‘The saddest time of my life’: relocating the Ahiarmiut from Ennadai Lake (1950–1958) (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Politics of Community Relocation: An Eastern Cree Example
2021
In the fall of 1977 the Nemaska Band held a meeting with représentatives of the Grand Council of the Créés (of Québec), Peat, Marwick& Partners, Daniel Arbour& Associâtes, DINA, and some other consultants. The meeting was held at the proposed site for the new Nemaska community, and lasted four days. It began with a bear feast and ended with a community plan. In the five years following, much of the plan has been successfully implemented. This case study contrasts with the more typical studies of failure in planning, or failure in im plémentation. While the study of a success is no excuse for ignoring problems faced by other propie, the Nemaska case can serve a constructive rôle in identifying the means to success in dealing with goals, obstacles, strategies, and practical steps for development.
The end of “Eskimo land”: Yupik relocation in Chukotka, 1958-1959
2007
La fin de la «Terre eskimo»: relocalisation yupik en Tchoukotka Il y a cinquante ans, pendant l'été 1958, les autorités russes ont entrepris un programme de relocalisation massive de la population yupik de la péninsule des Tchouktches en Sibérie. Quelques 800 personnes, ou environ 70% de cette petite nation de 1100 individus à l'époque, ont été forcées de quitter leur lieu de résidence et ont été transférées vers d'autres communautés. L'essentiel des faits relatifs à la relocalisation yupik est connu depuis les années 1960 mais aucun récit de première main n'a jamais été publié. Cet article présente une vue d'ensemble de la fermeture des trois plus grands villages yupik sibériens, Naukan, Ungaziq (Chaplino) et Plover en 1958-1959 ainsi que du déplacement de leurs résidents, à travers leurs souvenirs et leurs récits personnels que les auteurs ont recueillis durant les années 1970 et 1980. L'article soutient que ces relocalisations yupik par les autorités soviétiques dans les années 1950 ont été sans précédent en terme d'échelle et d'effet traumatisant, même si on les compare aux programmes de repeuplement initiés par d'autres États qui visaient de nombreuses communautés inuit en Alaska,
Reconciling with Minoaywin: First Nations Elders’ Advice to Promote Healing from Forced Displacement
En 2011, dans la région d'Interlake, au Manitoba, une inondation provoquée par l'homme a déplacé 17 communautés des Premières nations ayant de profonds liens ancestraux avec leurs terres. L'inondation et les déplacements forcés ont eu des effets dévastateurs dans ces communautés, incluant des morts prématurées, l'aggravation de maladies chroniques, la dépression et la solitude. En 2015, une réunion des aînés des Premières nations a rassemblé 200 personnes à Winnipeg pour discuter des moyens de se remettre des inondations provoquées. Une approche qualitative et un cadre participatif ont été utilisés pour documenter les perspectives des aînés. Vingt-trois aînés ont participé à des entrevues semi-dirigées en ojibwé et en anglais, enregistrées sur vidéo. Les discussions en petits groupes ont été documentées et transcrites en verbatim. Les recommandations des aînés sur la réconciliation avec le minoayawin (bien-être) ont été partagées par le biais d'un livret de guérison et d'un site Web. Les aînés ont partagé leurs réflexions sur le besoin de guérison de leurs peuples et de leurs communautés et ont proposé les stratégies suivantes pour aller de l'avant : pardonner, rester unis, promouvoir l'autodétermination, retrouver leur identité culturelle, et se rapprocher de la terre.
The Dispossession of the Northern Ojibwa and Cree
Ontario History
Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.
