2 Inuvialuit Ethnonyms and Toponyms as a Reflection of Identity, Language, and Memory

When the Inuit of the western Canadian Arctic were preparing their land claim, they chose Inuvialuit as their collective name. After the Inuvialuktun Language Commission was created, they selected Siglit, Uummarmiut, and Kangiryuarmiut to name their three linguistic groups (Osgood 1984, viii). In the latter two ethnonyms, the suffix –miut means “inhabitants of” (Lowe 1984a, 133, although the term is not specific to humans, it is often translated as “people of/from.” Their dialects are named by adding the suffix –un to the end of the ethnonym, Inuvialuktun being the term used to encompass all three. The Inuvialuktun dialects are part of the Inuit language family, which is divided into the following groups from west to east: Alaskan Iñupiatun (also called Iñupiaq), western Canadian Inuktun, eastern Canadian Inuktitut, and Greenlandic Kalaallisut. Uummarmiutun is a dialect of the Northern Alaska Iñupiatun subgroup, Siglitun and Inuinnaqtun are dialects of the western Canadian Inuktun, and Kangiryuarmiutun is a subdialect of Inuinnaqtun (Dorais 2010, 28–29).

The term Inuvialuit means “real people,” (singular, Inuvialuk “real person”) (Lowe 2001, 358). According to linguist Louis-Jacques Dorais, after contact with Europeans, the Indigenous peoples of the North American Arctic attributed themselves names encompassing all their local groups to be distinguished from the newcomers. In Canada and Alaska, this was done by either using Inuit as an ethnic name including all regional groups, or creating names with the wordbase inu- (as in inuk, “person” and its plural inuit, “people” which originally applied to all humans) followed by morphemes meaning “real” or “genuine” to indicate that the Inuit are the prototype of Arctic humanity (for example, Iñupiat, Inuvialuit, and Inuinnait) (Dorais 2020, 77–78). Thus, it was likely after contact with foreigners other than their Dene neighbours that the Siglitun speakers used the ethnonym Inuvialuit “to refer to themselves, no matter where they lived” (Osgood 1984, viii).

Indeed, the Siglit are the original Inuvialuit, who traditionally occupied a vast area that extended from Barter Island, off the northern coast of Alaska not far west of the Yukon boundary, as far east as Cape Lyon (figure 2.2). Archaeologists trace their origins to the Thule people, whose culture developed in coastal western Alaska sometime around AD 1000 and quickly populated the Canadian Arctic and Greenland eight hundred years ago (Friesen and Arnold 2008). At least until the first half of the nineteenth century, the Inuvialuit comprised eight main territorial groups. From west to east, these were the Tuyurmiat of the Yukon coast (including the Qikiqtaryungmiut of Herschel Island); the Kuukpangmiut and the Kitigaaryungmiut of the Mackenzie Delta; the Imaryungmiut of Eskimo Lakes, along the south-western side of the Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula; on its northern part, the Nuvugarmiut of Atkinson Point; the Kuungmiut of the Anderson River; the Avvarmiut of Cape Bathurst; and southeast of it, the Igluyuaryungmiut of the Franklin Bay area (Betts 2009, 7; Hart 2011, 117; Morrison 2003a, 14–17; Nagy 1994, 25–28, 2012a, 153).³

The term Siglit (singular, Sigliq) was first recorded by Oblate missionary Émile Petitot as “Tchiglit” during one of his five travels to the Mackenzie Delta region between 1865 and 1870. It is also possible that Petitot was given the term by the young Siglit couple that stayed at Fort Good Hope Catholic mission in the summer of 1868 or by Arviuna (“bowhead whaler”), a teenager who spent two months with Petitot in the summer of 1870 helping him to complete his French-Inuit dictionary (Petitot 1876, i; 1887, 226–227, 279).

Published in 1876, Petitot’s dictionary includes a monograph of the Siglit and a short grammar of their language. Without defining the word Tchiglit explicitly, Petitot indicated that the Inuit living along the shores of the Arctic sea, between Colville River (Alaska) in the west and as far east as Cape Bathurst, used it to identify themselves (Petitot 1876, i, x). Later, he specified that their western limit was Point Barrow (Petitot 1886, 3). However, his monograph is restricted to the Tchiglit of the Mackenzie and the Anderson Rivers because they were the only groups he had visited. Although Petitot wrote innok (Inuk) and its plural innoït (Inuit) as translations of the word Esquimau, he stipulated that those at the mouths of the Anderson and Mackenzie Rivers were called Tçiglit and that its singular was Tçigleρk (Petitot 1876, 29).⁴ Those two last terms are now pronounced Siglit and Sigliq.⁵

