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Inuit social studies
¹eaching and ¹eacher Education, Vol. 14, No. 6, pp. 565—577, 1998 ( Published by 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain 0742-051X/98 $19.00#0.00
PII: S0742-051X (97) 00050-4
INUIT SOCIAL STUDIES: A VARIANT ON A COMMON THEME JOHN WOLFORTH McGill University, 3700 McTavish Street, Montreal PQ, Canada H3A IY2
with ALLEN AGLUKKAK, MARY EETOOLOOK, MARY GILLIS, ELI HIQINIQ, JESSIE LYALL, MARGARET LYALL, SUSIE OHOKANNOAK, MOLLIE OLIKTOAK, JOANNI SALERINNA, SARAH TAKOLIK and KUBLU TUCKTOO1 Abstract—In a social studies methods course I taught to Inuit students (all teacher-trainees) in the Kitikmeot region of Canada’s Northwest Territories, I tried to mediate between the knowledge and professional skills required of a social studies teacher as these are presented in a methods textbook written for a mainstream readership, and the knowledge brought to the course by the students. We used, among other things, three devices which are often used in the teaching of social studies: the genealogy, the concept web and the time line. In applying each of these devices, we tried to organize our work so that ‘Inuit knowledge’ was given the same or greater weight than ‘non-Inuit knowledge’. By using as referents a standard methods text, primary documentary materials and oral histories, we situated ‘Inuit knowledge’ within the framework of social studies methods. ( Published by 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Prologue In 1999, the eastern part of Canada’s Northwest Territories will become the territory of Nunavut. Nunavut is divided into three regions each with its own School Board; Baffin, Keewatin and Kitikmeot. This article is set in Kitikmeot, the region which includes the arctic coast, the eastern part of Victoria Island as well as some other islands of the arctic archipelago (Figure 1). The geographic scale is vast, Victoria Island alone being only a little smaller than Great Britain. Until quite recently, the population, which anthropologists (Jenness, 1922; Rasmussen, 1931, 1932) divided into the Copper Inuit in the west and Netsilik Inuit in the east, was dispersed over most of this vast area and moved in well established seasonal migration patterns. Today, the population is concentrated in a few settlements; Cambridge Bay (Ikaluktutiaq), Coppermine (Kugluktuk), Spence Bay or Taloyoak (Talurjuak), Gjoa Haven (Oqsuqtooq) and Pelly Bay (Aqviligjuaq)2. None of these has a population of more than a few hundred, but within the Arctic context they represent the urban milieu that provides a window to the wider
world. For teachers, as for other Inuit, there is a constant tension between the traditions of the Inuit world and the world outside. Television, frequent and reliable air service, and periodic influxes of southern workers have increased the impact of southern Canadian culture on the Arctic and, in reaction to these outside influences, Inuit have sought to define themselves in terms of a traditional land-based culture that is increasingly under threat. Education, and specifically the education of Inuit teachers, plays a critical role in this process as the means by which Inuit are gaining control of the curriculum, mainly through the use of language in the elementary grades. Mediating Between Social Studies Technique and Inuit Knowledge This paper is based on the experience of an intensive two-week social studies course I, as an instructor from a southern university, gave to eleven Inuit teacher-trainees at Cambridge Bay, NWT. The course is part of a program developed collaboratively since the mid-1970s
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Figure 1. The boundaries and principal communities of Nunavut.
by McGill University and the Eastern Arctic (now the Nunavut) Teacher Education Program to give Inuit teachers the opportunity of earning recognized university credentials through courses offered in their own communities, and in some cases, in their own language. Like other similar programs (Cram, 1985; Wolforth, 1991), this one walks the narrow line between providing material that both meets the academic standards of a respected southern institution, and is at the same time accessible and relevant to teachers whose formal academic preparation may be weaker than that of other undergraduates and whose cultural and linguistic base is quite different. I saw it as my task to try to bridge these differences, to introduce the students to the skills required of good social studies
teachers in a way that respected, and in fact drew from, their own experience as Inuit. Although the course dealt with several social studies issues, this paper focusses on the treatment of three pedagogical devices—the genealogy, the concept web and the time line—which formed part of the framework on which the course was constructed. I recognized that all of us came to the course with our own knowledge. The students know what it is to be Inuit and to teach Inuit children. I know what it is to be a social studies teacher, and to access sources of information which may not be available to the students, even about their own culture. Although communities contain resources making up their own particular funds of knowledge (Moll & Greenberg, 1990), theory and method are required to identify them, and
Inuit Social Studies: A Variant on a Common Theme
pedagogical skills to translate them into classroom practice. It was unnecessary for the students to learn the codes of their own community, as would a neophyte non-native teacher (McAlpine & Crago, 1995), but they might need to be inducted into the codes of social studies practice, if for no other reason than they work alongside southern teachers whose credentials have been earned in mainstream teacher education programs and that they teach a curriculum that draws, at least in part, from mainstream knowledge. In many of the teacher education programs that have developed in Canada for aboriginal teachers, there has been an assumption that their graduates should be ‘teachers plus’ (Nyce, 1990), that they should have the attributes and skills of their non-aboriginal colleagues plus those that they derive from their own culture. This is a difficult objective to achieve. Some would argue that any attempt to induct aboriginal people, or any people that form a cultural minority, into mainstream knowledge inevitably diminishes or subverts their own culture, since the two knowledge bases are essentially antipathetic. One response to this position is to suggest that mainstream knowledge can be learned as a kind of ‘foreign language’, to be used in situations where the exclusive use of minority cultural referents would have the effect of disempowering the user. This is the strategy that has been proposed, for example, for African—Americans, for whom the exclusive use of ‘Black English’ in certain situations (a job interview, for instance) might be disadvantageous. Better to learn standard American English, not to replace the vernacular, but to be brought out in just such situations (Delpit, 1988). Another response is to suggest that there is no ‘mainstream’ and that knowledge can and should be constructed by each cultural group. This is an argument that is more difficult (but not impossible) to make for, say, medicine or engineering, but it certainly can be made quite effectively for social studies. One of the goals of social studies is to ‘socialize’, to induct the learner not into a body of knowledge like physics or mathematics, but into the values, organizing concepts and behaviours of the society of which they are a part. Thus, social studies for Inuit or for other aboriginal people is constructed around an analysis of criteria that aboriginal
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people themselves see as important, and nonaboriginal text is evaluated according to these same criteria (Dillabough & McAlpine, 1996). My own response was to take the middle path, to acknowledge that since the students were working towards a recognized university credential (a Bachelor of Education degree in this case), they would be short-changed if they did not receive some exposure to the same kind of content that would be received by students taking the same course on the university campus. On the other hand, I realized that this content would have little meaning or value to them if it was not linked to their own experience, and to the knowledge that they brought with them to the course. In this sense, then, I wanted the course to be a kind of ‘social studies plus’, an Inuit variant of mainstream social studies. I felt the students should be introduced to enough of the content and methods of social studies disciplines like history and geography for them to feel confident in their professional practice and able to increase their competence through further study, but that they should do so in a context where their mastery of certain aspects of the content would be superior to my own. Together then, students and instructor, we would try to reconfigure social studies, as it might be represented in a standard text, so that it would be more relevant to Inuit culture. In this way we would construct a knowledge of social studies that would draw, hopefully in equal measure, from both the mainstream academic and from Inuit tradition. The social studies text we used in the course (Wright, 1995) provides as good a guide as any to what social studies teachers might need to know. It is one of the texts used by instructors giving the same course on the university campus and at Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit. Although it happens to use some examples from Inuit culture, it is clearly aimed at the southern teacher. The vocabulary, the frame of reference and most of the examples are relatively unfamiliar to the students, whose travels south like those of many Inuit have been confined to the occasional trip to Edmonton for shopping or medical treatment, or sometimes to more distant places like Mexico or the Caribbean for holidays, and whose most common view of the non-Inuit world is through the distorting lens of television.