The art of Inuit administration: Post-war Canada, cultural diplomacy and northern administration
Polar Record, 2023
In this paper, we expand on existing studies of Canadian Inuit art in the international arena by examining ways in which this new art served domestic purposes, focusing primarily on the 1950s and 1960s. The Canadian government developed and promoted Inuit art as part of its project to transform Inuit from semi-independent hunters into modern Canadian citizens. In this effort, Canada took up and assimilated Inuit art as a genuine Canadian cultural product, presenting it as diplomatic gifts and for other forms of international cultural diplomacy. Previous studies of Canadian Inuit art from that era have noted the ways that the promotion of Canadian Inuit art supported the young nation's claims to a deep history, while simultaneously marking the country's distinction from both the United States and the United Kingdom. In the context of the Cold War, the promotion of Canadian Inuit art also asserted Canada as an Arctic power. Labelled as "primitive modernist" fine art, Inuit sculpture and prints provided a stark contrast to the contemporaneous socialist realist art of the Soviet Union and its allies. We argue that the success of the Inuit art program sustained a belief among government officials that their programme to remake Inuit lives and livelihoods would succeed. Inuit art likely deflected attention from the many things that were going wrong with that northern modernisation project. Participation in the Venice Biennalesomething that is primarily available to nations in the Global North-"can be viewed as a symbolic extension of actual colonial and imperial practices" (Moreno, 2010, p.9). By sponsoring Isuma's pointed critique of 1960s era internal colonialism, Canada advances its contemporary image as a progressive, postcolonial and multicultural nation; a nation secure enough to admit past wrongs. Renisa Mawani (2004, p.49) labels Canada's willingness to acknowledge its past abuses of Indigenous peoples a "new national performance" of a better Canada, "one that seeks forgiveness for its shameful colonial past" and past actions that it claims no longer occur (see also Irlbacher-Fox, 2009). Yet, in showcasing the exquisite, professionally produced artistic work of the Isuma team, Canada does more than
Comment on: Dombrowski, Kirk, Patrick Habecker, G. Robin Gauthier, Bilal Khan, and Joshua Moses. 2016. “Relocation Redux: Labrador Inuit Population Movements and Inequalities in the Land Claims Era.” Current Anthropology 57 (6): 785–805. doi:10.1086/689210. [my text: p. 795-796]
Historians and Inuit: Learning from the Qikiqtani Truth Commission
Journal of Canadian History, 2015
This article examines historians' contributions to the Qikiqtani Truth Commission (qtc) from 2007 to 2012. The qtc was unique in being commissioned, conducted, and paid for by an Aboriginal organization, the Qikiqtani Inuit Association. The qtc reviewed the elimination of qimmiit (sled-dogs) as well as other government policies concerning the Arctic and the relocation of northern communities to thirteen settlements between 1950 and 1975. By examining recent trends in writing about Nunavut's past along with historians' involvement with the qtc, this article argues that the qtc combined oral testimony with archival research to produce a compelling analysis of historical trauma and public memory. It thus demonstrates the ways in which historians can contribute to the work of reconciliation and the exploration of historical trauma. Résumé analytique : Dans cet article, nous examinons l'apport des historiens à la Commission sur la vérité de Qikiqtani (qtc) de 2007 à 2012. La qtc était unique en son genre ayant été commanditée, menée et subventionnée par un organisme autochtone, l'Association Inuit de Qikiqtani. La qtc passa en revue l'historique des épreuves infligées par les politiques du gouvernement dans l'Arctique entre 1950 et 1975, comme celles qui firent disparaître les qimmiit (les chiens-traîneaux) et le déménagement d'une centaine de hameaux isolés du Nord pour créer treize nouveaux villages permanents. En examinant les tendances les plus récentes des écrits sur l'histoire de Nunavut de même que l'implication de plusieurs historiens dans le qtc, nous soutenons que le qtc joignit les témoignages oraux avec la recherche d'archives pour présenter une analyse irréfutable de l'historique des épreuves et de la mémoire des gens. Nous montrons, de la sorte, les moyens par lesquels les historiens peuvent contribuer au travail de réconciliation et à l'explora-tion des souffrances historiques.
Skin for skin: death and life for Inuit and Innu
Choice Reviews Online, 2014
Labrador is the northeasternmost part of mainland Canada-a stretch of rocky and rough land along the north Atlantic coast. It has long been the homeland of two Native peoples, the Inuit and the Innu, who are a branch of the Cree Indian peoples. Starting in the late 1960s and intensifying relentlessly since then, both Native peoples have been experiencing interwoven epidemics of substance abuse-mostly gasoline sniffing and alcohol-plus youth suicide, domestic violence, and high rates of children born damaged because their mothers drank alcohol while pregnant. During the fall semester of 2001 I was living with my family in St. John's, Newfoundland, doing research on the declining Newfoundland fishery. Labrador is part of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador, and the Newfoundland media were then full of reports both about these epidemics and about the mostly ineffective measures that Newfoundland and Canada, who had shared responsibility, were taking in their attempts to help. By 2001 I had been working on the historical anthropology of Newfoundland fishing villages for three decades. As a great many fishers from northern Newfoundland had been going, seasonally, to fish from the Labrador coasts, and had been doing this for over 150 years, I knew a bit about the history of Labrador. What caught my attention in 2001 was the fact that the media were reporting a widespread consensus-among government officials, academics, consultants, and media pundits-that the epidemics of communal self-and collective destruction were provoked by the forced relocation of Native peoxiv preface story always tells two stories.. .. Each of the two stories is told in a different manner. Working with two stories means working with two different systems of causality. The same events enter simultaneously into two antagonistic. .. logics. The essential elements of the story. .. are employed in different ways in each of the two stories. The points where they intersect are the foundations of the story's construction. (2011, 63) This may be a complicated way of making several useful points. What