Petitot’s 1887 book, Les Grands Esquimaux, has a copy of his 1875 map attached, which includes the three territorial groups he mentioned in his 1876 dictionary: the Taréorméut of the Mackenzie Delta (Tariurmiut, “coast dwellers,” Lowe 2001, 147), the Kragmalit of the Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula and the Anderson River (Qangmalit, “people of the east,” Lowe 2001, 104), and the Kragmalivit of Cape Bathurst (“places of the Qangmalit”).⁶ These terms are too generic to have been the endonyms of local Siglit groups, but were used by people of the Mackenzie Delta to designate their eastern neighbours (see Stefansson 2001, 115). On his map, Petitot added, in parentheses, the term Tchizaré for the people at the mouth of the Anderson River. He did not translate Tchizaré but described it as equivalent to Tchiglit (Petitot 1887, 2). In his dictionary, he specified that Tchizaρéni was the corrupted form of an Inuit term meaning “on the shore” that the Dene used to designate people of the Anderson River (Petitot 1876, x).

Despite calling “chief of the Tchiglit” the leader of the Anderson River people, Petitot did not restrict that ethnonym to this group (1887, 3). He referred to three peoples—from the west, the centre, and the east of the Mackenzie River—as part of the Inuit he was describing (Petitot 1887, 298). To complicate the matter, Petitot cited a story told by Arviuna about the origins of the Tchiglit, which he translated this time as meaning “humans” (1876, xxiv, 1886, 3). If Arviuna provided this translation, it must have reinforced Petitot’s understanding that Tchiglit was an endonym used to designate an entire nation made of territorial groups. However, Petitot also translated the singular form Tchiglerk to mean “fellow” and “man” when twice quoting Arviuna (1887, 283–284).

Petitot also stated that Arviuna belonged specifically to the Taréorméout (Tariurmiut), a term he translated as “people of the high sea.” However, he also wrote that they lived west of the Mackenzie Delta (where he had placed them on his map), a discrepancy that suggests they lived along the Yukon North Slope (1887, 279). During our interviews, Ishmael Alunik insisted that the people of the Yukon coast called themselves Tuyurmiat but since the Kitigaaryungmiut called them Siglit, they started to use that name (Nagy 1994b, IA91-14A, 2). Alunik then corroborates Arviuna’s use of Tchiglit (Siglit) to talk about his people. Petitot mentioned the “Tuyormiyat” (Tuyurmiat) as one of the Inuit “tribes” known to the Siglit, but he placed them in the Bering Strait.

Tuyurmiat (singular, Tuyurmiaq) means “guests” in Siglitun and Uummarmiutun (Lowe 1984a, 224; 2001, 159). Stefansson mentioned that the Kitigaaryungmiut called the people west of the Mackenzie River up to Herschel Island and a little beyond it the Tuyormiut (Tuyurmiat) (1919, 23). The Inuvialuit we interviewed also called those people Tuyurmiat and indicated that they spoke Siglitun but with a dialect slightly different from that of the Kitigaaryungmiut (Nagy 1994, 26). Linguistic informants from Tuktoyaktuk also identified them as Tuyurmiat but specified that they spoke an Alaskan dialect (Lowe 1991, 185n4). In 1991, Emmanuel Felix explained that Tuyurmiat was the name the Kitigaaryungmiut used for the people from Qitiqtaryuk (Herschel Island) and Tapqaq (Shingle Point), but Lily Lipscomb said that her grandmother, who was originally from inland Alaska, used it only in reference to the people of Pattuktuq (Demarcation Point), Alaska, close to the Yukon border (Nagy 1994b, EF91-5A, 1 and LL91-25A, 3).⁷

Although the term Siglit had been used for a long time, its meaning was no longer known by the 1980s and most speakers of Siglitun agreed that it was given to them by others. Only the inhabitants of Paulatuk unhesitatingly called themselves by that name (Osgood 1984, viii). In 1991, Emmanuel Felix suggested that the term Siglit might refer to one of the two places called Siglialuk north of Tuktoyaktuk and that it may have originated from an older version of the Siglit language (Nagy 1994a, EF90-5A, 1–2). Asked about the meaning of the toponym Siglialuk located at the bottom of Hutchison Bay, David Nasogaluak explained that some people called the inhabitants of the Tuktoyaktuk area Siglit to differentiate them from those who lived more inland, thus implying that both Siglialuk and Siglit are derived from the wordbase sigyaq (Hart 2011, 70).⁸