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Engaging with Time Some of the concepts of social studies that are taken for granted in the text such as the one used might be regarded as neutral: they are in fact loaded with implied cultural content. For example, the concept of the ‘time line’, which eventually formed one of the organizing structures for the course can be quite culturally specific. First and fundamentally, there is the idea that time is linear. Second there is the idea that it can be quantified, into seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, years, centuries and millennia. Third, there is the idea that there is an implied logic in the sequence in which events are arranged on the time line and that the events may be causally related to each other. Fourth, there is the idea that these events are intrinsically important, and that there is some basis for selecting them over others. However, since ‘time’, however defined, is one of the most fundamental concepts of social studies, along with ‘space’, ‘relationship’ and others, it did seem important to deal with in some fundamental way. The vehicle chosen (as a precourse assignment) was the genealogy (Aaron, 1992), since it organizes time according to the lives of parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles and others who are important to Inuit culture and identity. The genealogy also has the advantage that it does not have to be quantified unless it is necessary to connect the events it summarizes with other events, as it would be in observing that, ‘Grandfather was born in 1929, the year of the Wall Street Crash.’ In a pre-course assignment, the students were asked to draw a tree with themselves as the trunk, mother and father as branches, maternal and paternal grandmothers and grandfathers as sub- branches, and so on. This presented no major problem although ‘roots’ would have made a more appropriate metaphor than ‘branches’, and purists would of course point out that Inuit are, in any case, only familiar with trees in books and on television. Where the problems did arise were in defining what is meant by such terms as ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘grandmother’ and ‘grandfather’. The students are of course aware of the biologically based definition of these terms and commonly use these definitions themselves. However, they also know that other definitions are possible, for example those
based on the ‘naming relationships’, in which the name given to a baby and who bestows that name have an importance that can override biology. They were asked also to choose one person from the family tree and write a short history of their life, based either on an interview with that person or with others who knew them. The exercise was intended to be as open-ended as possible to allow the person to define their own frame of reference rather than one imposed upon them. Each person was also asked to tell a story about one event in their life that they remembered very clearly. The purpose of this part of the exercise was to show that ‘time’ has depth as well as linearity (if indeed it is linearity it has and not circularity) and that it is possible to ‘zoom in’ to one particular part of the story in order to get progressively finer detail. Its purpose also was to provide a source of primary materials that might later be used to create instructional materials. The data that this task yielded was far too rich to reproduce here although it is hoped the students will continue to use it in their social studies teaching. The accounts recorded by the students opened many questions, as well as providing some answers, about pre-contact and early contact ways of life. They also acted as a heuristic device inviting the exploration of other ethnographic data from published sources. The following excerpt from the account of Kublu Tucktoo is typical in that it hints at information on migrations, naming practices, the impact of Christianity, modes of travel, use of animal resources, and burial practices. Jenny Akana has no idea where she was born, but knows she was born in Uyagaqyuaq [Melbourne Island]. A lady named her Akana, Qangattaq’s mother’s name. Her English name was given by a minister just before she and Frank Analuk got married around close to Christmas. They used to travel by dogs in the wintertime and walk in the summer with the help of dogs carrying their belongings on their backs. [Jenny Akana] used to enjoy running towards her parents coming back from a polar bear hunt to go meet them when she was younger. They ate the meat and used the skin for bed mattresses or whatever they needed. There was this one time when she went with her two brothers to the top of the hill to see if their parents were coming from a polar bear hunt, only to find that the two brothers came back running fast
Inuit Social Studies: A Variant on a Common Theme
because there was a polar bear coming their way and left her running and crying to go and tell others about the polar bear. She remembers when the polar bear came right up to the iglu porch, and everyone ran in all directions... Both her parents died of sickness in the same area and they used to bury them on the ground with rocks around them. She does not know if they would still be there but figures the animals probably scattered them by now. But the ring of rocks would still be there.
By engaging the students in the analysis of several such accounts, it was possible to have them begin to look beyond the particularities to the concepts referred to above, and to construct a more generalized picture of the life of their immediate forebears based on contemporary accounts. It also provided an opportunity to discuss questions of relevance and of how information that may be relevant to one question is irrelevant to another. Underlying this question are some epistemological issues which need not be confronted explicitly, but which colour the way in which we work as teachers. ‘Relevance’ is a relativistic concept, since nothing (and every thing) is relevant unless the terms of reference are defined and we know what it is we wish to understand. If what we want to understand is ‘Inuit culture’, then there is clearly more that is relevant to us than if we wanted to understand ‘polar bear hunting’, though the latter might be a sub-set of the former. What we needed was some kind of map or template which would enable us to determine how information might fit together. The Concept Web Taba (1971) provides a simple device for developing conceptual thinking by analysing photographs for their content. Since her work was reported in the textbook used in the course (Wright, 1995, pp. 46—51), it was available to us, although of course Taba’s illustrations were of a world that was relatively unfamiliar. Instead, we examined a set of photographs I had taken locally (on an earlier visit when longer hours of daylight made photography more feasible) to identify as many as possible of the objects shown and to put them into conceptual categories. An example would be one in which objects identified as skidoos, trucks, qumatiqs (sleds), bicycles, planes and boats are all grouped into a category
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that has something to do with the concept of ‘transportation’. The question might arise as to whether powered objects like skidoos were in the same category as unpowered objects like qumatiqs, or whether dogs should also be in the same category as the others and, if so, under what circumstances. With some understanding of conceptual thinking, it was now possible to introduce the concept web as a means of organizing information, and then as a means of organizing curriculum (Novak & Gowin, 1984; Martorella, 1991). Fortuitously, the textbook used contained an illustration of a simple concept web based on the word ‘Inuit’ (Wright, 1995, p. 35). Thus, it was a possible to take this fairly simplified template and develop from it a more complex conceptual structure. An intriguing sidelight on this task was provided by the fact that the students used two totally different orthographies. Whereas syllabics of the kind adapted by the Reverend E.J Peck from the earlier system devised for the Cree by the Reverend James Evans are used universally in the Eastern Arctic, the Western Arctic (and Greenland) use the Roman alphabet. Cambridge Bay is the divide. Consequently, it was necessary to develop two different concept webs (Figure 2), one in Inuktitut using syllabics, and the other in Inuinnaqtun using Roman script. The task for both was to take the root concept ‘Inuit’ and to develop from it a map of related concepts moving outwards to those that become more and more particular. Constructing the web raised some interesting conceptual questions. Is ‘store’ a subset of ‘shelter’ or of ‘trade’? Since ‘Inuit’ is the basic concept, should the only examples of subconcepts be those that relate directly to Inuit, and to no other culture? If ‘inukshuk’ (a beacon of stones, piled on top of each other to resemble a human being) is an example of communication, is ‘television’ also within the same category? What is the basis for categorization of concepts? Does it make a difference whether the central concept is ‘Inuit’, as in the Inuinnaqtun version, or ‘Inuit Present’ and Inuit Past’, as in the Inuktitut version? A practical value of this task is that it demonstrates a way of taking a first run at curriculum building by organizing content within some kind of coherent structure. This was especially important since the Northwest Territories has
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Figure 2(a). Scanned images of the concept webs, based on the word ‘Inuit,’ prepared in Inuktitut (syllabics) and Inuinnaqtun (Roman script), with an English translation of the latter, ignoring those terms, for example ones relating to clothing, for which there is no translation.
recently introduced a new holistic, culturally based curriculum guide called Inuuqatigiit (NWT Department of Education, Culture and Employment, 1994), the use of which invites teachers to make connections. It was now possible to begin to map some of the topics of the Inuuqatigiit curriculum (such as ‘names and naming’, ‘elders’) into the framework of the two concept webs in order to draw attention to further interrelationships and to how they might be explored in the classroom. The Elders It was at this stage that the students suggested that we should involve the elders themselves in our discussions—a suggestion that did not surprise me for the following reason. One of the emerging characteristics of aboriginal societies—whether Inuit or First Nations—as they seek to reconstruct a cultural identity within the
educational systems over which they are gaining increasing control is that the elders are looked up to as authorities (Kirkness, 1992). As aboriginal languages take on a more important role both as the medium of instruction (at least in the elementary grades) and as that which distinguishes the aboriginal from the non-aboriginal person, the elders are looked to for their expertise. Inuktitut, including its dialectical variants, is one of the three aboriginal languages in Canada (the others being Ojibwa and Cree) which stand a reasonable chance of survival. However, although it is spoken by a large number of individuals as a first language, it is often only the elders that speak it well. Like any other language, Inuktitut grew out of a culture and a way of life. The fact that these are now changing means that the language itself is changing, usually towards greater simplicity and loss of linguistic elegance as older forms of expression are replaced by anglicisms or by those which are less nuanced. The elders remember how the
Inuit Social Studies: A Variant on a Common Theme
Figure 2(b).
Figure 2(c).
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language used to be spoken in all its previous complexity; how activities (such as traditional hunting) and social relations (such as traditional naming) required a vocabulary and a syntax which is no longer current. The elders’ knowledge of the language is the key to understanding the culture, especially the pre-contact culture, and is therefore seen as an important reference source for teachers. The elders are looked to not just for the knowledge of how things used to be done and how they were talked about, but also for their moral authority. This was recognized when the questions were raised: ‘For what purpose are we inviting the elders to our class?’ ‘What are we going to ask them?’ It was agreed that not only did we want to tap into what they knew, but also into what they thought was appropriate. It would be unusual in southern culture to consult the residents of a home for the aged on curriculum content: in Cambridge Bay it seemed exactly the right thing to do. So when Frank Analuk (the same Frank referred to in Kublu’s story above), Mabel Angulaik, David Kautaluk and Mary Anaganiq graciously agreed to spend a morning with us, the most important question they were asked was: ‘What do you think we should be teaching?’ Their answers were informative, as is suggested by the following account of Joanni Sallerina: I learned (says Joanni) that the elders were concerned about the students being taught survival on the land, iglu building and how to take care of themselves on the land. They also added that skidoos are not as reliable as dog teams. They were also concerned about teaching girls to prepare and make clothing the traditional and modern ways. They also said that children should be able to speak fluently in English and Inuktitut for them to communicate better with English-speaking and Inuktitutspeaking people, even if they have different dialects. They also added that the Inuit should start talking to their children right from birth and when the older people talk to the parents they should talk to them in Inuktitut in front of them. When a child is born s/he is named after a deceased relative or another person that might be an elder that wishes to have the child named after them or wishes to name the child. They also wanted the children to learn about the names of land in Inuktitut and English so they know where they will be going and be able to tell their family or anyone in case they get stuck or lost so that people will be able to find (them).
