From map to horizon; from trail to journey: Documenting Inuit geographic knowledge (original) (raw)
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Mapping Traditional Knowledge: Digital Cartography in the Canadian North
Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 2013
Digital cartography offers exciting opportunities for recording indigenous knowledge, particularly in contexts where a people's relationship to the land has high cultural significance. Canada's north offers a useful case study of both the opportunities and challenges of such projects. Through the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre (GCRC), Inuit peoples have been invited to become partners in innovative digital mapping projects, including creating atlases of traditional place names, recording the patterns and movement of sea ice, and recording previously uncharted and often shifting traditional routes over ice and tundra. Such projects have generated interest in local communities because of their potential to record and preserve traditional knowledge and because they offer an attractive visual and multimedia interface that can address linguistic and cultural concerns. But given corporations' growing interest in the natural resources of the Arctic and the concomita...
New Ways of Mapping: Using GPS Mapping Software to Plot Place Names and Trails in Igloolik (Nunavut)
ARCTIC, 2003
The combined use of a GPS receiver and mapping software proved to be a straightforward, flexible, and inexpensive way of mapping and displaying (in digital or paper format) 400 place names and 37 trails used by Inuit of Igloolik, in the Eastern Canadian Arctic. The geographic coordinates of some of the places named had been collected in a previous toponymy project. Experienced hunters suggested the names of additional places, and these coordinates were added on location, using a GPS receiver. The database of place names thus created is now available to the community at the Igloolik Research Centre. The trails (most of them traditional, well-traveled routes used in Igloolik for generations) were mainly mapped while traveling, using the track function of a portable GPS unit. Other trails were drawn by experienced hunters, either on paper maps or electronically using Fugawi mapping software. The methods employed in this project are easy to use, making them helpful to local communities involved in toponymy and other mapping projects. The geographic data obtained with this method can be exported easily into text files for use with GIS software if further manipulation and analysis of the data are required.
Inuit and scientific ways of knowing and seeing the Arctic Landscape
Master of Landscape Architecture Thesis, School of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Design, Adelaide University, Australia., 2002
This work explores traditional Inuit and Western scientific ways of knowing and seeing the Arctic through a number of cultural expressions of landscape. Inuit and Western perceptions of the Arctic are analysed by examining a series of thematic and cognitive 'maps', drawings and satellite imagery. The study focuses on how these forms of landscape representation and methods of navigation shape the way in which the Arctic is perceived. Centred on Inuit coastal villages in Nunavik (Northern Quebec), Canada, the study illustrates different and converging ways of reading the landscape through maps.
The Igliniit project: Inuit hunters document life on the trail to map and monitor arctic change
Canadian Geographer, 2011
The Igliniit Project brought together Inuit hunters and geomatics engineering students during the International Polar Year (IPY) to collaborate on the development and testing of a new integrated GPS/PDA/mobile weather station technology for observing and monitoring the environment. Part of the larger Inuit Sea Ice Use and Occupancy Project (ISIUOP), the Igliniit Project culminated in a tangible product that is the direct result of combined scientific and Inuit knowledge, ingenuity, and engineering. This paper describes the Igliniit Project and examines the resulting technology as (i) an artifact of Inuit knowledge, science and engineering collaboration; (ii) a tool for meaningful engagement of Inuit in environmental science and community-based monitoring; (iii) a new approach and tool in the field of indigenous mapping; and (iv) an example of one technology in the expanding ecology of technologies in everyday Inuit life. The technology requires improvements in hardware and further development of supporting systems such as data management and mapping capability, but there is potential for the Igliniit Project approach and system to have wide appeal across the North for a variety of applications including environmental monitoring, wildlife studies, land use mapping, hazards research, place names research, archaeological and cultural inventories, and search and rescue operations.
Challenges, Opportunities, and the Way Forward For millennia, indigenous peoples have transferred knowledge to younger generations and amongst each other in a number of ways. In this chapter, the authors draw on their collective experience to discuss the dialogue and approaches that have emerged when using information and communications technologies (ICT) to represent indigenous knowledge (IK) of the Arctic through the Exchange for Local Observations and Knowledge of the Arctic (ELOKA). This includes the establishment of protocols and methods that use digital technologies to share and preserve documented forms of IK while attempting to maintain cultural significance , context, ownership, and control of the resources. We pay particular attention to indigenous cultural expression in the context of academic research projects involving researchers and institutions from outside of the community.