Although Hart described sigyaq as the word for “shore” in Siglitun, which could apply to rivers, lakes, or the sea, its meaning is in fact “seashore” (Hart 2011, 70; Lowe 2001, 525, 529). As Siglit comprises the beginning of sigyaq and –lit, which seems an assimilation of –lliit, the plural of the suffix –lliq (“the one located at the most X”) (Lowe 2001, 128, 245), it probably means “those more toward the seashore” and hence corroborates Duncan Pryde’s translation of this ethnonym (Fortescue, Jacobson, and Kaplan 2010, 87). Furthermore, this definition explains why Siglitun was previously called the “coastal dialect” (Lowe 1991, 142). Convinced that Siglit is a mispronounciation or misspelling of Sallit, the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation has recently replaced Siglit with Sallirmiut (translated as “coastal people” on their website) and Siglitun with Sallirmiutun.⁹ If one follows this interpretation, rather than originating with the word sigyaq, Siglit is closer to sallit, the plural of salliq (“the one located closest to shore”) (Lowe 2001, 121). However, this new name might be confused with the extinct Sallirmuit (formerly spelled Sadlermiut) of Southampton Island in Hudson Bay. Since I will be discussing historical sources and data collected in the 1990s and for the purposes of avoiding anachronisms, I will use the terms Siglit and Siglitun in this text.

British explorer Captain John Franklin visited the Siglit in the nineteenth century, roughly forty years prior to Petitot. Both estimated the Siglit population to have been around 2,000 although it may have been close to 2,500, according to geographer Peter Usher’s reconstruction from various sources (Franklin [1828] 1971, 86–228; Petitot 1876, x; Usher 1971a, 169–171). Robert McGhee (1974, xi) and Derek Smith (1984, 349) argued that because of their ability to hunt down large numbers of beluga whales in the Mackenzie Delta during the summer months, the Siglit were able to sustain one of the largest Inuit populations in the Arctic before contact with whalers, traders, and missionaries at the end of the nineteenth century. Sadly, these interactions resulted in major epidemics during the first two decades of the twentieth century that drastically reduced the Siglit population.

The largest village of the Siglit was Kitigaaryuit (McGhee 1974). From 1911 to 1917, it had an Anglican mission and, from 1912 to 1933, a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post which was moved to Tuktoyaktuk in 1934 where most Kitigaaryungmiut relocated (Hart 2011, 31, 50). During the 1930s, fox trapping attracted some Siglit to Banks Island, while others moved east of Cape Bathurst to the Cape Parry area to trap and hunt. Southeast of Bathurst, a new community was formed in Paulatuk after a Catholic mission with a small trading post opened in 1935 (Parks Canada 2004). When the last trading post of Herschel Island closed in 1937, most Siglit living there and along the Yukon North Slope moved to Tuktoyaktuk. Now, the Siglit live in Inuvik, the mainland coastal communities of Tuktoyaktuk and Paulatuk, as well as in Sachs Harbour, on Banks Island (figure 2.2).

Uummarmiut means “inhabitants of the evergreens or green willows” and refers to the vegetation of the Mackenzie Delta. Linguistic evidence indicates that the Uummarmiut are the descendants of Iñupiatun speakers from northern Alaska, many of whom were originally from the Anaktuvuk Pass area (Lowe 1984a, xv, 47, 63). During our interviews, the terms Iñupiat, Nunataarmiut, and sometimes Nunamiut, were terms used by Siglit to refer to the Uummarmiut and by the Uummarmiut to refer to themselves. Both Iñupiatun and Uummarmiutun were names given to their language (Nagy 1994a, 1994b). Iñupiat (“real people,” singular, Iñupiaq “real person”) is an endonym that represents the Iñupiatun speakers of northwest and northern Alaska and their descendants. Although both terms contain the wordbase nuna (“land”), Nunamiut and Nunataarmiut originally had different meanings. Nunamiut (“inland inhabitants”) is used in contrast to Tariurmiut (“coastal inhabitants”), both being generic terms depicting different ways of life (Burch 1998, 3). After the creation of the village of Anaktuvuk Pass in 1949, its inland inhabitants were often called Nunamiut in the anthropological literature, but they now call themselves Naqsragmiut.

Nunataarmiut refers to the inhabitants of the Nunatak or Noatak River (Hall 1984, 345). According to Ernest (“Tiger”) Burch (1984, 318–319), Nunataarmiut originally designated the inhabitants of the entire Noatak River drainage, although Iñupiatun speakers of the Alaska North Slope used it for those of the drainage’s upper part. Maps in his latest books depict the Nunataarmiut north of the Nuataarmiut, thus including the Anaktuvuk Pass area in the Brooks Range (Burch 2005, 37, 2006, 8). In the mid-1880s, Nunataarmiut referred to people who came to the Alaskan Arctic coast, east of Colville River, but it soon became a general term for all former inland inhabitants regardless of their origins (Burch 1984, 319). Indeed, Stefansson (1919, 23) mentioned that the Kitigaaryungmiut called most of the people from western Alaska Nunataarmiut.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, some Nunataarmiut began to migrate inland to the northern Yukon and the Mackenzie Delta region in response to a decrease in Alaska caribou populations in the Brooks Range, a decline which had begun in the 1860s (Burch 2012, 119; Nagy 1994, 1–2). During our interviews, Uummarmiut mentioned that the caribou decline also led their grandparents and parents to move to Old Crow Flats (Yukon), the inland territory of the Vuntut Gwitchin (Nagy 1994, 2).¹⁰