Survival on the land and knowing the traditional toponymy would seem at first sight to be unrelated ideas, neither of which has much relation to modern social studies. However, looked at from a different perspective, one of the themes running through social studies since its inception as a school subject is that of its instrumental value, of preparing students for life in the ‘real world’. But what if the ‘real world’ is not that of nuclear families, urban communities and impersonal social and economic relations? Survival on the land implies more than not freezing or starving to death if one should inadvertently stray too far from the settlement. In the minds of the elders, it implies having a relationship with the land of which knowing the traditional place names is a part. It implies feeling truly at home on the land, surely an important part of being Inuk. Part also of being Inuk, it appears, is the view that boys and girls should know different things and be taught different skills. In this case also, it is not difficult to guess why the elders would give the advice they did since there is a difference—economically and socially, as well as sexually—between being an Inuk man and being an Inuk woman. In the traditional economy and society, the roles of each were clearly differentiated and mutually independent to such an extent that a man simply could not be a good hunter without a woman to prepare his clothes. Of course, times are changing and for present day Inuit, as for everyone else, gender roles are blurred as the division of labour occurs along modern work-related lines rather than those that are culturally based. Nonetheless, it was important to be reminded by the elders that the cultural base suggests an alternative approach in which male and females roles could be different, symbiotic and equally valued. A second reason for inviting the elders to the class, of course, was that they represent an irreplaceable primary source. In a society which until very recently has followed an oral tradition, this means that they can provide information that is not available from any other source, although what they know can sometimes corroborate the written record. They do so, however, with a richness of detail that is often not found in the written record simply because those who kept the written record (such as Hudson’s Bay Company post managers, RCMP officers
Inuit Social Studies: A Variant on a Common Theme
and clergymen) were either not where some of the important things were happening, or saw them from a different viewpoint. Take the following example (provided by Eli Hiqiniq as the ‘in depth’ pre-course assignment), which illustrates the subtle differences to be found in an account which is written from outside the trading post or the ship from one that is written from within. There was a post northeast of Cambridge Bay called Kugruaq. The only way to get supplies was by dog team from Cambridge Bay. The store had been there for over ten years, but Cambridge Bay was the first store. In the early 1960s they announced the store would be closing for good. The people there split up, some going to Gjoa Haven and some going to Cambridge Bay. The people here mainly did trapping by dog team, although some were seal hunting. The only way to buy food or supplies was to trade fox furs. One fur would equal one peg or one piece of stick because there was not money. If a fox fur was thicker than the other it would mean more than one peg. The only way to communicate was by travelling to other camps by dog team, and giving news or just talk about our families. The first radios were the Morse code and, Boy!, were they noisy! There was this ship called the Netsilik. It was one of the first ships that went by near Iqalluk River. The people there were all saying, ‘A ship, a ship!’
Organizing concepts according to how they are seen by Inuit to be interrelated and collecting oral histories representing the Inuit perspective on events allowed us to construct an approach to social studies that the students would feel more comfortable with and yet which used the procedures of the subject. Although the students were not explicitly made aware that they were doing so, they were organizing data which they themselves had gathered according to conceptual categories which they themselves had defined. With this framework well established, it was now possible to add information from other sources. The Time Line Besides giving the students a pre-course assignment, I had also set a task for myself. I knew a little of the history and geography of the Cambridge Bay area, and had made a couple of short
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visits before giving the course, but my own knowledge base was rather weak. I decided that the best way of remedying this situation was to gather as many relevant materials as I could, which I could use both to inform myself and to use with the students if the opportunity arose. Two days at the Public Archives of Canada (PAC) in Ottawa, and some time also spent in the library of my own university, had yielded a wealth of material. The materials I gathered were somewhat eclectic and what was chosen depended on my own knowledge before starting the search, what I discovered during it—and serendipity. As an example of the latter, I did not know until I was there that the PAC has a wonderful collection of historical photographs of arctic settlements. I ordered copies of as many as I could find of the Cambridge Bay area, some dating back to the 1920s and showing some the earliest structures in the settlement. Also in the PAC, the records of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the RCMP, the Church Missionary Society and the Oblates of Mary Immaculate provided documentary excerpts relating to the region’s early history of contact between Inuit and non-Inuit. Some of the accounts of European exploration also yielded some interesting first impressions of the region by non-Inuit. John Franklin (with John Richardson and George Back) had come close to the area in 1819—21 as they made their way down the Coppermine River from Great Slave Lake. Peter Warren Dease and Thomas Simpson had come overland from the Mackenzie River in 1837—39 for the Hudson’s Bay Company, and John Rae in 1850—51 in the search for Franklin’s famous lost expedition of 1845, all reported most accessibly in Berton (1988). But the first expedition (again in search of Franklin) to record information that could be related directly to the region was that of Capt. Richard Collinson in 1851—54 on the British navy ship Enterprise (a name which caused a small frisson for the trekkies among us!). Collinson spent the winter of 1852—53 in Cambridge Bay, and made the first contact with the Inuit of the region, of whom he left the following account: Five natives made their appearance and being brought alongside, one of them, the eldest, after some hesitation, consented to come on board; and after getting him down into my cabin and making him
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some small presents, he felt reassured, but it was evidently his first communication. On the 4th of October a shooting party was sent out and fell in with the native encampment. On board, we surveyed our chain cables, hauled three of the boats up on shore, and erected a flagstaff. (Collinson, 1889, p. 242)
Other sources that yielded specific information about the area that might have social studies ‘teachability’ included government reports, and popular works. Among the former, the area surveys that were carried out by the Industrial Division of the former Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources provide a kind of latter day Canadian domesday book of the Arctic. For each settlement, everything that could be recorded was recorded and analyzed and the surveys for Cambridge Bay (Abrahamson, 1964, pp. 118—132) and for Holman and Coppermine (Usher, 1965) provided a wealth of information about the region in the 1960s. Also of value were Usher’s comprehensive directory of fur trading posts (Usher, 1971) and the amazingly detailed atlas of Inuit resource use produced in the mid 1970s as land claims became a major political issue (Freeman, 1976). The former includes maps showing the location of all trading posts throughout the NWT, with their dates of operation, so could provide a useful cross-references for other information. The latter includes maps showing the traplines and hunting areas for each Inuit group, and so could also be related to information from other sources. Popular works also provided a source of possible materials, especially Ernie Lyall’s biography (Lyall, 1979), since he had been one of the non-Inuit pioneers of Cambridge Bay (and a relative of two of the students). In the same genre, Christian Klengenberg’s biography (1932) provided details of the life of an individual who traded along the coast when few non-Inuit had been there, and Bishop Fleming’s of early missionary activity (Fleming, 1957). Re-reading some of the classic ethnographies like those of Amundsen (1908), Stefa´nsson (1913), Jenness (1928), Rasmussen (1931, 1932) and BirketSmith (1935) provided a reminder of how recently the people of the area had lived a traditional life. Somewhat, more recent studies like those of Briggs (1970) or Balikci (1970) reinforced this impression, while even more recent
studies (Condon, 1996) illuminated the complexities of emergent relationships between Inuit and non-Inuit society. It should be reemphasized that the purpose of the somewhat idiosyncratic search of the literature was not to provide the kind of exhaustive coverage that might be used to inform a comprehensive historical study of the area. It had to give me, as an instructor, enough information not to make unwarranted assumptions or to jump to stupid conclusions. I wanted to be reasonably well-informed about the places the students were coming from and about their cultural base. Second and maybe more importantly, I wanted to gather materials (historical accounts, ethnographies, maps, photos, etc.) that could be used by them for instructional purposes to augment those they had gathered for themselves, as well as giving them some practice in using documentary as well as oral sources. While I was still gathering the materials I had toyed with the possibility of having developing a time line (Downey & Levstik, 1991; Burlbaw, 1990), growing of course out of the genealogies. However, it was apparent that we had two time lines, initially running parallel with each other and never touching, later touching briefly and finally becoming intertwined. The ‘Inuit time line’ did not have dates attached to it, of course, and did not go back very far without becoming rather shadowy. The ‘non-Inuit time line’ was more precise with regard to dates, started about the middle of the last century but only provided brief but intriguing glimpses of Inuit until quite recently. When we reviewed both sets of materials, the Inuit oral histories and the non-Inuit documentary sources, it seemed appropriate to try to put them together. We started by putting up markers around the four walls of the classroom indicating key dates, initially at fifty year and later at ten year intervals, since we knew we would have more detail the closer we came to the present. Next we went through all the materials, selected those that we thought were interesting or important and pinned them to the wall as close to the date of their occurrence as possible. Some materials (such as the photos from the PAC) could be pinpointed exactly, while others (such as the information provided by elders) could only be placed with a possible time range. Some of the written information was in English, some was in Inuktitut
