Month: November 2008

Listening to our Past is the online version of a series of collections of oral history books published by Nunavut Arctic College. The series is based on interviews and talks by Inuit elders invited to the college. There are five collections in the series:

1. A journey into Inuit Traditional Knowledge
2. Winds of change
3. North meets south
4. Development of Government Services in the arctic
5. The creation of Nunavut

The focus of the first series is passing on traditional Inuit knowledge such as childrearing practices, shamanism, and traditional health and law.  There is video footage in that records elders talking in their native language, about traditional games. There is an animated story about a Shaman’s spiritual journey as raven.  In our class discussions we have talked about the issues of viewing a culture from the outside.  It was interesting to observe the practices used in this animation.  The Shaman begins his spiritual journey tied-up on the floor of an igloo.  In the film Atanarjuat, the Shaman is bound during the ceremony.  Until seeing this website animation, I had not connected this as part of a ceremony.

In the second series, Winds of Change, the focus remains on the ways before the missionaries, but it begins to question the traditional customs as a way to better understand the contemporary issues facing the Inuit. This examines the interplay between Christianity and Shamanism.

The North meets South series discusses how military deployments to the Artic during the second world changed the land, and indigenous populations’ relationship to it. Stories make one think about how much Western cultures impose on indigenous cultures without thinking. For example in this case, the influx of HBC goods, hiring Inuit for pay, seemed to draw the people away from their relationship with the land.

This is an amazing project, and web presence.

This site provides a series of National Post articles that look at First Nations engagement with other cultures through a variety of discussions about economic development. Topics include: living off band land, ability to hold jobs, casinos, governance issues, business acheivements, and education.  The site also includes an interactive map that helps to place all of these key issues for reserves within the larger geographical context of Canada.

The education article questions whether private schools are a better alternative for native kids.  The article  describes how one private school helped turn around education for native students who have now become leaders in native education. The article also discusses how changes to education funding over the years have made this type of schooling more difficult for native families to access.  The page also includes links to interviews with principals, teachers, parents and students.

This link is to a 1999 CBC radio broadcast about issues of overfishing, fishing out of season, aboriginal treaty rights, and non-aboriginal fishing rights. The link is interesting from a teaching and learning perspective because it uses video, audio, and internet technologies to present a variety of perspectives on the issues and implications surrounding this news story.   Perspectives include aboriginal and non-aboriginal, commercial fishers, native fishers, and journalists.

The page also includes links to similarly presented archived news stories on land claims, logging, and whaling, and also interesting from a historical perspective.  The clips and the other links on this page are from the CBC archives and provide examples of attitudes and actions surrounding these stories which date back to a period between 1971 to 1999.

Our World, Our Way of Life is a virtual exhibition preserving and expressing the culture and connections to the land of the Inuit, and the Haida Peoples. I feel that this site is intended to increase awareness of these cultures among non-Native, or among non-Haida and non-Inuit peoples. The site provides a great synopsis of the languages, and relationships of these two cultures with their natural world.  There are descriptions of the language, their way of life and communties.  I was interested to learn that the syllabic writing used by some Canadian Inuit was first introduced by Moravian missionaries in 1770. In our class discussions we have discussed how technology can impact indigenous cultures, and questioned the meaning of “traditional”.  The link to the Inuit Hunting page makes a point that echos our class discussions. The author commsent that given the changes in hunting technology, the Inuit are often asked how they can call themselves “traditional” hunters when they no longer use their old technologies.  There is also a beautiful true story by an Inuit hunter that exemplifies his cultural and spiritual connection to the land and the animals.