Although Petitot located the Nuna-tag-méut (Nunataarmiut) toward the Bering Strait, he listed them as another Inuit “tribe” known to the Siglit (1876, x). Petitot may have met Nunataarmiut coming to trade at Fort McPherson (south of the Mackenzie Delta) in the summer. In fact, evidence of the presence of Nunataarmiut appears in Petitot’s dictionary, which includes the word innoρiaρ (Iñupiaq) as the translation of “human,” when the Siglitun version of that word is inuk (1876, 38). If Siglit is neither an exonym of the Tuyurmiat of the Yukon North Slope nor an endonym of the Mackenzie Delta and Anderson River inhabitants, it might have been used by the Nunataarmiut to distinguish themselves from the Inuvialuit coming from inland.

Starting in 1889, Nunataarmiut and other Iñupiat from coastal villages of northwest Alaska worked as hunters and seamstresses for American whalers, who often hired entire families for two years or more (Bockstoce 2018, 86). The whalers were hunting bowhead whales, mainly for their baleen, around Herschel Island and later expanded to the area around Baillie Islands, west of Cape Bathurst, as well (Bockstoce 1986; Morrison 2003b).¹¹ In 1894 and 1895, caribou hunters were so essential to whalers that most Iñupiat from Point Barrow were at Herschel Island along with another one hundred from Point Hope (Bockstoce 1986, 274). From 1906 to 1918, a dozen Nunataarmiut were employed by Canadian anthropologist and explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson and his colleagues (Gray 2003; Jenness 1991; Stefansson 1919, 1921, 1922, 2001).

After the 1908 collapse of the whaling industry, some whalers stayed in the Inuvialuit territory and became trappers or traders. Many Nunataarmiut families did not return to Alaska, preferring to trap for furs along the Yukon North Slope and in the Mackenzie Delta and remain near the important trading centres of Herschel Island and the Hudson’s Bay Company trading post Aklavik, which opened in 1912 (Morrison and Kolausok 2003). More Nunataarmiut came in the 1920s, as muskrat trapping developed in the Mackenzie Delta area. A final migration of Nunataarmiut occurred in the mid-1930s and 1940s, as local trading posts near the Alaska-Yukon border closed down (Nagy 1994, 1–2).

While they worked on their dictionary in the early 1980s, the Iñupiatun speakers of the Mackenzie Delta decided to be called Uummarmiut since Nunataarmiut had become a misnomer and could have a pejorative connotation (Lowe 1991, 185n6). Most Uummarmiut now live in Aklavik and Inuvik, although some are in Sachs Harbour.

Kangiryuarmiut means “people of the large bay,” referring to Prince Albert Sound (Kangiryuaq), on the western coast of Victoria Island (Kudlak and Compton 2018, 85). They now live primarily in the village of Ulukhaktok (formerly Holman), at the entrance to the sound, although a few families have been residing in Sachs Harbour on Banks Island since the mid-1950s. Both culturally and linguistically, the Kangiryuarmiut are closely connected to the Inuinnait (once known as the Copper Inuit) of the Kitikmeot Region of Nunavut, particularly those of Kugluktuk (formerly Coppermine), at the mouth of the Coppermine River, and Cambridge Bay on the southeastern shore of Victoria Island (see, for example, Collignon 1996, 2006; Condon 1996; Kudlak and Compton 2018).

Inuinnait, which means “genuine people” and designates all the Inuinnaqtun speakers regardless of local identity (Dorais 2020, 78), has been used as a regional name since at least the 1990s (Collignon 2006, 21). Ten years after the creation of Nunavut in 1999, Inuinnaqtun became one of its two official languages, along with Inuktitut. In recognition of their origins, Kangiryuarmiut might refer to themselves as both Inuinnait and Inuvialuit, and most prefer to call their language Inuinnaqtun rather than Kangiryuarmiutun (Dorais 2010, 33; Lowe 1983, xv). For example, in contrast to the title of the first Kangiryuarmiutun dictionary, which did not mention Inuinnaqtun (Lowe 1983), the latest version of the dictionary indicates that its subject is the Kangiryuarmiut dialect of the Inuinnaqtun language (Kudlak and Compton 2018). The Kangiryuarmiut remain proud of their Inuinnait ancestry while also being Inuvialuit, a double identity reflected in the definition of Kangiryuarmiut provided in the dictionary: “Inuinnait and Inuvialuit of the Prince Albert Sound” (Kudlak and Compton 2018, 85). Since the Aulavik Oral History Project captured stories about the past, the Kangiryuamiut we interviewed about Banks Island often called themselves Inuinnait and referred to their language as Inuinnaqtun (see also Kelvin 2016, 37).¹²