Inuit Social Studies: A Variant on a Common Theme
or Inuinnaqtun. When we had finished, the walls of the classroom were covered with scraps of written material (in English, Inuktitut or Inuinnaqtun), photographs, maps, facsimiles of historical documents. What we had now were two components for developing a social studies curriculum. On the one hand, concept webs provided us with a way of organizing information in a coherent way. The time line, incorporating both Inuit oral histories from a variety of sources and (almost entirely non-Inuit) documentary sources, provided the information itself. What remained was to put them together, to devise appropriate pedagogical strategies that could be used in an Inuit elementary classroom, a task which defined the latter part of the course, but which cannot be discussed here. Reflections on Being an ‘Imperial Traveller’ There are clearly problems when teachers are distinguished from their students, in whatever educational context, by class, ethnicity, culture or language. In their contact with southern Canadian society, Inuit have been increasingly exposed to the European invention of ‘schooling’, as distinct from the education they received in traditional Inuit society that prepared them to live effectively off the land and to be guided by the values of their ancestors as expressed in the oral tradition. In the fairly recent past, all Inuit (and indeed all aboriginal people in Canada) were taught by non-Inuit from the time they entered school until they left, usually at the earliest opportunity. Generally, this experience was unsuccessful with Inuit children rarely meeting the (to them, largely irrelevant) academic standards of the non-Inuit world, while at the same time having their own language and culture put at risk. But there is no turning back, and schools are in the Arctic to stay, as are hospitals, stores and government offices. The recent move throughout the Canadian Arctic to recruit and train Inuit teachers for community schools has bridged the chasm between teacher and taught, at least at the elementary levels where such teachers are generally employed. However, there is a paradox implicit in this development suggested by the following question. If schools and school teachers are
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cultural imports, can a young woman or man be both an Inuk and a school teacher and, if so, what kind of school teacher will they be? Teacher education programs have been developed over the past 25 years to prepare Inuit to be accomplished and self-confident teachers by building on the attributes they have as Inuit, especially their fluency with Inuktitut/Inuinnaqtun. It has been found that this goal can rarely be achieved by having Inuit join regular teacher education programs at southern universities, where they run the risks of acculturation. It is more likely to be achieved where programs are offered in the teacher-trainees’ own communities, preferably with much of the content in their own language. Some programs, notably in Arctic Quebec, are based on all instruction being given in their own language by Inuit instructors, with university subject specialists acting discreetly as coaches in the background. The Nunavut Teacher Education Program referred to in this paper uses generally a more orthodox approach, with instruction in most courses being given by the specialists themselves. I recognize that in taking on this role one runs the risk of being what one reviewer of this paper called an ‘imperial traveller’. It seems to me, however, that as long as Inuit are being prepared for what is essentially the non-Inuit role of ‘school teacher’, they will need to study essentially non-Inuit models, and draw from them whatever they think is going to be valuable to them. I saw my task, then, not as bringing the unadulterated message from the outside for them to accept without question, but to provide the framework, based on what I know of the practice of the social studies, for a dialogue between their experience and my own. On reflection, it seemed to me that to engage productively in this dialogue we had each in our way been involved in the kind of research that is a necessary precursor to effective instruction, research that is related to practice rather than to the discovery of new knowledge. This research fell into two categories. First, we had produced a map of how ideas in a social studies course might be organized. Because this map, in the form of the concept webs, had been constructed in the language of the students, it represented how they themselves organize their thinking about the Inuit world. It was therefore an Inuit model of social organization rather than one
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imposed from another culture. Second, we had in the documents, transcriptions of oral accounts, photographs and other materials organized chronologically in the time line, a pool of resources that could be incorporated into that model for pedagogical purposes. The research we had each followed to create these had been different but complementary. The students had carried out their research among Inuit, creating genealogies and recording oral history, while I had tapped into the southern library and archival resources with which I was most familiar. When we started our work together, we could not have predicted exactly how the two strands would come together, but the learning we all experienced lay in the process of constructing knowledge that drew from both, but which should have its greatest relevance for Inuit. As the instructor, I hope that the idea had been planted that being a researcher in the two senses described above forms a large part of being a social studies teacher. There is a ‘social studies’, with both content and method. There is an Inuit culture, that suggests to what purpose content and method should be put. What I hoped we had done together was to set the students on the path of developing an ‘Inuit social studies’, distinctive in its cultural content and implied values, but connected to the main ideas of the field in the same way that the branches of a genealogical tree are connected to its trunk, or the sub- concepts of a web are connected to its core. Postscript I left after class on Friday afternoon and Jessie Lyall drove me out to the airport, in the dark of course since the sun had momentarily risen and set three hours before. The temperature was a reasonably mild !28°C with no wind, a considerable improvement over the previous few days. The turbo-prop plane lifted us out of the dark into the mauve arctic sky, which lightened appreciably as we headed south, taking a few hours to cover the ground that had taken the likes of Franklin, Richardson, Back, Dease and Simpson months of arduous travel. A plane change in Yellowknife, another in Edmonton and yet another in Calgary for the red-eye to Toronto, there to join the morning Rapidair
crowd for the short hop to Montreal, brought me home in time for Saturday morning breakfast. Notes 1 Although I took on the task of writing this account, it owes much to the students’ contribution, and I am honoured that each of them agreed to allow me to recognize them as co-authors. I should also like to acknowledge the assistance of Anthony Pare´ and Chris Milligan, who kindly commented on the manuscript. I am especially indebted to Mary Maguire, whose constructive criticism of an earlier draft of this article led to my making many changes, to Deborah Metchette, who produced the diagrams, and to Monica Ittusardjuat, who translated the text in Figure 2. The perceptive comments of both anonymous reviewers of this journal caused me to sharpen my thinking on many of the issues implicit in this paper, although I recognize that many others remain unresolved. 2 The non-Inuit names are used in this article because they are more familiar to southern readers. When Nunavut comes into being, the Inuit names will become official.
References Aaron, L. (1992). Using genealogy to teach history. OAH Magazine of History, 6(3), 5—7. Abrahamson, G. et al. (1964). ¹he Copper Eskimos: An area economic survey, AESR 63/1. Ottawa: Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, Industrial Division. Amundsen, R. (1908). ¹he North ¼est Passage. London: Archibald, Constable and Co. Amundsen, R. (1927). My life as an explorer. New York: Doubleday, Page and Co. Balikci, A. (1970). Netsilik Eskimos. Garden City, NY: Natural History Press. Berton, P. (1988). ¹he Arctic Grail: ¹he quest for the North ¼est Passage and the North Pole, 1818—1909. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Birket-Smith, K. (Trans. W.E. Calvert) (1935). ¹he Eskimos. New York: Dutton. Briggs, J. (1970). Never in anger: Portrait of an Eskimo family. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Burlbaw, L. (1992). An unfolding timeline. Canadian Social Studies, 26(4), 158—160. Condon, R. (1996). ¹he Northern Copper Inuit. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Collinson, R. (1889). Journal of HMS Enterprise on the expedition in search of Sir John Franklin’s ships by Behring Strait, 1850—55. London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington. Cram, J. (1985). Northern teachers for northern schools. McGill Journal of Education, 20(2), 113—131. Delpit, L. (1988). The silenced dialogue: power and pedagogy in educating other people’s children, Harvard Educational Review, 58, 280—298. Downey, M., & Levstik, L. (1991). Teaching and learning history. In J. Shaver (Ed.), Handbook of research on social studies teaching and learning. New York: Macmillan.
