Pimachiowin Aki

Known as Pimachiowin Aki (“the Land that Gives Life”), this internationally recognized network of protected areas is situated in the North American Boreal Shield and spans an area of 29,040 km². For millennia, the Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe), Indigenous people of this region, have lived intimately with this place in the boreal forest. The site comprises the traditional lands of four Anishinaabe communities – Poplar River, Bloodvein River, Pauingassi, and Little Grand Rapids First Nations – as well as adjacent protected areas, including Atikaki and South Atikaki Provincial Parks in Manitoba, and Woodland Caribou Provincial Park and Eagle-Snowshoe Conservation Reserve in Ontario.

Pimachiowin Aki is a living cultural landscape that reflects the beliefs, values, and practices that guide Anishinaabe interactions with the land. Cultural attributes dispersed across the landscape include habitation, harvesting, and processing sites, traplines, travel routes, named places, ceremonial sites, and sacred places, such as pictographs. Numerous archeological sites throughout the area demonstrate the long occupation by Indigenous peoples. Anishinaabe customary governance and oral traditions ensure continuity across generations and reflect an intimate relationship between culture and nature that has preserved the boreal forest of Pimachiowin Aki.

Pimachiowin Aki is located in what once was the centre of glacial Lake Agassiz. The features left behind by this lake and the impact of these features on ecosystems are evident today in the vast area of healthy boreal forest, wetlands, exposed bedrock, myriad lakes, and long free-flowing rivers that characterize Pimachiowin Aki. The site contains a diversity of terrestrial and freshwater aquatic ecosystems and fully supports wildfire, nutrient flow, species movements, and predator-prey relationships, which are essential ecological processes in the boreal forest. Four large unimpeded rivers flowing through the area contribute to its aquatic diversity. One of these rivers, the Bloodvein, is a designated Canadian Heritage River. Pimachiowin Aki supports a high proportion of the North American boreal shield species, including characteristic and iconic species, as well as species of conservation concern, such as woodland caribou, wolverine, lake sturgeon, leopard frog, and Canada warbler.

World Heritage Convention

The World Heritage Convention is an international treaty that was adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO in 1972. Currently, 193 countries (known as “State Parties”) have ratified it, including Canada which did so in 1976. The Convention is a vital tool in safeguarding the world’s heritage - having sites inscribed on the World Heritage List often serves as a catalyst to raising awareness for heritage preservation. It is rooted in the recognition that some heritage places have such exceptional qualities they can be considered to be of Outstanding Universal Value (often referred to as OUV) and are the shared responsibility of the international community as a whole. The Convention therefore seeks to identify, protect, conserve, present, and transmit to future generations, cultural and natural heritage that are deemed to be of Outstanding Universal Value, for the benefit of all humanity.