In his analysis of the ethnogenesis of the Inuvialuit, Jens Dahl (1988) pointed out that before the turn of the twentieth century, there was no single ethnic territory encompassing the Siglit of the Mackenzie Delta and the Kangiryuarmiut of western Victoria Island and Banks Island. Indeed, early accounts suggest that the two groups lived in different areas and rarely, if ever, interacted before the visits of fur traders and explorers in the early 1900s, who arrived in the company of Siglit, as well as a number of Iñupiat from Alaska (for example, Franklin [1828] 1971; Stefansson 1919, 1922). However, once contacts were made in the first part of the twentieth century, relationships and intermarriages took place with the Kangiryuarmiut as it had happened before between Siglit, Iñupiat, whalers, Métis, non-Indigenous trappers, and Gwich’in neighbours (Lyons 2009).¹³

Before the three linguistic groups that now form the Inuvialuit decided to work together on the land claim that would result in the 1984 Inuvialuit Final Agreement, their sense of identity, as that of Inuit in general, was at the local level (Collignon 2006; Dorais 1994). In her study of the Inuinnait, Béatrice Collignon (2006, 21) remarked that “the territory is dotted with their temporary camps, and it is this territory that gives them their sense of identity, and their name.” She further noted that even years after Inuinnait groups had moved into permanent settlements, “their social life still revolves around the original sub-groups, around their traditional territorial identity” (Collignon 2006, 57). I had the same impression while interviewing Inuvialuit from each of the linguistic groups. Often those from multiple origins felt they belonged primarily to one specific group. At the same time, when Kangiryuarmiut, Siglit, and Uummarmiut, including those with diverse ancestry, collectively call themselves “Inuvialuit,” it is to reflect a new identity founded on their shared occupation, use, and management of a vast territory stretching from the Yukon North Slope to the western part of Victoria Island.

Toponyms form part of what Mark Nuttall (1992, 39) has called “memoryscape” which is constructed with people’s mental image of remembered places. During his fieldwork with Northwest Greenland Inuit, they used memoryscape to recall local and mythical narratives about past events or experiences (Nuttall 2001, 63). As Collignon (1996, 2006) demonstrated, toponyms are essential to the integration of Inuinnait in their milieu, which then becomes humanized and allows cultures to blossom. She also noted, “The history and beliefs of the people are rooted in the territory, so that the territory becomes the keeper of the community’s memory and values” (Collignon 2006, 42). This echoes the observation made by Keith Basso (1984, 44) that “geographical features have served the Apache people for centuries as indispensable mnemonic pegs on which to hang the moral teachings of their history.” Similarly, in an account of the life stories told by three women of Tagish, southern Tutchone, and Tlingit ancestry from the Yukon, Julie Cruikshank (1990, 354) remarked that toponyms do more than simply identify particular places: by allowing people to “use points in space to talk about time,” they provide an entryway into the past.

Although the Inuvialuit oral history projects we worked on had a broader scope, place names were an important aspect of the data we hoped to collect. We interviewed thirty-two Inuvialuit in 1990 and 1991 and fifty in 1996. Using maps and archival photographs, we asked people to tell us about their life along the Yukon North Slope and on Banks Island (figures 2.3 and 2.4). We also enquired about toponyms and stories associated with those names. We brought people back to old camps, by boat in 1990 and by helicopter in 1991 and 1996, hoping that being physically in specific places would ignite memories, which indeed proved to be the case. The meanings of the place names mentioned reflected geographical features (including analogies with human anatomy), specific animals, plants, and rocks, or activities that were held there. Because the people interviewed used their own dialect to identify places, some of them had more than one toponym, although they often shared the same meaning.

During the projects on Herschel Island and the Yukon North Slope, we visited 20 sites and documented 90 toponyms in Inuvialuktun (specifically, Siglitun and Uumarmiutun).¹⁴ Although Inuvialuktun place names are now used in maps of the Yukon coast (for example, Burn and Hattendorf 2012, 22; Irrgang et al. 2019, 109), official maps published by the Government of Canada had mainly English names. Indeed, many originated from Captain John Franklin’s 1826 expedition and a survey of Herschel Island made in 1889 by Charles H. Stockton (Burn and Hattendorf 2012; Government of Yukon 2015). During our research, it was impossible to translate some Inuvialuktun names, they either have no meaning or, more likely, include vocabulary no longer used. Most of the toponyms referred to places located on the Yukon coast and those mentioned repeatedly designated large camps where families had lived. Noticeably, the major camp sites along the Yukon coast were located at regular intervals of about 10 to 20 kilometres.