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Dillabough, J., & McAlpine, L. (1996). Rethinking research processes and praxis in the social studies: the cultural politics of methodology in text evaluation research. ¹heory and Research in Social Education, 24(2), 167—203. Fleming, A. L. (1957). Archibald the Arctic. Toronto: Saunders. Freeman, M. M. R. (Ed.) (1976). Report, Inuit land use and occupancy project. Ottawa: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. Jenness, D. (1922). ¹he ¸ife of the Copper Eskimos. Report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913—1918, Vol. 12 Ottawa: Government of Canada. Jenness, D. (1928). ¹he people of the twilight. New York: Macmillan. Kirkness, V. (1992). Giving voice to our ancestors, Canadian Journal of Native Education, 19(2). Klengenberg, C. (1932). Klengenberg of the Arctic. London: Cape. Lyall, E. (1979). An arctic man. Halifax, NS: Goodread Biographies. Martorella, P. (1991). Knowledge and concept development in social studies. In J. Shaver (Edd.), Handbook of research on social studies teaching and learning (pp. 370—384). New York: Macmillan. McAlpine, L., & Crago, M. (1995). The induction year experience in a cross-cultural setting. ¹eaching and ¹eacher Education, 11(4), pp. 403—415. Moll, L. C., Greenberg, J. (1990). Creating zones of possibilities: combining social contexts for instruction. In L.C. Moll (Ed.), »ygotsky and Education (pp. 319—348). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Novak, J., & Gowin, D. B. (1984). ¸earning how to learn. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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NWT Department of Education, Culture and Employment (1994). Inuuqatigiit: the curriculum from the Inuit perspective. Yellowknife, NWT: NWT Education, Culture and Employment. Nyce, D. (1990). ¹eachers Plus: First Nations teacher education programs in Canada. M.Ed. Major Paper, Department of Administrative, Adult and Higher Education, University of British Columbia. Rasmussen, K. (1931). Netsilik Eskimo: Social life and spiritual culture, Report of the Fifth ¹hule Expedition, »olume 7. Copenhagen: Glyndalske Boghaindeln. Rasmussen, K. (1932). Intellectual culture of the Copper Eskimo, Report of the Fifth ¹hule Expedition, »olume 9. Copenhagen: Glyndalske Boghaindeln. Stefa´nsson, V. (1913). My life with the Eskimo. New York: Macmillan. Taba, H. et al. (1971). A teacher’s handbook to elementary social studies. Reading, MA.: Addison-Wesley. Usher, P. J. (1965). Economic basis and resource use of the Coppermine-Holman area, N¼¹, NCRC 62—2. Ottawa: Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, Northern Coordination and Research Centre. Usher, P. J. (1971). Fur trade posts of the Northwest ¹erritories 1870—1970, NSRG-71-4. Ottawa: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Northern Science Research Group. Wright, I. (1995). Elementary social studies: A practical approach, (4th ed.). Toronto: Nelson. Wolforth, J. (1991). Preparing the Native teacher. In M. Gillett, & A. Beer (Eds), Aspects of education. Montreal: McGill University Faculty of Education.
PII: S0742-051X (97) 00050-4
INUIT SOCIAL STUDIES: A VARIANT ON A COMMON THEME JOHN WOLFORTH McGill University, 3700 McTavish Street, Montreal PQ, Canada H3A IY2
with ALLEN AGLUKKAK, MARY EETOOLOOK, MARY GILLIS, ELI HIQINIQ, JESSIE LYALL, MARGARET LYALL, SUSIE OHOKANNOAK, MOLLIE OLIKTOAK, JOANNI SALERINNA, SARAH TAKOLIK and KUBLU TUCKTOO1 Abstract—In a social studies methods course I taught to Inuit students (all teacher-trainees) in the Kitikmeot region of Canada’s Northwest Territories, I tried to mediate between the knowledge and professional skills required of a social studies teacher as these are presented in a methods textbook written for a mainstream readership, and the knowledge brought to the course by the students. We used, among other things, three devices which are often used in the teaching of social studies: the genealogy, the concept web and the time line. In applying each of these devices, we tried to organize our work so that ‘Inuit knowledge’ was given the same or greater weight than ‘non-Inuit knowledge’. By using as referents a standard methods text, primary documentary materials and oral histories, we situated ‘Inuit knowledge’ within the framework of social studies methods. ( Published by 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Prologue In 1999, the eastern part of Canada’s Northwest Territories will become the territory of Nunavut. Nunavut is divided into three regions each with its own School Board; Baffin, Keewatin and Kitikmeot. This article is set in Kitikmeot, the region which includes the arctic coast, the eastern part of Victoria Island as well as some other islands of the arctic archipelago (Figure 1). The geographic scale is vast, Victoria Island alone being only a little smaller than Great Britain. Until quite recently, the population, which anthropologists (Jenness, 1922; Rasmussen, 1931, 1932) divided into the Copper Inuit in the west and Netsilik Inuit in the east, was dispersed over most of this vast area and moved in well established seasonal migration patterns. Today, the population is concentrated in a few settlements; Cambridge Bay (Ikaluktutiaq), Coppermine (Kugluktuk), Spence Bay or Taloyoak (Talurjuak), Gjoa Haven (Oqsuqtooq) and Pelly Bay (Aqviligjuaq)2. None of these has a population of more than a few hundred, but within the Arctic context they represent the urban milieu that provides a window to the wider
world. For teachers, as for other Inuit, there is a constant tension between the traditions of the Inuit world and the world outside. Television, frequent and reliable air service, and periodic influxes of southern workers have increased the impact of southern Canadian culture on the Arctic and, in reaction to these outside influences, Inuit have sought to define themselves in terms of a traditional land-based culture that is increasingly under threat. Education, and specifically the education of Inuit teachers, plays a critical role in this process as the means by which Inuit are gaining control of the curriculum, mainly through the use of language in the elementary grades. Mediating Between Social Studies Technique and Inuit Knowledge This paper is based on the experience of an intensive two-week social studies course I, as an instructor from a southern university, gave to eleven Inuit teacher-trainees at Cambridge Bay, NWT. The course is part of a program developed collaboratively since the mid-1970s
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Figure 1. The boundaries and principal communities of Nunavut.
by McGill University and the Eastern Arctic (now the Nunavut) Teacher Education Program to give Inuit teachers the opportunity of earning recognized university credentials through courses offered in their own communities, and in some cases, in their own language. Like other similar programs (Cram, 1985; Wolforth, 1991), this one walks the narrow line between providing material that both meets the academic standards of a respected southern institution, and is at the same time accessible and relevant to teachers whose formal academic preparation may be weaker than that of other undergraduates and whose cultural and linguistic base is quite different. I saw it as my task to try to bridge these differences, to introduce the students to the skills required of good social studies
teachers in a way that respected, and in fact drew from, their own experience as Inuit. Although the course dealt with several social studies issues, this paper focusses on the treatment of three pedagogical devices—the genealogy, the concept web and the time line—which formed part of the framework on which the course was constructed. I recognized that all of us came to the course with our own knowledge. The students know what it is to be Inuit and to teach Inuit children. I know what it is to be a social studies teacher, and to access sources of information which may not be available to the students, even about their own culture. Although communities contain resources making up their own particular funds of knowledge (Moll & Greenberg, 1990), theory and method are required to identify them, and
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pedagogical skills to translate them into classroom practice. It was unnecessary for the students to learn the codes of their own community, as would a neophyte non-native teacher (McAlpine & Crago, 1995), but they might need to be inducted into the codes of social studies practice, if for no other reason than they work alongside southern teachers whose credentials have been earned in mainstream teacher education programs and that they teach a curriculum that draws, at least in part, from mainstream knowledge. In many of the teacher education programs that have developed in Canada for aboriginal teachers, there has been an assumption that their graduates should be ‘teachers plus’ (Nyce, 1990), that they should have the attributes and skills of their non-aboriginal colleagues plus those that they derive from their own culture. This is a difficult objective to achieve. Some would argue that any attempt to induct aboriginal people, or any people that form a cultural minority, into mainstream knowledge inevitably diminishes or subverts their own culture, since the two knowledge bases are essentially antipathetic. One response to this position is to suggest that mainstream knowledge can be learned as a kind of ‘foreign language’, to be used in situations where the exclusive use of minority cultural referents would have the effect of disempowering the user. This is the strategy that has been proposed, for example, for African—Americans, for whom the exclusive use of ‘Black English’ in certain situations (a job interview, for instance) might be disadvantageous. Better to learn standard American English, not to replace the vernacular, but to be brought out in just such situations (Delpit, 1988). Another response is to suggest that there is no ‘mainstream’ and that knowledge can and should be constructed by each cultural group. This is an argument that is more difficult (but not impossible) to make for, say, medicine or engineering, but it certainly can be made quite effectively for social studies. One of the goals of social studies is to ‘socialize’, to induct the learner not into a body of knowledge like physics or mathematics, but into the values, organizing concepts and behaviours of the society of which they are a part. Thus, social studies for Inuit or for other aboriginal people is constructed around an analysis of criteria that aboriginal
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people themselves see as important, and nonaboriginal text is evaluated according to these same criteria (Dillabough & McAlpine, 1996). My own response was to take the middle path, to acknowledge that since the students were working towards a recognized university credential (a Bachelor of Education degree in this case), they would be short-changed if they did not receive some exposure to the same kind of content that would be received by students taking the same course on the university campus. On the other hand, I realized that this content would have little meaning or value to them if it was not linked to their own experience, and to the knowledge that they brought with them to the course. In this sense, then, I wanted the course to be a kind of ‘social studies plus’, an Inuit variant of mainstream social studies. I felt the students should be introduced to enough of the content and methods of social studies disciplines like history and geography for them to feel confident in their professional practice and able to increase their competence through further study, but that they should do so in a context where their mastery of certain aspects of the content would be superior to my own. Together then, students and instructor, we would try to reconfigure social studies, as it might be represented in a standard text, so that it would be more relevant to Inuit culture. In this way we would construct a knowledge of social studies that would draw, hopefully in equal measure, from both the mainstream academic and from Inuit tradition. The social studies text we used in the course (Wright, 1995) provides as good a guide as any to what social studies teachers might need to know. It is one of the texts used by instructors giving the same course on the university campus and at Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit. Although it happens to use some examples from Inuit culture, it is clearly aimed at the southern teacher. The vocabulary, the frame of reference and most of the examples are relatively unfamiliar to the students, whose travels south like those of many Inuit have been confined to the occasional trip to Edmonton for shopping or medical treatment, or sometimes to more distant places like Mexico or the Caribbean for holidays, and whose most common view of the non-Inuit world is through the distorting lens of television.