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.
ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 2021
The term Inuinnaqtun is often used in reference to a dialect of Inuktut spoken by Inuinnait (Copper Inuit) of the Central Canadian Arctic. The broader meaning of Inuinnaqtun, however, is to speak, to create, to practice, to do, to think, to be, like an Inuinnaq (a human being). Inuinnaqtun was once its own robust ecosystem, with Inuinnait physically immersed in a landscape and way of life that nourished a fluent and full language, supported human relationships, and maintained a sophisticated body of cultural knowledge. The Inuinnait journey into the 21st century has challenged the practice of Inuinnaqtun, along with the connectivity of its ecosystem. How can an integrated Inuinnaqtun ecosystem be restored in contemporary Inuinnait society? In this paper, we outline the decade-long development of a digital mapping program to document traditional forms of engagement between Inuinnait people, language and land, and facilitate the continued circulation of knowledge that underlies these ...
2005
Inuit hunters of the Igloolik region orient themselves on the land by understanding wind behaviour, snowdrift patterns, animal behaviour, tidal cycles, currents, and astronomical phenomena. Inuit wayfinding methods are burdensome to learn, requiring years of quiet tutoring and experience, but are perfectly reliable. Concern arose in the mid-1990s that younger, less experienced hunters were beginning to rely too heavily on mechanized conveyances and electronic navigational aids. The use of global positioning system (GPS) units, particularly, has been steadily growing in Igloolik. This paper discusses the changes wrought by GPS use against the backdrop of interacting social and technological change. It argues that an understanding of these changes requires a model of technology that depends on the patterns created by devices rather than the devices (or systems of devices) themselves. A paradigmatic theory of technology based on the work of the philosopher Albert Borgmann is presented, and a distinction is made between technology that is physically and socially engaging and technology that reduces engagement with experience of the land, people, and local knowledge. It is suggested that there is a risk of turning landscapes into constructed entities or commodities, which is what happens figuratively when we are too attentive to the map and not the territory.
2020
This paper describes progress of the ongoing postdoctoral project ARCVIS. The project is funded by a two-year individual fellowship from Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (2019-2021). ARCVIS gathers, maps, and disseminates representations of Indigenous peoples in the western Arctic (Greenland, Canada, Alaska) between 1800 and 1880. The material is comprised of watercolours, pencil sketches, photographs, and prints, such as lithographs, woodcuts, and engravings. The visual material is scattered in archives around the world and this project’s aim is to gather that material together and display it geographically, linked to its places of origin in the Arctic. A key element of this project is the collation and interpretation of the material through an open access online geospatial platform, which combines the visuality of exploration and travel with digital methods that seek to bring out the richly contextual information often bypassed in visual documentary records. The project will present...
Archaeology and Oral History of Inuit Land Use on the Kazan River, Nunavut: a Feature-based Approach
Arctic 53(3):260-278, 2000
Archaeology and oral history are used to interpret recent Inuit land use along the lower Kazan River. A record of caribou crossings, camps, and other places of cultural significance generated by Inuit elders from Baker Lake is combined with the results of an archaeological survey to identify important spring and fall sites. The survey, which employed differential Geographic Positioning System (GPS) technology to record individual archaeological features (e.g., tent rings, caches), has resulted in a Geographic Information System (GIS) database for the Fall Caribou Crossing National Historic Site. Individual 'sites' are distinguished, within a more general 'non-site' distribution of features in the study region, on the basis of two criteria: clustering of features and the known history of use of these places by elders and previous generations of Harvaqtuurmiut Inuit. Analysis of the different kinds of features indicates considerable site variation, but also some seasonal patterning: fall has a more distinctive signature than spring. In this study, individual features are used to address questions of regional land use, site definition, and season of site occupation. This emphasis on the feature reflects the special circumstances of this project, which include the need to record archaeological materials occurring on the ground surface and spread over a large area and the availability of elders to interpret those materials.