a problematic relationship to empirical research methods such as ethnography. While purportedly foregrounding the knowledge of expert forecasters over that of impacted people, impact assessment documents and processes actually raise serious questions about forecasters' expertise and impartiality. Using three case studies of traditional land use reports from the tar sands region, this article draws on literature from the Anthropology of the Future to understand and critique the construction of expert knowledge and predictive power in the tar sands region through social impact assessment documents.
Key words: social impact assessment, tar sands, Anthropology of the Future, Canada, traditional land use
Introduction
This article asserts that one implicit goal of policy processes assessing the future impacts of tar sands development on indigenous people is to present potential futures, thereby both showing, and more subtly, influencing how development will impact future generations of indigenous people in northern Alberta. In so doing, impact assessment documents rhetorically work to preclude certain futures; they, thus, can be read as texts with power to inscribe, rather than just describe, the future. Rather than assessing cultural impacts then, such documents and processes may work to entail such future impacts. Alas, in the tar sands sector, documents produced through such legally mandated social impact assessment (SIA) studies are ethnographically thin. They, thus, tend to present future scenarios with little empirical basis, partly because they show little understanding of present conditions. Furthermore, consultants authoring such documents systematically avoid discussion of topics that are not easily rendered technical, thus largely dismissing, for example, spiritual, cosmological, or ontological issues at the heart of indigenous cultural traditions (Westman n.d.2). In studying the "traditional land use" (TLU) components of such environmental impact assessment (EIA) reports from the tar sands region (Westman 2006, n.d.l, n.d.3), I have concluded that impact assessment on tar sands projects is not being carried out in a manner consistent with either sound anthropological practices, with federal legislation, or with the constitutionally...