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Engaging with Time Some of the concepts of social studies that are taken for granted in the text such as the one used might be regarded as neutral: they are in fact loaded with implied cultural content. For example, the concept of the ‘time line’, which eventually formed one of the organizing structures for the course can be quite culturally specific. First and fundamentally, there is the idea that time is linear. Second there is the idea that it can be quantified, into seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, years, centuries and millennia. Third, there is the idea that there is an implied logic in the sequence in which events are arranged on the time line and that the events may be causally related to each other. Fourth, there is the idea that these events are intrinsically important, and that there is some basis for selecting them over others. However, since ‘time’, however defined, is one of the most fundamental concepts of social studies, along with ‘space’, ‘relationship’ and others, it did seem important to deal with in some fundamental way. The vehicle chosen (as a precourse assignment) was the genealogy (Aaron, 1992), since it organizes time according to the lives of parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles and others who are important to Inuit culture and identity. The genealogy also has the advantage that it does not have to be quantified unless it is necessary to connect the events it summarizes with other events, as it would be in observing that, ‘Grandfather was born in 1929, the year of the Wall Street Crash.’ In a pre-course assignment, the students were asked to draw a tree with themselves as the trunk, mother and father as branches, maternal and paternal grandmothers and grandfathers as sub- branches, and so on. This presented no major problem although ‘roots’ would have made a more appropriate metaphor than ‘branches’, and purists would of course point out that Inuit are, in any case, only familiar with trees in books and on television. Where the problems did arise were in defining what is meant by such terms as ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘grandmother’ and ‘grandfather’. The students are of course aware of the biologically based definition of these terms and commonly use these definitions themselves. However, they also know that other definitions are possible, for example those
based on the ‘naming relationships’, in which the name given to a baby and who bestows that name have an importance that can override biology. They were asked also to choose one person from the family tree and write a short history of their life, based either on an interview with that person or with others who knew them. The exercise was intended to be as open-ended as possible to allow the person to define their own frame of reference rather than one imposed upon them. Each person was also asked to tell a story about one event in their life that they remembered very clearly. The purpose of this part of the exercise was to show that ‘time’ has depth as well as linearity (if indeed it is linearity it has and not circularity) and that it is possible to ‘zoom in’ to one particular part of the story in order to get progressively finer detail. Its purpose also was to provide a source of primary materials that might later be used to create instructional materials. The data that this task yielded was far too rich to reproduce here although it is hoped the students will continue to use it in their social studies teaching. The accounts recorded by the students opened many questions, as well as providing some answers, about pre-contact and early contact ways of life. They also acted as a heuristic device inviting the exploration of other ethnographic data from published sources. The following excerpt from the account of Kublu Tucktoo is typical in that it hints at information on migrations, naming practices, the impact of Christianity, modes of travel, use of animal resources, and burial practices. Jenny Akana has no idea where she was born, but knows she was born in Uyagaqyuaq [Melbourne Island]. A lady named her Akana, Qangattaq’s mother’s name. Her English name was given by a minister just before she and Frank Analuk got married around close to Christmas. They used to travel by dogs in the wintertime and walk in the summer with the help of dogs carrying their belongings on their backs. [Jenny Akana] used to enjoy running towards her parents coming back from a polar bear hunt to go meet them when she was younger. They ate the meat and used the skin for bed mattresses or whatever they needed. There was this one time when she went with her two brothers to the top of the hill to see if their parents were coming from a polar bear hunt, only to find that the two brothers came back running fast
Inuit Social Studies: A Variant on a Common Theme
because there was a polar bear coming their way and left her running and crying to go and tell others about the polar bear. She remembers when the polar bear came right up to the iglu porch, and everyone ran in all directions... Both her parents died of sickness in the same area and they used to bury them on the ground with rocks around them. She does not know if they would still be there but figures the animals probably scattered them by now. But the ring of rocks would still be there.
By engaging the students in the analysis of several such accounts, it was possible to have them begin to look beyond the particularities to the concepts referred to above, and to construct a more generalized picture of the life of their immediate forebears based on contemporary accounts. It also provided an opportunity to discuss questions of relevance and of how information that may be relevant to one question is irrelevant to another. Underlying this question are some epistemological issues which need not be confronted explicitly, but which colour the way in which we work as teachers. ‘Relevance’ is a relativistic concept, since nothing (and every thing) is relevant unless the terms of reference are defined and we know what it is we wish to understand. If what we want to understand is ‘Inuit culture’, then there is clearly more that is relevant to us than if we wanted to understand ‘polar bear hunting’, though the latter might be a sub-set of the former. What we needed was some kind of map or template which would enable us to determine how information might fit together. The Concept Web Taba (1971) provides a simple device for developing conceptual thinking by analysing photographs for their content. Since her work was reported in the textbook used in the course (Wright, 1995, pp. 46—51), it was available to us, although of course Taba’s illustrations were of a world that was relatively unfamiliar. Instead, we examined a set of photographs I had taken locally (on an earlier visit when longer hours of daylight made photography more feasible) to identify as many as possible of the objects shown and to put them into conceptual categories. An example would be one in which objects identified as skidoos, trucks, qumatiqs (sleds), bicycles, planes and boats are all grouped into a category
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that has something to do with the concept of ‘transportation’. The question might arise as to whether powered objects like skidoos were in the same category as unpowered objects like qumatiqs, or whether dogs should also be in the same category as the others and, if so, under what circumstances. With some understanding of conceptual thinking, it was now possible to introduce the concept web as a means of organizing information, and then as a means of organizing curriculum (Novak & Gowin, 1984; Martorella, 1991). Fortuitously, the textbook used contained an illustration of a simple concept web based on the word ‘Inuit’ (Wright, 1995, p. 35). Thus, it was a possible to take this fairly simplified template and develop from it a more complex conceptual structure. An intriguing sidelight on this task was provided by the fact that the students used two totally different orthographies. Whereas syllabics of the kind adapted by the Reverend E.J Peck from the earlier system devised for the Cree by the Reverend James Evans are used universally in the Eastern Arctic, the Western Arctic (and Greenland) use the Roman alphabet. Cambridge Bay is the divide. Consequently, it was necessary to develop two different concept webs (Figure 2), one in Inuktitut using syllabics, and the other in Inuinnaqtun using Roman script. The task for both was to take the root concept ‘Inuit’ and to develop from it a map of related concepts moving outwards to those that become more and more particular. Constructing the web raised some interesting conceptual questions. Is ‘store’ a subset of ‘shelter’ or of ‘trade’? Since ‘Inuit’ is the basic concept, should the only examples of subconcepts be those that relate directly to Inuit, and to no other culture? If ‘inukshuk’ (a beacon of stones, piled on top of each other to resemble a human being) is an example of communication, is ‘television’ also within the same category? What is the basis for categorization of concepts? Does it make a difference whether the central concept is ‘Inuit’, as in the Inuinnaqtun version, or ‘Inuit Present’ and Inuit Past’, as in the Inuktitut version? A practical value of this task is that it demonstrates a way of taking a first run at curriculum building by organizing content within some kind of coherent structure. This was especially important since the Northwest Territories has
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Figure 2(a). Scanned images of the concept webs, based on the word ‘Inuit,’ prepared in Inuktitut (syllabics) and Inuinnaqtun (Roman script), with an English translation of the latter, ignoring those terms, for example ones relating to clothing, for which there is no translation.
recently introduced a new holistic, culturally based curriculum guide called Inuuqatigiit (NWT Department of Education, Culture and Employment, 1994), the use of which invites teachers to make connections. It was now possible to begin to map some of the topics of the Inuuqatigiit curriculum (such as ‘names and naming’, ‘elders’) into the framework of the two concept webs in order to draw attention to further interrelationships and to how they might be explored in the classroom. The Elders It was at this stage that the students suggested that we should involve the elders themselves in our discussions—a suggestion that did not surprise me for the following reason. One of the emerging characteristics of aboriginal societies—whether Inuit or First Nations—as they seek to reconstruct a cultural identity within the
educational systems over which they are gaining increasing control is that the elders are looked up to as authorities (Kirkness, 1992). As aboriginal languages take on a more important role both as the medium of instruction (at least in the elementary grades) and as that which distinguishes the aboriginal from the non-aboriginal person, the elders are looked to for their expertise. Inuktitut, including its dialectical variants, is one of the three aboriginal languages in Canada (the others being Ojibwa and Cree) which stand a reasonable chance of survival. However, although it is spoken by a large number of individuals as a first language, it is often only the elders that speak it well. Like any other language, Inuktitut grew out of a culture and a way of life. The fact that these are now changing means that the language itself is changing, usually towards greater simplicity and loss of linguistic elegance as older forms of expression are replaced by anglicisms or by those which are less nuanced. The elders remember how the
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Figure 2(b).
