ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the assumptions related to the types of formal knowledge needed to establish Canadian national parks and to guide their subsequent planning. It examines customary and indigenous knowledge and evaluates its actual and/or potential impact on scientific information used in park planning. The chapter suggests several non-hierarchical alternatives that Parks might consider to ameliorate relations between management and its publics. Visitor Activity Management Process is a pro-active, flexible and conceptual framework – one whose features facilitate integration of social science information with the development of the systems planning process of the agency and the management plan for a park. Interest in indigenous knowledge and customary users’ environmental knowledge and its relationship to conservation planning and management was once considered a narrow area of scholarship, of interest only to a few anthropologists, ethnographers and cultural geographers.
