Northern Reflections

We have been in Iqaluit for a week. One of the first stops was the Arctic Ventures store. They have a good collection of Northern literature from Inhabit Media. All week, I have been reading The Hands’ Measure. It is a series of essays honouring Leah Aksaajuk Otak’s contribution to Arctic Science.

”Leah was an oral historian and linguist with the Nunavut Research Institute in Igloolik. Leah’s lifelong advocacy of Inuit culture and language was uniquely expressed in her passionate promotion of traditional sewing skills and clothing-making techniques.

”To measure with the hands” she asserted, was the essential first step in producing a perfectly fitting garment. Aptly this axiom serves as a proxy for Leah’s unwavering certainty about the essential role of tradition in contemporary Inuit society”.

The nineteen essays were edited by John MacDonald and Nancy Wachowich. Of particular note, for myself, were the contributions by Claudio Aporta and Hugh Brody. Claudio teaches at Dalhousie University. Hugh is an anthropologist and filmmaker and holds the Canada Research Chair at the University of the Fraser Valley.

Aporto’s essay ‘Living, Travelling, Sharing. How the Land permeates the Town through Stories’ contained the following quotation.

”The concept of ‘body of knowledge’ only scratches the surface of that complex relationship that Inuit have with their environment. As Tim Ingold (2000) has argued, it is in the unveiling of relationships that people truly learn, through a process that he calls ‘enskilment’. Many books have been written describing this or that aspect of Inuit knowledge, but knowledge separated from skills (and actual performance) has only partial meaning in the Inuit world. This is perhaps true of any knowledge, but in the Inuit approach to learning, knowledge, skills and performance are fundamentally entangled, to the point that separating them is detrimental or nonsensical.”

Or Hugh Brody’s essay on ‘The People’s Land – the Film’

”To write about the film now is to be reminded that… hundreds of others in the North were determined that Inuit history be known, Inuit knowledge respected and the Inuit land – the people’s land – be a continuing source of every kind of nourishment for the Inuit.” The People’s Land was filmed in Pond Inlet in 1974.

Visiting grandchildren in the North, this book raises a number of questions.

For example,
What is the concept of an elder in Western society?
What skills do we have to pass on?
What happens when you remove people (elders) from the land?

References

John MacDonald and Nancy Wachowich (ed). 2018. The Hands’ Measure. Published by Nunavut Arctic College Media.

Inhabit Education is a Nunavut-based educational publishing company with a mandate to provide educators and parents with educational resources that are infused with authentic Northern perspectives, ways of life and imagery.Inhabit Education

 

 

 

 

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