Inuksuk, Sled Shoe, Place name: Past Inuit Ethnogeographies (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Trail as Home: Inuit and Their Pan-Arctic Network of Routes
Human Ecology, 2009
This paper provides ethnographic and historical evidence for the existence, in time and space, of a network of well-established trails connecting most Inuit settlements and significant places across the Canadian Arctic. The geographic and environmental knowledge relating to trails (and place names associated with the trails) has been orally transmitted through many generations of Inuit. I use historical documents, ethnographic research, and new geographic tools such as GPS, GIS and Google Earth, to show the geographic extent of the network and its historical continuity. I particularly draw on a trip following Inuit along a traditional trail connecting the communities of Iglulik and Naujaat (Repulse Bay). Inuit have made systematic use of the Arctic environment as a whole and trails are, and have been, significant channels of communication and exchange across the Arctic. There are some types of oral history and knowledge that can be accurately transmitted through generations, and I propose that some aspects of Inuit culture are better understood in terms of moving as a way of living.
Routes, trails and tracks: Trail breaking among the Inuit of Igloolik
Études/Inuit/Studies, 2004
Despite significant social, economic, and technological changes, travelling remains a significant part of people's lives in the community of Igloolik, in the territory of Nunavut, Canada. When the snow covers the land and the sea ice, travellers start breaking trails, some of which recreate routes that have been used by generations of Inuit. These routes belong to the individual and social memory of the community, and this knowledge affords people safe and reliable travel to hunting and fishing grounds and between communities. This paper analyzes the characteristics of routes traditionally used by the people of Igloolik and explores the differences between land routes and sea-ice routes, the role of the trail breaker, and the characteristics of oral descriptions of routes. Finally, it addresses the issue of how the perception of trails is changing due to generational differences and the use of new transportation technologies. The study of trails and routes reveals some significa...
Protecting the authenticity and integrity of inuksuit within the Arctic milieu
Études/Inuit/Studies, 2002
This paper explores the legacy of the stone cairn beacons known as inuksuit — intriguing stone formations built by the Inuit for the last 4000 years that describe messages about landscape, convey messages about way-finding and communicate stories about place. Although inuksuit appear as ancient artefacts of a by-gone era, they have survived well into the twenty-first century, withstanding the changes that have dramatically impacted other traditional facets of Inuit life. Inuksuit remain as solidified fingerprints on the landscape, marking ancient and modern navigation routes. They are signs in themselves and signs that converge to form maps. The power and legacy inuksuit exert over the landscape is, however, potentially at risk from mining and hydro-electricity developments that are planned to consume further areas of the Arctic. Moreover, particular marketed forms of inuksuit threaten to taint and avert the original inuksuit function. A case for preserving inuksuit is indeed strong, and perhaps quite necessary considering they are one of the few remaining tangible fabrics of Inuit society that continue to function within an original setting.
Inuksuk: Icon of the Inuit of Nunavut
Études/Inuit/Studies, 2000
The Inuit of the Canadian Arctic have long been known to the outside world through the accounts of explorers, whalers, traders, and missionaries. Famous for their igloos, dog sleds, kayaks and skin clothing, they became the quintessential hardy people of the American Arctic as portrayed in the film “Nanook of the North.” Now that they have emerged with their own agency in the world, their iconic distinctiveness is threatened by their near disuse of these traditional markers. In the past few years, the Inuit have combined their visibility to outsiders with their pride in heritage to select and foreground a few items, such as the inuksuk, the qulliq and the amautik, which have gone from the ordinary to the extraordinary. This paper explores the emergence of the inuksuk as an icon both for and of the Inuit in Canada, and considers its development, reintegration, commercialization and diaspora.
From map to horizon; from trail to journey: Documenting Inuit geographic knowledge
Canadian University Music Review, 2005
This paper describes how new cartographic and information technologies were used to record and represent Inuit geographic and environmental knowledge in Igloolik, Nunavut. The method proved a powerful tool to document an approach to geography that is mainly oral. It was also helpful in documenting how people relate to a highly dynamic environment as the Arctic. The method includes the merging of different geographic databases that acquire full meaning when seen as layers of the same map. It also involves the search for new ways of representing, including simulated horizons, photographs of horizons embedded on maps, and recordings of oral descriptions of trails and locations. An example of such method can be seen in the Igloolik Multimedia Project, a CD-Rom that is being currently piloted in the Igloolik high school.
