Inuksuk, Sled Shoe, Place name: Past Inuit Ethnogeographies (original) (raw)

Inuit households moved through a complex and far-flung annual round, and individuals travelled even more widely, in pursuit of game and other resources, for trading opportunities and social contacts, to learn about the local landscape and monitor its changes, and as part of an ongoing personal, spiritual engagement with the world. The igluviak or snow house so emblematic of Eastern Arctic groups – a sophisticated winter travel structure that required practiced skills and technical environmental knowledge, though little in the way of equipment or raw materials beyond a snow knife and a snowdrift – neatly embodies this style of land use. In fact, a capacity for mobility was embedded in virtually every facet of Inuit culture. Portable travel technologies (including situational ones, assembled on the spot like the igluviak) involved an elaborate array of seasonally appropriate vehicles (including domesticated animals to provide traction), tools, clothing, knowledge and skills. Durable place markers – inuksuit – oriented travelers as they moved along trails or followed learned travel routes, and a network of semantically-dense place names archived spatial and historical information in a readily memorable form. The rapidity and spatial scale of Inuit exploration and colonization during the first few centuries of expansion out of the western Canadian Arctic (roughly AD 1200-1500) are particularly exceptional. The archaeological record reveals a sophisticated body of travel technologies and epistemologies – an Inuit ethnogeography - that have continued to evolve as novel things and practices (motorized transport, telecommunications, GIS, etc.) have been taken onboard. Travel remains at the heart of Inuit culture.