Day: November 22, 2008

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.