On April 1, 1999, after decades of discussion, Nunavut was finally created as Canada’s newest territory. Carved off the Northwest Territories to form an eastern-Arctic homeland for the majority-Inuit population, the birth of this territory has created much expectation as well as some skepticism. Four years later, much criticism is still voiced against this experience in selfgovernment and skepticism is even higher now in some quarters than it was at the time of Nunavut’s creation. The second election of Nunavut’s MLAs last February was another occasion to point to the critical social and economic problems facing the territory.
Yet, despite its very real problems, Nunavut is also home to a very significant and positive experiment in cultural and political affirmation. In fact, Inuit traditional knowledge has evolved in the span of a decade from contextualized and practical (and often spiritualized) knowledge, for the most part conceived in an ecological framework, to a new organic way of knowing, Qaujimajatuqangi (IQ). A closer look at this process through official documents, policies and the work of such bodies as the IQ Task Force (2002) help shed light on the significance of governmental autonomy for cultural affirmation and empowerment.
Nunavut is an idea and a human invention as much as it is a rather harsh and isolated physical space (by southern standards). It is home-place for the Inuit, a people who have inherited a distinct identity with its own cultural roots and history. But to the extent that the concept has long been supported by a host of studies— from those by policy analysts seeking greater administrative efficiency to those by environmental groups and academics seeking a launching pad for New Age alternatives— Nunavut is also a romantic and ideological construction by southerners. The North and the Aboriginal peoples who inhabit these vast regions have long been a blank slate onto which the West projects new ideas. This was made abundantly clear in recent histories, including that of the Mackenzie Valley pipeline hearings in the 1970s, and in early documents such as the Dene Manisfesto.
It is only recently that Inuit have had the power and the capacity to contribute to the discourse on Nunavut and things northern, and on Inuitness itself. They have taken over the reins from anthropologists, environmentalists, and political scientists in this regard. And the establishment of Nunavut was instrumental to the emergence of this new assertiveness.
Indeed, legislation and policies inherited from the “old” Northwest Territories are being rewritten to breathe sovereign life into Nunavut. In this context, policies are not cutand-dried value-neutral documents but richly embedded statements of values, identity, and relations among Inuit and with the “other.” Legislation “from the ground up” has helped bring cohesion to a people who until recently lived in small, scattered camps with several dialects and ecological adaptations, and has contributed to the projection onto the rest of the world of a common Inuit identity.
In recent decades there has been a tremendous interest in Aboriginal traditional knowledge, principally because Western scientific knowledge has come up short in resolving fundamental problems that are rooted in values, for example, environmental problems, sustainability in all its dimensions, and the role of the individual in society.
Earlier writings on Aboriginal traditional knowledge conceived of it as a situated or contextual knowledge based on personal and practical experience “on the land” and transmitted orally from generation to generation. Hence the urgency for recording the traditional knowledge of elders before they passed on. For instance, in “Traditional Knowledge Policy,” the Government of the Northwest Territories defined traditional knowledge as “knowledge and values which have been acquired through experience, observation, from the land or from spiritual teachings, and handed down from one generation to another.”
In contrast, the Qaujimajatuqangi (IQ) of today, as a form of knowledge for understanding and explaining Nunavut, is conceived as a dynamic, organic and evolutionary work in progress rather than a fixed and diminishing product. IQ is much more than the memory traces of mortal elders, with all the limitations in scope and future utility that this implies. For instance, IQ was recently defined by the IQ Task Force as “the Inuit ways of doing things: the past, present and future knowledge, experience and values of Inuit society.” According to The Nunavut Economic Strategy, “Inuit knowledge includes not only what has been handed down from the past, but also what is contemporary and changing.” The new Nunavut Wildlife Act (1993) says in its preamble that IQ “means traditional Inuit values, knowledge, behaviour, perceptions, and expectations.”
These words mark the transformation of IQ from contextualized knowledge to ways of knowing that are more fluid and amenable to human construction. The new IQ evolves and is defined over time by the Inuit themselves not by southern-trained academics. IQ is not fixed but is responsive to needs, whether those needs are to provide an adaptive understanding of wildlife, define Inuit culture and identity, or adopt a strategic approach to interpreting past, present and future relations with Canada and the world at large.
Inuit have always afforded much respect to elders, and certainly it is elders who have accumulated much wisdom of the land and of wildlife. This is widely recognized by scientists researching northern regions. However, when knowledge is taken out of context and generalized, or as some would say, commodified, it is typically younger Inuit, with their feet in “both worlds,” who must rise to the challenge.
It is only since the 1950s, when the Inuit were encouraged to move into settlements with schools, that they began to make the transition from the oral language tradition to the written language (syllabics were introduced by the missionaries). And it is only with the advent of Inuit political organizations such as the early Eskimo Brotherhood (later Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, now Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami), created and funded largely by the federal government, that Inuit began to develop and project a political identity. Through vision statements and public relations documents, they began the task of weaving their own stories and myths about what it means to be Inuit. The dynamic young leaders of these organizations were fiery young Inuit, educated for the most part in federal residential schools.