Figure 2(c).
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language used to be spoken in all its previous complexity; how activities (such as traditional hunting) and social relations (such as traditional naming) required a vocabulary and a syntax which is no longer current. The elders’ knowledge of the language is the key to understanding the culture, especially the pre-contact culture, and is therefore seen as an important reference source for teachers. The elders are looked to not just for the knowledge of how things used to be done and how they were talked about, but also for their moral authority. This was recognized when the questions were raised: ‘For what purpose are we inviting the elders to our class?’ ‘What are we going to ask them?’ It was agreed that not only did we want to tap into what they knew, but also into what they thought was appropriate. It would be unusual in southern culture to consult the residents of a home for the aged on curriculum content: in Cambridge Bay it seemed exactly the right thing to do. So when Frank Analuk (the same Frank referred to in Kublu’s story above), Mabel Angulaik, David Kautaluk and Mary Anaganiq graciously agreed to spend a morning with us, the most important question they were asked was: ‘What do you think we should be teaching?’ Their answers were informative, as is suggested by the following account of Joanni Sallerina: I learned (says Joanni) that the elders were concerned about the students being taught survival on the land, iglu building and how to take care of themselves on the land. They also added that skidoos are not as reliable as dog teams. They were also concerned about teaching girls to prepare and make clothing the traditional and modern ways. They also said that children should be able to speak fluently in English and Inuktitut for them to communicate better with English-speaking and Inuktitutspeaking people, even if they have different dialects. They also added that the Inuit should start talking to their children right from birth and when the older people talk to the parents they should talk to them in Inuktitut in front of them. When a child is born s/he is named after a deceased relative or another person that might be an elder that wishes to have the child named after them or wishes to name the child. They also wanted the children to learn about the names of land in Inuktitut and English so they know where they will be going and be able to tell their family or anyone in case they get stuck or lost so that people will be able to find (them).
Survival on the land and knowing the traditional toponymy would seem at first sight to be unrelated ideas, neither of which has much relation to modern social studies. However, looked at from a different perspective, one of the themes running through social studies since its inception as a school subject is that of its instrumental value, of preparing students for life in the ‘real world’. But what if the ‘real world’ is not that of nuclear families, urban communities and impersonal social and economic relations? Survival on the land implies more than not freezing or starving to death if one should inadvertently stray too far from the settlement. In the minds of the elders, it implies having a relationship with the land of which knowing the traditional place names is a part. It implies feeling truly at home on the land, surely an important part of being Inuk. Part also of being Inuk, it appears, is the view that boys and girls should know different things and be taught different skills. In this case also, it is not difficult to guess why the elders would give the advice they did since there is a difference—economically and socially, as well as sexually—between being an Inuk man and being an Inuk woman. In the traditional economy and society, the roles of each were clearly differentiated and mutually independent to such an extent that a man simply could not be a good hunter without a woman to prepare his clothes. Of course, times are changing and for present day Inuit, as for everyone else, gender roles are blurred as the division of labour occurs along modern work-related lines rather than those that are culturally based. Nonetheless, it was important to be reminded by the elders that the cultural base suggests an alternative approach in which male and females roles could be different, symbiotic and equally valued. A second reason for inviting the elders to the class, of course, was that they represent an irreplaceable primary source. In a society which until very recently has followed an oral tradition, this means that they can provide information that is not available from any other source, although what they know can sometimes corroborate the written record. They do so, however, with a richness of detail that is often not found in the written record simply because those who kept the written record (such as Hudson’s Bay Company post managers, RCMP officers
Inuit Social Studies: A Variant on a Common Theme
and clergymen) were either not where some of the important things were happening, or saw them from a different viewpoint. Take the following example (provided by Eli Hiqiniq as the ‘in depth’ pre-course assignment), which illustrates the subtle differences to be found in an account which is written from outside the trading post or the ship from one that is written from within. There was a post northeast of Cambridge Bay called Kugruaq. The only way to get supplies was by dog team from Cambridge Bay. The store had been there for over ten years, but Cambridge Bay was the first store. In the early 1960s they announced the store would be closing for good. The people there split up, some going to Gjoa Haven and some going to Cambridge Bay. The people here mainly did trapping by dog team, although some were seal hunting. The only way to buy food or supplies was to trade fox furs. One fur would equal one peg or one piece of stick because there was not money. If a fox fur was thicker than the other it would mean more than one peg. The only way to communicate was by travelling to other camps by dog team, and giving news or just talk about our families. The first radios were the Morse code and, Boy!, were they noisy! There was this ship called the Netsilik. It was one of the first ships that went by near Iqalluk River. The people there were all saying, ‘A ship, a ship!’
Organizing concepts according to how they are seen by Inuit to be interrelated and collecting oral histories representing the Inuit perspective on events allowed us to construct an approach to social studies that the students would feel more comfortable with and yet which used the procedures of the subject. Although the students were not explicitly made aware that they were doing so, they were organizing data which they themselves had gathered according to conceptual categories which they themselves had defined. With this framework well established, it was now possible to add information from other sources. The Time Line Besides giving the students a pre-course assignment, I had also set a task for myself. I knew a little of the history and geography of the Cambridge Bay area, and had made a couple of short
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visits before giving the course, but my own knowledge base was rather weak. I decided that the best way of remedying this situation was to gather as many relevant materials as I could, which I could use both to inform myself and to use with the students if the opportunity arose. Two days at the Public Archives of Canada (PAC) in Ottawa, and some time also spent in the library of my own university, had yielded a wealth of material. The materials I gathered were somewhat eclectic and what was chosen depended on my own knowledge before starting the search, what I discovered during it—and serendipity. As an example of the latter, I did not know until I was there that the PAC has a wonderful collection of historical photographs of arctic settlements. I ordered copies of as many as I could find of the Cambridge Bay area, some dating back to the 1920s and showing some the earliest structures in the settlement. Also in the PAC, the records of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the RCMP, the Church Missionary Society and the Oblates of Mary Immaculate provided documentary excerpts relating to the region’s early history of contact between Inuit and non-Inuit. Some of the accounts of European exploration also yielded some interesting first impressions of the region by non-Inuit. John Franklin (with John Richardson and George Back) had come close to the area in 1819—21 as they made their way down the Coppermine River from Great Slave Lake. Peter Warren Dease and Thomas Simpson had come overland from the Mackenzie River in 1837—39 for the Hudson’s Bay Company, and John Rae in 1850—51 in the search for Franklin’s famous lost expedition of 1845, all reported most accessibly in Berton (1988). But the first expedition (again in search of Franklin) to record information that could be related directly to the region was that of Capt. Richard Collinson in 1851—54 on the British navy ship Enterprise (a name which caused a small frisson for the trekkies among us!). Collinson spent the winter of 1852—53 in Cambridge Bay, and made the first contact with the Inuit of the region, of whom he left the following account: Five natives made their appearance and being brought alongside, one of them, the eldest, after some hesitation, consented to come on board; and after getting him down into my cabin and making him
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some small presents, he felt reassured, but it was evidently his first communication. On the 4th of October a shooting party was sent out and fell in with the native encampment. On board, we surveyed our chain cables, hauled three of the boats up on shore, and erected a flagstaff. (Collinson, 1889, p. 242)
Other sources that yielded specific information about the area that might have social studies ‘teachability’ included government reports, and popular works. Among the former, the area surveys that were carried out by the Industrial Division of the former Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources provide a kind of latter day Canadian domesday book of the Arctic. For each settlement, everything that could be recorded was recorded and analyzed and the surveys for Cambridge Bay (Abrahamson, 1964, pp. 118—132) and for Holman and Coppermine (Usher, 1965) provided a wealth of information about the region in the 1960s. Also of value were Usher’s comprehensive directory of fur trading posts (Usher, 1971) and the amazingly detailed atlas of Inuit resource use produced in the mid 1970s as land claims became a major political issue (Freeman, 1976). The former includes maps showing the location of all trading posts throughout the NWT, with their dates of operation, so could provide a useful cross-references for other information. The latter includes maps showing the traplines and hunting areas for each Inuit group, and so could also be related to information from other sources. Popular works also provided a source of possible materials, especially Ernie Lyall’s biography (Lyall, 1979), since he had been one of the non-Inuit pioneers of Cambridge Bay (and a relative of two of the students). In the same genre, Christian Klengenberg’s biography (1932) provided details of the life of an individual who traded along the coast when few non-Inuit had been there, and Bishop Fleming’s of early missionary activity (Fleming, 1957). Re-reading some of the classic ethnographies like those of Amundsen (1908), Stefa´nsson (1913), Jenness (1928), Rasmussen (1931, 1932) and BirketSmith (1935) provided a reminder of how recently the people of the area had lived a traditional life. Somewhat, more recent studies like those of Briggs (1970) or Balikci (1970) reinforced this impression, while even more recent
