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. Continue reading ›
Tagged Arctic, Inuinnait, Nunavut, Spatialization