For the project on Banks Island, we visited twenty-two sites and documented 74 toponyms, including 49 in Inuvialuktun (specifically, Kangiryuarmiutun, Siglitun, and possibly some Uummarmiutun). In comparison, the Government of the Northwest Territories (2015) lists 175 toponyms for Banks Island including 29 in Inuvialuktun. Most of the foreign names were given by outsiders; first by British Captain Robert McClure who spent four winters between 1850 and 1853 with his crew on Banks Island when the HMS Investigator got stuck in ice while searching for the lost Frankin expedition, and then by anthropologist and explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson who led the Canadian Arctic Expedition between 1913 and 1918 (Gray 2003; McClure 1865; Stefansson 1922). During our interviews, the majority of toponyms that were mentioned designated camps of various sizes.

Collignon (2006, 84–90) lists three types of narratives associated with Inuinnait toponyms: the first is about the origin of a land feature, the second about how to use the land in the wisest way, and the third are local stories of anecdotal nature. People we interviewed had life stories associated with specific places but rarely information regarding how the places got their names. Furthermore, in contrast to the 1,007 toponyms collected among the Inuinnait of Victoria Island by Collignon (1996, 2006) in the 1990s, and the 314 among the Siglit of the Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula by Hart (2011) during the same period, the smaller numbers recorded for the Yukon North Slope and Banks Island are surprising, especially given the size of the areas in question (roughly 18,000 square kilometres and 70,000 square kilometres, respectively). Various factors may have contributed to this outcome.

First, our methodological approach had certain limitations. We started by interviewing all Inuvialuit participants in their homes to find those who were particularly knowledgeable about their territory and its place names. Then, we brought as many elders as possible back to old camps. We had only a short period of time at these sites, which might not have been sufficient to document toponyms. Indeed, with the exception of two occasions on which we travelled by boat and camped with elders along the Yukon North Slope and at Herschel Island in 1990, most of our visits were made by helicopter within the space of a single day. Given the time it took to travel, we never stayed for more than a few hours at each site. Although we might have met with greater success had we been able to spend longer periods of time travelling and camping with just a few elders, this would have been more complicated logistically, as well as possibly hazardous for the health of some elders, in view of the tremendous distances between camps. Moreover, we would have had to try to judge in advance who might have the best memories, given that elders had often not returned to these sites for somewhere between forty and sixty years. With the exception of the summer camp at Tapqaq (Shingle Point), this temporal gap was especially pronounced for sites on the Yukon coast, which had been almost completely abandoned by the 1940s, when most people moved to and around the hamlets of Aklavik and Tuktoyaktuk.

Another methodological issue was the use of maps. Even if elders remembered toponyms, some had difficulty locating them on a map. Indeed, most participants in the Herschel Island and Yukon North Slope projects were not comfortable with maps of that area, possibly because they had not been back there for a long time or because they “knew” the land from a different perspective—by travelling on the water, for example, or on the ice.¹⁵ This, however, was not a problem with elders of Banks Island because they were used to maps of their island, some having taken part during the 1960s and 1970s in studies of their trapping activities, which included the identification of trap lines on maps (Usher 1966, 1971b, 1976). Thus, they were familiar with maps of the island and place names attributed by explorers since 1820, including those by explorer and anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson a century later (Stefansson 1919).

Second, fewer toponyms might reflect the nature and intensity of territorial occupation, and the absence of transmission. The Tuyurmiat of the Yukon coast were described by the Inuvialuit we interviewed as distinct from the rest of the Siglit, with a dialect slightly different, rather isolated, and not too numerous (Nagy 1994, 27). Thus, they probably did not occupy the Yukon North Slope in an intense manner. Furthermore, many of those people died during the big epidemics of the early 1900s and of 1928, and since oral history is normally passed on by elders, all their knowledge of place names might not have survived them.

In the case of Banks Island, the toponyms that we recorded were associated with the different groups who have lived there: the Kangiryuarmiut, on the one hand, and the Siglit and Uummarmiut, on the other. The Kangiryuarmiut had been going to Banks Island seasonally for hundreds of years, mainly to hunt muskox, caribou, seals, and geese. Their intermittent use of the island is reflected in its name, Ikaahuk, which means “the crossing place,” in reference to traversing from their main camps in Kangiryuaq (Prince Albert Sound) on western Victoria Island. Accordingly, the Kangiryuarmiutun toponyms we collected are located mainly on the eastern and southern coasts of Banks Island. Although from 1853 to possibly the late 1890s, the Kangiryuarmiut also went north of the island to Mercy Bay to salvage wood and metal from the shipwrecked HMS Investigator (Hickey 1986), only a few place names were mentioned for that area.