studies (Condon, 1996) illuminated the complexities of emergent relationships between Inuit and non-Inuit society. It should be reemphasized that the purpose of the somewhat idiosyncratic search of the literature was not to provide the kind of exhaustive coverage that might be used to inform a comprehensive historical study of the area. It had to give me, as an instructor, enough information not to make unwarranted assumptions or to jump to stupid conclusions. I wanted to be reasonably well-informed about the places the students were coming from and about their cultural base. Second and maybe more importantly, I wanted to gather materials (historical accounts, ethnographies, maps, photos, etc.) that could be used by them for instructional purposes to augment those they had gathered for themselves, as well as giving them some practice in using documentary as well as oral sources. While I was still gathering the materials I had toyed with the possibility of having developing a time line (Downey & Levstik, 1991; Burlbaw, 1990), growing of course out of the genealogies. However, it was apparent that we had two time lines, initially running parallel with each other and never touching, later touching briefly and finally becoming intertwined. The ‘Inuit time line’ did not have dates attached to it, of course, and did not go back very far without becoming rather shadowy. The ‘non-Inuit time line’ was more precise with regard to dates, started about the middle of the last century but only provided brief but intriguing glimpses of Inuit until quite recently. When we reviewed both sets of materials, the Inuit oral histories and the non-Inuit documentary sources, it seemed appropriate to try to put them together. We started by putting up markers around the four walls of the classroom indicating key dates, initially at fifty year and later at ten year intervals, since we knew we would have more detail the closer we came to the present. Next we went through all the materials, selected those that we thought were interesting or important and pinned them to the wall as close to the date of their occurrence as possible. Some materials (such as the photos from the PAC) could be pinpointed exactly, while others (such as the information provided by elders) could only be placed with a possible time range. Some of the written information was in English, some was in Inuktitut
Inuit Social Studies: A Variant on a Common Theme
or Inuinnaqtun. When we had finished, the walls of the classroom were covered with scraps of written material (in English, Inuktitut or Inuinnaqtun), photographs, maps, facsimiles of historical documents. What we had now were two components for developing a social studies curriculum. On the one hand, concept webs provided us with a way of organizing information in a coherent way. The time line, incorporating both Inuit oral histories from a variety of sources and (almost entirely non-Inuit) documentary sources, provided the information itself. What remained was to put them together, to devise appropriate pedagogical strategies that could be used in an Inuit elementary classroom, a task which defined the latter part of the course, but which cannot be discussed here. Reflections on Being an ‘Imperial Traveller’ There are clearly problems when teachers are distinguished from their students, in whatever educational context, by class, ethnicity, culture or language. In their contact with southern Canadian society, Inuit have been increasingly exposed to the European invention of ‘schooling’, as distinct from the education they received in traditional Inuit society that prepared them to live effectively off the land and to be guided by the values of their ancestors as expressed in the oral tradition. In the fairly recent past, all Inuit (and indeed all aboriginal people in Canada) were taught by non-Inuit from the time they entered school until they left, usually at the earliest opportunity. Generally, this experience was unsuccessful with Inuit children rarely meeting the (to them, largely irrelevant) academic standards of the non-Inuit world, while at the same time having their own language and culture put at risk. But there is no turning back, and schools are in the Arctic to stay, as are hospitals, stores and government offices. The recent move throughout the Canadian Arctic to recruit and train Inuit teachers for community schools has bridged the chasm between teacher and taught, at least at the elementary levels where such teachers are generally employed. However, there is a paradox implicit in this development suggested by the following question. If schools and school teachers are
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cultural imports, can a young woman or man be both an Inuk and a school teacher and, if so, what kind of school teacher will they be? Teacher education programs have been developed over the past 25 years to prepare Inuit to be accomplished and self-confident teachers by building on the attributes they have as Inuit, especially their fluency with Inuktitut/Inuinnaqtun. It has been found that this goal can rarely be achieved by having Inuit join regular teacher education programs at southern universities, where they run the risks of acculturation. It is more likely to be achieved where programs are offered in the teacher-trainees’ own communities, preferably with much of the content in their own language. Some programs, notably in Arctic Quebec, are based on all instruction being given in their own language by Inuit instructors, with university subject specialists acting discreetly as coaches in the background. The Nunavut Teacher Education Program referred to in this paper uses generally a more orthodox approach, with instruction in most courses being given by the specialists themselves. I recognize that in taking on this role one runs the risk of being what one reviewer of this paper called an ‘imperial traveller’. It seems to me, however, that as long as Inuit are being prepared for what is essentially the non-Inuit role of ‘school teacher’, they will need to study essentially non-Inuit models, and draw from them whatever they think is going to be valuable to them. I saw my task, then, not as bringing the unadulterated message from the outside for them to accept without question, but to provide the framework, based on what I know of the practice of the social studies, for a dialogue between their experience and my own. On reflection, it seemed to me that to engage productively in this dialogue we had each in our way been involved in the kind of research that is a necessary precursor to effective instruction, research that is related to practice rather than to the discovery of new knowledge. This research fell into two categories. First, we had produced a map of how ideas in a social studies course might be organized. Because this map, in the form of the concept webs, had been constructed in the language of the students, it represented how they themselves organize their thinking about the Inuit world. It was therefore an Inuit model of social organization rather than one
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imposed from another culture. Second, we had in the documents, transcriptions of oral accounts, photographs and other materials organized chronologically in the time line, a pool of resources that could be incorporated into that model for pedagogical purposes. The research we had each followed to create these had been different but complementary. The students had carried out their research among Inuit, creating genealogies and recording oral history, while I had tapped into the southern library and archival resources with which I was most familiar. When we started our work together, we could not have predicted exactly how the two strands would come together, but the learning we all experienced lay in the process of constructing knowledge that drew from both, but which should have its greatest relevance for Inuit. As the instructor, I hope that the idea had been planted that being a researcher in the two senses described above forms a large part of being a social studies teacher. There is a ‘social studies’, with both content and method. There is an Inuit culture, that suggests to what purpose content and method should be put. What I hoped we had done together was to set the students on the path of developing an ‘Inuit social studies’, distinctive in its cultural content and implied values, but connected to the main ideas of the field in the same way that the branches of a genealogical tree are connected to its trunk, or the sub- concepts of a web are connected to its core. Postscript I left after class on Friday afternoon and Jessie Lyall drove me out to the airport, in the dark of course since the sun had momentarily risen and set three hours before. The temperature was a reasonably mild !28°C with no wind, a considerable improvement over the previous few days. The turbo-prop plane lifted us out of the dark into the mauve arctic sky, which lightened appreciably as we headed south, taking a few hours to cover the ground that had taken the likes of Franklin, Richardson, Back, Dease and Simpson months of arduous travel. A plane change in Yellowknife, another in Edmonton and yet another in Calgary for the red-eye to Toronto, there to join the morning Rapidair
crowd for the short hop to Montreal, brought me home in time for Saturday morning breakfast. Notes 1 Although I took on the task of writing this account, it owes much to the students’ contribution, and I am honoured that each of them agreed to allow me to recognize them as co-authors. I should also like to acknowledge the assistance of Anthony Pare´ and Chris Milligan, who kindly commented on the manuscript. I am especially indebted to Mary Maguire, whose constructive criticism of an earlier draft of this article led to my making many changes, to Deborah Metchette, who produced the diagrams, and to Monica Ittusardjuat, who translated the text in Figure 2. The perceptive comments of both anonymous reviewers of this journal caused me to sharpen my thinking on many of the issues implicit in this paper, although I recognize that many others remain unresolved. 2 The non-Inuit names are used in this article because they are more familiar to southern readers. When Nunavut comes into being, the Inuit names will become official.
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