is happening can center on, or emerge from, the surprises, and it can help to focus on what the surprises may reveal. Further, it is helpful to not impose one logic, one perspective, one unified interpretation on the multiplicity of events that are happening, for what may be most important are the ruptures and the breaks, the way things do not fit together. John Berger made a similar point very simply and very powerfully when he said, "If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories" ([1983] 2011). And in what follows the nameless-both for us and for the Native peoples-is often crucial. What I have learned from Berger and Piglia turned into a bigger issue for this book than it might at first appear to be. It has led me to put aside, or to minimize, many of the central concepts of anthropology, including culture, social organization, and social structure. All of these concepts both suggest and seek to point toward a supposed wholeness or unity of social life, as when we say "a culture," or "a social organization" or, even more out of touch, we say "the Inuit" or "the Cherokee," and so forth. We could scarcely go very far if we started our discussion with, say, "the New Yorkers. " What makes us think we could go much further starting from "the Inuit"? Or to press the point, "Inuit culture" as an abstraction from peoples spread from Alaska to Greenland, living from the coast or more from inland resources, or both, some now near mining camps or military bases and some more distant? This last point, putting aside such abstract and unifying concepts as culture and social organization, will likely make some readers uncomfortable, or even angry, for it rubs against the familiar. Wait until the book is read to see how this perspective unfolds. I also put aside most of the standard methods of anthropological research. Almost all the data for what follows comes from public documents accessible to anyone at libraries and archives. I went to Labrador several times, partly to work in libraries in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, the administrative center of Labrador, and partly just to see several of the Native communities I was writpreface xv ing about. Seeing these communities meant just that-I mostly only walked around them, looking, bought food and some clothes at local stores. When I did talk to people, for some people approached me, I asked no questions whatsoever other than those that make social conversation, such as "Do you think it will rain today?" To ask a research question, which anthropologists usually do, is to assume that you know what is important to ask about. I took my first graduate anthropology course in the spring of 1957, and for decades afterward I lived with the assumption that I knew what questions to ask and that I could almost fully explain the answers I heard. I now find both these assumptions more like obstacles than aids. Graduate students may still need to work that usual way, as Professor Linda Green has insisted, at least until they develop some practice at doing anthropology, but then it might well end. So in my work in the field I just look and listen. Mostly what I listen for, as will be explained in detail in the book, are the silences, and I try, based on a long-term familiarity with the primary historical sources, to see the surprises. This is, in sum, a different kind of anthropology. It has been a struggle to learn to work in this way, focusing not just on the silences and the surprises but also on the ways that the diversity of social life both does and does not fit together well, if it fits together at all. At best this perspective, which I will argue replicates how many people themselves see and seek to grasp their worlds, will lead to only partial explanations and incomplete understandings, both among the peoples this book is about and for us. I am deeply grateful for all the people who have helped me learn to start working in this way. A note on the index: One of the major analytical and political-strategic points of this work is to confront the uncertain boundaries between the usual categories and thus to expose, in useful ways, the chaos that domination inescapably imposes upon the everyday lives of vulnerable peoples. From this perspective, the very idea of an index-specific topics with specific page numbers-often, but not always, works against the formation of effective struggle, which must emerge from that chaos and uncertainty. I have tried to work against that-for example, by listing the mining company's pronouncements about "respecting" elders' ecological advice under the category "elder abuse," for much of it is well-paid mockery. So use the index lightly: read the book, and determine for yourselves what points you find helpful. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I had the privilege, the pleasure, the pressure, and the special productivity of working, for a month or two almost every summer for twenty years, with the working group on the history of everyday life at the Max Planck Institute for History, in Goettingen, Germany. The two central members of this group, Alf Luedtke and Hans Medick, have shaped my sense both of the larger significance of everyday lives and methodological and theoretical ways of studying it. Two other very special German historians, Adelheid von Saldern and Ursula Nienhaus, have been crucial to my work. As I brought what I learned back, several of my doctoral students at the City University of New York, with their relentlessly quizzical engagement with my perspectives, helped shape my understanding of productive ways to work. I specially want to thank
2018
UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL OF INDIGENOUS STUDIES DBAAJMOWIN As a publication of undergraduate papers relating to the discipline of Indigenous Studies, this journal is intended as a respectful and inclusive space of scholarly expression. We encourage submissions that engage with Indigenous knowledge and practice, and which are supportive of Indigenous movements towards sovereignty and resurgence, decolonization, environmental protection, and the reconciliation of Indigenous-Settler relations. In support of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s call for broad-based political transformation embodied in its 94 Calls to Action across 22 different public policy sectors, the first nine contributions in this volume outline a diversity of challenges in the areas of race relations, health, energy production, education, and the criminal justice system while suggesting possible paths forward that reflect Indigenous understandings of respectful relations. This volume then concludes with two submissions; which focus specifically on the Anishnaabe teachings of respect, wellness, and the meaning and practice of Mino Biimadiziwin.