In contrast, Banks Island was an unknown territory for the Siglit and Uummarmiut families who started to come there from the mainland in the late 1920s and 1930s, to trap white fox during the fall and the winter, before travelling back to the Mackenzie Delta and Herschel Island in the summer to sell their furs and get supplies (figure 2.5). Such journeys were possible because the high prices of furs allowed them to buy motor schooners from trading companies (Bockstoce 2018, 229; Usher 1971b). They established a dozen camps mainly in the western and southern coasts of Banks Island and identified them, and nearby rivers, by the names of schooners (for example, Blue Fox Harbour) and trappers or used previous toponyms given by explorers. By 1960, most families had moved from these camps to Sachs Harbour, the only community on Banks Island (Usher 1971b, 1:58).

A common practice by Banks Island’s Inuvialuit of all origins is to call lakes and creeks by the name of a person, in either Inuvialuktun or English. Although it might be too soon to talk of a language shift (see, for example, Marino 2006), there are presently at least sixteen toponyms bearing the English first names of Inuvialuit individuals, including a few new ones recorded in 2016 by Kelvin (232–240). Some locations might have been renamed since because we recorded four that did not appear on Kelvin’s list. Even if these place names are not in Inuvialuktun, they are nonetheless Inuvialuit since they have been chosen by people of Banks Island.

Third, although it would be unrealistic to expect that each toponym has a story associated with it, the fact that we gathered only a few stories about how some places were named might have to do with the different types of names that were recorded. In her study of Inuinnait toponyms, Collignon (2006, 137–138) found that specific geographic terms represented 21 percent and spatially referenced terms (that is, those with meanings such as “on the other side” or “across from each other” that imply a known reference point) accounted for 12 percent. In the case of the Yukon North Slope toponyms that were collected, 28 percent were specific geographic terms and 15 percent were spatially referenced terms. As for those recorded for Banks Island, 33 percent were specific geographic terms and 4 percent were spatially referenced terms. Although our samples are much smaller than Collignon’s, the presence of geographic terms (with or without spatial references) explains why those places had no stories related to their name. As for the other toponyms without associated stories, they may have become “only names.” Indeed, as explained by Moscovitch (2012, 108), most memories do not retain perceptually rich information, but instead become more schematic with time.

Fourth, perhaps the people being interviewed did not spend their formative years along the Yukon North Slope and Banks Island and therefore did not become familiar with toponyms and their stories. Indeed, one’s early years spent at specific places seems to influence one’s toponymic knowledge and memory.¹⁶ Hence, the example of Lily Lipscomb, who was born in 1948 and was adopted by her maternal grandparents, themselves born in the late 1870s. She lived with them mostly around Arvagvik (Roland Bay), along the Yukon coast, until the early 1960s.¹⁷ While we spent about three hours in Arvagvik with Lily Lipscomb, she shared life stories about herself and her grandparents but also mentioned 34 place names and specifically 16 within that area. She told us that her grandmother was originally from the Kuvuk (Kobuk River) area in Alaska and called her a Nunataarmiuq, which she defined as an inland person, while her Siglit grandfather was from Tikiraq (Kay Point), along the Yukon coast, and she called him a Tariurmiuq or coastal person (Nagy 1994b, LL91-25A, 1–2, 9). Because of their different backgrounds, she sometimes had two different toponyms for the same place, one used by her grandmother and the other by her grandfather, as they each taught her their own language and traditions.

Another case in point is that of Edith Haogak, who was born in the early 1930s and raised in Kangiryuaqtihuk (Minto Inlet) and Kangiryuaq (Prince Albert Sound), both on the western side of Victoria Island, but who also travelled to Banks Island with her parents to hunt (figure 2.6). In the late 1950s, she moved to Sachs Harbour, the newly built community on the island. Having been widowed early in her adult life, she had to support her family by hunting and trapping for furs. When we interviewed her, she had been living on Banks Island for almost forty years. Although she was one of the few people who knew most of the Kangiryuarmiutun toponyms for the eastern coast of Banks Island, these numbered only about ten. Yet she had an extensive knowledge of more than 120 toponyms from the west coast of Victoria Island, where she was raised, and all of which she could locate on a map (Nagy 2006, 77). Of the 58 toponyms she listed for Kangiryuaqtihuk and the area north of it, I found all but four in Collignon (2006, 235–257). Collignon (2006, 106) had a similar experience with a seventy-one-year-old man from Ulukhaktok who only knew the place names of the lower part of Kangiryuaq, “where he had grown up but had hardly ever returned as an adult.”

