Book Review: Knowing Places: The Inuinnait, Landscapes and the Environment
Knowing Places: The Inuinnait, Landscapes and the Environment, Béatrice Collignon. Translation of Les Inuit : ce qu’ils savent du territoire. Translation and scientific editing by Linna Weber Müller-Willie. Circumpolar Research Series No.10, CCI Press, University of Alberta: Edmonton, Canada, 2006. ISSN 0838133X.
The points become fewer, the lines fade out as fewer and fewer people travel along them. Empty spaces increase… the territory has become increasingly limited to those few points from which they can carry out…activities only to provide extra food….The lines from those points all lead back to the settlement. These lines have begun to resumble modern highways where the modern weekend hunter travels, unaware of the areas on either side – areas that used to be important to his father, grandfather and forefathers.” (p.195)
Can one of the most different appreciations of the landscape and sense of geography can be found amongst the Inuit? In an environment where ice-covered land blurs into sea, there is not only a detailed vocabulary and profound sense of snow and ice, for example landfast and sea ice, but also of location and the landscape as an ecosystem of animals and their territories. Survival over centuries has depended on close attention to the details and possibilities of hunting and fishing grounds, but this is changing with life in settlements, more rapid travel by snowmobile rather than by dogsled, a shift to English, European bans on seal-hunting and more recently a US ban which ended the livelihood of guides for polar bear hunters. A small ecotourism industry exists on Victoria Island.
Collignon offers a very readable and important account of place-naming amongst the Inuinnait, the Inuit who live in the western areas of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Her work is centred specifically in and around Ulukhaqtuuq ([Ulukhaktok] formerly Holman) on Victoria Island. She marvellously describes the cultural and economic schanges which are resulting in a loss of geographical knowledge and declining familiarity with the region. While,
the Baffin Islanders made use of the increase range of the machines…Inuinnait have primarily taken advantage of the speed. They do not travel farther, but do not stop at the traditional staging areas anymore and they go ‘back and forth’ more often….from the 1980s onward, snowmobiles…have been a means toward a life increasingly centred in and around the settlement.” (p.188)
The result of several sojourns and over more than a decade by the French anthropologist, the book is an excellent translation of her Ph.D. research for the benefit of northern residents. On the one hand she gives us diary-like descriptions of going hunting, showing how people interact with and comment on sites and the landscape, on the other hand by analyzing place names she shows the importance of place to memory and the relational deep-structure of Inuinnait geography.
In this sense of space, nuna (the land in general including earth, ice and water) is differentiated in practice from seasonal hiku (ice sheet) 5where no game live and tariuq (salt sea). These surfaces are linked by lines of travel which cross otherwise ignored spaces where game is not abundant. This geography is enlivened by memory and significance which is only hinted at in place names which often refer to activities possible at a place, or a significant event that took place at a site. Uumajuit (animals, and all living beings including people and mythical creatures) also contribute to a spiritual sense of nuna as a network of sites as a living environment. ‘Great myths and small tales from the oral tradition are one of the many signs on the land, that thransform the landscape into a ‘memoryscape’, as Mark Nuttall describes it (1992:51-58). With changes in travel, language and the Inuinnait economy, many are now less familiar with this geography and less engaged in the activities that it refers to and which in turn refresh it.
While it was once more detailed and intensely engaged, Inuinnait toponymy still reveals a zone of assembly embracing settlements and nearby ancient fall and winter camps where the community once reunited annually. These places are often named for regular activities or events. Second, spaces of trails which are traversed rather than inhabited on seasonal migrations which may now only be quick hunting trips out from town on snowmobiles, and a third border zone which were historically assocated with summer camps and with trapping during the fur trade period from about 1920-1970. Beyond these areas of activity, lie less frequented southern spaces such as southern cities visited by plane (sometimes for health care) and the globalized mediascape of places represented on television shows.
Collignon incisively notes the contrast with Western categories such as physical versus human geography, for Nuna and Uumajuit work together, with the latter nested in the former like a folderol doll. She gives two examples: a place called Hiuqqitak is ‘the shallow and sandy place’ but the proper translation would be not this Nuna dictionary sense, but ‘caribou crossing place’, a contextual, Uumajuit, sense of the place. Nilak (mouth of a river where the ice forms a high pile) is not merely topology but ‘to anyone who has travelled in the Arctic is “an obstacle”’, which would be the correct translation. The importance of contextual experience for understanding place names illustrates the problems that can come with a shift from Inuinnaqtun to speaking English in everyday life, especially amongst young people, which creates a divide between generations.