Since its creation, the Government of Nunavut has significantly contributed to this process and has taken important strides to increase the use of IQ as both a foundation for the traditional and mixed economy in Nunavut and a tool for the day-to-day operations of government.
Just as culture is not frozen in time but rather evolves, IQ has become the conduit and epistemological glue for creating and projecting a culture onto the new place called Nunavut. IQ is not yet sufficiently codified and grounded through discourse in narrative and official documents to provide an answer for all contingencies, but it nevertheless provides broad guiding principles to evaluate whether programs and policies are culturally appropriate for Inuit. For instance, the Department of Culture, Language, Elders and Youth has recently created the Inuit Qaujimajatuqangi Katimajitt, an external council of 11 people who provide advice to the government on the context in which government activities are conducted. The corresponding internal counterpart, consisting of representatives from each Nunavut government department, is the Inuit Qaujimajatuqangita Isumaksaqsiuqtingit (IQI).
Most governmental documents now require a statement about how IQ priorities and principles will be addressed in action plans and budgets. While much of the IQ committee’s work will be proactive and visionary, some will remain post hoc and issuedriven. The IQ committee’s work will function as a lens through which we can see how the Nunavut government is resonating with Inuit culture and the Inuit way of knowing. Senior bureaucrats, Inuit and non-Inuit, will be expected to use their own judgment in implementing IQ in their day-today operations.
There has also been considerable emphasis on trying to integrate IQ with Western science, or what is known as Qallunat Qaujimajatuqangi (Q2), loosely translated as the white man’s way of knowing and doing things. There is broad support in Nunavut for the idea that integration of IQ and Q2 can offer more effective knowledge for approaching discrete applications such as resource management (e.g. Nunavut bowhead whale studies), economic development planning, and global climate change. There are still conflicts, however, over such issues as polar bear management, where there sometimes appears to be a struggle between IQ and the international principles and practices of science-based management.
One obvious example of this integration is the new Nunavut Wildlife Act, which was passed in November 2003 after many months of extensive (and very expensive) consultation between the government’s professional Western-trained wildlife biologists and resource managers, Inuit harvesters, public officials, and a powerful IQ committee, and that will come into force January 2005. The Act was also written with considerable sensitivity to “external” environmental and political thought about what a made-in-Nunavut wildlife act should resonate with. Its authors were very conscious of the fact that the Act would be cast into the international arena for critique.
The result is that the Act is perhaps different from any other such legislation in the world. It combines cultural knowledge and values from an oral language tradition with postmodern political sensitivities and Western mainstream environmental science. It also recognizes some tenets of the more radical streams of environmental thought such as deep ecology and animal rights ideology. For example, the Act’s IQ principle of Pijitsirniq means that a person with the power to make decisions must exercise that power to serve the people to whom he or she is responsible; Avatimik Kamattiarniq calls for nature to be treated holistically and with respect, as wildlife and habitat are interconnected and all actions have consequences, for good or ill; Iliijaaqaqtailiniq tells us that malice toward animals is prohibited and young harvesters should be taught to respect them; and Papattiniq is about guardianship and stewardship: wildlife belongs to nature and is not a commodity.
These “land” values are abstracted from Inuit traditional knowledge and history, but the terminology also resonates with deep ecology and animal rights. This is in spite of the fact that Inuit perspectives and interests often have conflicted with those of extreme environmentalism in issues such as Inuit sealing and whaling (and the more profound issue of the sustainable use and the non-use of wildlife resources). The Act also has a lot to say about relationships among Inuit, about relationships between Inuit with the “others,” and about how Western science will integrate with IQ.
Political discourse, beyond the nuts and bolts of everyday living, enables people to understand themselves and to present themselves to others with discrete identities. Just as all people continually redefine their identity, Inuit will continue to invent themselves and give themselves new voices through text-mediated discourse.
As a vehicle to shape policy development, however, the capacity of IQ will increasingly be taxed. There will inevitably be contradictions and challenges in the discourse and between the discourse and its historical antecedents, and between the cultural context and future directions. For instance, Nunavut MLAs (and elders) Manitok Thompson and David Iqaqrialu said that women’s shelters ignored IQ (Nunatsiaq News May 7). Madeline Qumautuk of the Qulliit Nunavut Status of Women Council begged to differ. “It’s not the old way all the time now because our life is very different today,” she said.
The manner in which Nunavut will manage these tensions is as important to its future as the manner with which it will deal with its social and economic difficulties.
Relationships have always figured prominently among the Inuit, with each other, with nature, and now with other peoples in the global village. But when one considers that Nunavut, with fewer than 30,000 people, makes up one-fifth of the land mass of Canada but receives 85 percent of its revenues from the Government of Canada, it is easy to understand why Canadian and international goodwill are very important. Nunavut is very conscious of how it is perceived beyond its borders, and this consciousness is very much about identity, power and scarce resources. In that sense, the need to negotiate new meanings and new relationships with the federal and international governments, and with the general public as well, will remain of paramount importance for Nunavut. In the public domain, good will toward this new territory is closely linked to the Inuit’s “green capital”— the perceived contribution that Inuit can make to solving environmental and political problems in Canada and the world as a whole.
This article originated as a Ph.D. paper; the opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Government of Nunavut.