Cultural Landscapes and Long-Term Human Ecology, 2024
The seasonal round of activity is a valid, if necessarily generalized, concept in the ethnographic and archaeological record of many recorded hunter-gatherer groups. Its realistic limits, including annual and simultaneous variability of behavior, can, in theory, be tested with high-resolution archaeological data. The visible, surface archaeological record of the Caribou, or Inland (Kivalliq), Inuit living along the Kazan River from about 1800 to 1950 presents a record that is as problematic to resolve as any other. It has, however, a number of advantages, including its duration (relatively brief and discrete), year-round nature of settlement and land-use activities, the surface visibility of evidence of this settlement, and its association with historic and oral history records that inform us about subsistence and settlement there. The record examined here includes a variety of distinctive, built features that, if not a “high-resolution” record (in the absence of excavations), at least provide some evidence for investigating the relationship among location, resources and activity for the Inland Inuit. The record shows that even at locations where people are expected to converge around a predictable and important resource like caribou, choices from year to year and among different families are variable.
________________________________________________________________ The Inuit sod winter house or iglu has undergone a host of alterations over the past millennium, as housing styles were accommodated to changing local milieus during the colonization of the Eastern Arctic. Many of these changes relate to subtle shifts in gendered work and household social relations, and in Labrador from the eighteenth century some appear to reflect engagements with a more or less hostile European discourse on architectural modernity. Far from a static form subjected to convulsive contact-era transformations, however, dwellings were gradually remade in the context of a long-running Inuit effort to house work and sociality within a meaningful space. ________________________________________________________________ Résumé: La maison inuite hivernale en tourbe, aussi connue sous le nom d'iglou, a connu toute une série de modifications durant le dernier millénaire, alors que le style du logement s'adaptait aux changements du milieu local durant la colonisation de l'Arctique de l'Est. Plusieurs de ces changements sont liés a ` de subtiles modifications dans la division du travail et l'organisation des relations sociales de la maisonnée et au Labrador, a ` partir du 18 iè me siècle, certaines semblent refléter des engagements avec un discourt européen, plus ou moins hostile, sur la modernité architecturale. Les habitations, loin d'e ˆtre de forme statique, sont sujettes aux transformations convulsives de l'e `re du contact, cependant dans le contexte d'un long effort des Inuit, elles ont graduellement e ´té refaites comme espace significatif de travail et d'interactions sociales. ________________________________________________________________
Archaeopress Publishers of British Archaeological Reports
The original inhabitants of the Eastern Arctic migrated there from Alaska approximately 4500 years ago and are known to archaeologists as Palaeo-Eskimos. The latest Palaeo-Eskimo sites date to AD 1000. A long-standing debate in Arctic prehistory is whether there was cultural continuity over the entire 3500 years of Palaeo-Eskimo occupations within the region, or whether one or more of the stylistic/technological transformations within the archaeological record represents a population replacement. The issue of mobility has figured in this debate. The consensus is that during the earliest period populations were highly mobile and travelled considerable distances to exploit seasonally abundant yet locationally restricted species, and then that Palaeo-Eskimo mobility throughout the Arctic began to change towards increasing sedentism. An emphasis on marine resources and the development of storage technology was seen as pivotal in the establishment of this more settled way of life, which is taken to characterise the late Palaeo-Eskimo period. However, recent archaeological investigations in the interior of southern Baffin Island have revealed apparent continuity between Early and Late Palaeo-Eskimo long-distance mobility strategies designed to exploit inland caribou herds and chert. Moreover, the central situation of these sites compared to the major coastal region would have further provided important opportunities for small isolated populations to meet and socialise. Taken together, caribou, chert, and visiting might have encouraged the persistence of seasonal inland travels, which, in turn, may provide supporting evidence for cultural continuity among the southern Baffin Island Palaeo-Eskimos.
Moravian and Inuit Encounters: Transculturation of Landscapes and Material Culture in West Greenland
ARCTIC, 2017
From 1733 to 1900, Moravian missionaries settled in West Greenland to missionize and teach. These activities resulted in local mission and settlement layouts that followed Moravian principles and at the same time adapted to local landscapes and Inuit traditions and subsistence practices. This article explores spatial data, objects, oral tradition, and written sources from sites at Uummannaq, Akunnaat (Lichtenfels), and Kangillermiut, West Greenland. At these sites, landscape use was transculturated, and the material culture changed among both the European missionaries and the local Inuit. Moravian missionaries traded European commodities for Inuit artefacts, and an Inuit industry evolved through creating souvenirs for the missionaries. At the same time, local Inuit material culture was influenced by the presence of the Moravians, who introduced written language, administrative birth numbers, goats, and new crafts such as European-style basket weaving. The cultural encounters at the ...