She realizes that this unsettles the analytic structure of her research, but this is the point: she is presenting something which we can only grasp via its lack of fit with Western principles of place-naming and geography. Inuinnait knowledge of places is rich in subjectivity. A Qablunaat’s (White, Southerner) map is held to conceal the personality of the map-maker:
In the Inuinnait world, since it is the observer’s point of view that is the focus, when an island is called ‘the last one’ we get a clear picture of the viewpoint of a certain traveller moving in a certain direction. Moreover, a number of places have two names instead ofjust one, allowing speakers to refer to a place with a different name, a different meaning, depending on where they are at the moment of the description. A place name of a western map, however, is always the same…. An Inuinnaq toponym will often reflect the speakers direction of observation…. ‘The last one’ becomes ‘the first one’, ‘the distant one’ become ‘the closer one’…. on the return trip, each landmark will look different in the reverse direction. The relationship will have changed and so the character and sense of the place will have changed as well.” (p.167)
There are lots of duplicate place names - for example, Qikiqtalik (the place that has an island). Their importance is in relation to surrounding places. Innuinnait geography is not autonomous, not isolated from practical knowledge: ‘the tendency is to use either common everyday words, or words that belong to…hunting or physiology’ (p.138) that related to activities. Few toponyms relate to travel – this is no signpost system for nomads but an engaged and emotional spatialization of the land which casts it as places for this and places for that, sites where so and so did such and such or where a certain event happened.
Given the way enacted knowledge works….The Inuinnait framework of geographic knowledge is a structure that resides in the mind, ready for use when called upon. When needed, it springs to life and becomes a working paradigm. An empty structure when out of context, this paradigm can only exist in the context of a particular situation.” (p.155)
In sum, this toponymy does not simply a matter of geosophy, as some readers may conclude. It suggests not an abstract but a real, qualitative geography which truly is ‘landscape’ and not merely terrain. What is useful is the twin ideas of a, first, a ‘framework’ even if this sounds too much like an abstraction rather than also something imagined. And second, a ‘paradigm’ which again doesn’t communicate the sense of lived and embodied understanding. In clarifying what I would call a ’social spatialization’ (R. Shields, Places on the Margin , 1999), the anthropologists’ analytic toolkit fails. Although she says, “The abstract, virtual map of the Inuinnait is closer to the experience of the land it depicts that the Western system,” (p.167) this smuggles in a Western tendency to collapse together the abstract and virtual: the conceptual is seen as more or less the same as the qualitative leading to artificial difficulties in distinguishing the ‘abstract’ from the ‘virtual’, that is, in being able to differentiate the concept or idea of a place from its intangible but qualitative significance. For example, it is not merely a ’shallow place’ but one ‘where caribou are found’ – potentially a life and death difference in meaning. This is at the root of the paradox of Inuinnait toponymy: it is not a system of abstract locational signs but an annotated geography which casts places as the spatialized sites of activities, affordances and events.
Thus, even this inspired book never seems to come to grips with the mythic and geosophical elements it describes, even though it introduces the reader to them so well by narrating trips to hunting camps or a day-in-life of a teen in an Arctic settlement. Mythical beings which roam in certain places are fears, but in everyday life, they evoke a sense of palpable dread and a quickened step, which a scientist’s terms such as ‘paradigm’ poorly communicates, but the book speaks volumes about the changing nature of this intangible geography:
The modern young hunter does not stop to look at or use the surroundings. He does not think of the land as a collection of elements related to each other and to the people. Expressions such as ‘travelled territory’ and ‘inhabited territory’ no longer describe a reality. As an image… the land is losing its cohesion. It is becoming a puzzle of places poorly bound together, with too many missing pieces. The surfaces are becoming every smaller, seldom connected to the rest of the territory. …As everyone goes faster they neglect the old stopover places; they forget the names and qualities of the places along the trail. The territory becomes simplified: worn down, a skeleton with no flesh or muscle or connecting tissue; it disintegrates.” (p.195)
This is an essential and accessible book on the Canadian Eastern Arctic and its indigenous inhabitants, the Inuinnait, written for both specialists and the general public.
Reviewed by: Rob Shields
- Rob