Thus, it seems that individuals are more likely to form lasting memories of specific places while they are still fairly young, with their experiences as children and adolescents making an especially strong imprint. This observation is supported by research on autobiographical memory that has identified the “reminiscence bump” (Rubin, Wetzler, and Nebes 1986), a cross-cultural tendency of adults over forty years old to have more recollection of memories from adolescence and early adulthood (Zaragoza Scherman, Shao, and Bernsten 2015).¹⁸ However, there are divergent opinions regarding the range of the bump, particularly its onset. Initial research associated it with ages between 10 and 30 (Rubin, Wetzler, and Nebes 1986), but later studies placed it between 6 and 15 (Jansari and Parkin 1996, 88); 5 and 30 (Rubin and Schulkind 1997, 529); 6 and 20 (Janssen, Rubin, and St. Jacques 2011, 1); 5 and 20 (Corning and Schuman 2015, 164); and 15 and 30 (Zaragoza Scherman, Shao, and Bernsten 2015). These various ranges open the possibility for an earlier onset of the reminiscence bump after childhood amnesia, which usually ends between 3 and 7 (see Rubin 2000).

First memories represent the beginning of consciousness (Cohen-Mansfield et al. 2010, 571) and indeed, when recalling them, Inuvialuit interviewed used expressions related to “becoming aware” or “coming to their senses” while vividly describing their surroundings (see Nagy 2006). Cohen-Mansfield et al. (2010, 565, 571) explain that memories of formative events or those reflecting formative processes shape the identity of the individual and give a strong sense of group belonging. Among the Inuvialuit, not only were various places visited seasonally, but their names were included in discussions and storytelling with parents, the extended family, and one’s group as part of what Halbwachs (1950) called mémoire collective (“collective memory”). The encoding of those toponyms in the memory was likely reinforced by peer interactions as exemplified by Paatlirmiut children playing a contest listing place names (Correll 1976, 178).

As noted by Bernsten (2012, 294), the importance of emotion in relation to encoding and maintenance of memory is well established. Thus, the emotional link to the first places an individual remembers might be the key to which toponyms are better known and recalled. Indeed, as Basso (1996, 76) wrote about the Western Apache, “Because of their inseparable connection to specific localities, place names may be used to summon forth an enormous range of mental and emotional associations—association of time and space, of history and events, of persons and social activities, of oneself and stages in one’s life.” Furthermore, when referring to Inuinnait toponyms associated with local stories that are shared only within an extended family or hunting group, Collignon (2006, 90) emphasized that “their geographic dimension is that of the intimate scale of family, individuals, and emotions.” This intimate link to the land and its temporal connotations was very well expressed by Mark Emerak, who lived on Victoria Island: “I should send [that story] somewhere to the land where I first got my memory” (quoted in Nagy 2006, 76).

When trying to understand why fewer toponyms than expected were recorded, one last point to consider is the conclusion that Collignon (2006, 106) drew from her own interviews—namely, that the skills of the travellers are not related to the number of place names that they know. She emphasized that toponyms are mainly landmarks of history rather than travel and survival aids. A traveller who knows the names of places in a particular area will use them not for purposes of orientation but rather to feel connected to the land in a familiar way (Collignon 1996, 117). Her hypothesis was confirmed by the fact that specific geographic terms and those spatially referenced represented only 33 percent of the toponyms she collected. Similarly, such terms accounted for 43 percent of the toponyms we gathered on the Yukon North Slope and 37 precent of those from Banks Island. Furthermore, even though the elders we interviewed on Banks Island mentioned fewer toponyms than we had anticipated, they had extensive knowledge of particular areas and showed us on a map where they hunted and trapped (Nagy 1999, 2004).

Inuvialuit ethnonyms and toponyms are an entry-way to language, identity, and memory issues. Most of the toponyms recorded during oral history projects about Herschel Island, the Yukon North Slope, and Banks Island indicated geographical features, specific resources, and activities that were held at particular places. They also reflected the diverse origins of the Inuvialuit involved in naming their territory. Hence, along the Yukon North Slope, the toponyms were mostly in Siglitun and in Uummarmiutun, the dialects of the two different groups that lived there up to the 1940s. In contrast, a linguistic and temporal dichotomy was apparent between the place names on the eastern and western coasts of Banks Island. On the eastern coast, toponyms reflected centuries of seasonal occupations by the Kangiryuarmiut of western Victoria Island, while those of the western coast demonstrated the more recent occupation of the island, which started in the late 1920s, by people of Siglit and Uummarmiut origins. The English toponyms created by the Inuvialuit of Banks Island do not represent a language shift, as many bear the names of either people or schooners. Despite the fact that English is now the dominant language among the Inuvialuit, it seems unlikely that they will use it to create all their new toponyms, given that Inuvialuktun place names are such a powerful symbol of the Inuvialuit presence throughout their traditional territory.

Depending on their experience of living on the land, the elders we interviewed demonstrated various degrees of knowledge and memory regarding place names and the stories associated with them. Knowledge of toponyms seems linked to the emotional connection to the first places an individual remembers, with memories established during formative years (childhood and adolescence) lasting longer. All these factors are tied to family origins and are thus grounded in the various identities of the Inuvialuit.

A preliminary version of this chapter was presented at the session “Language, Memory, and Landscape” at the 18th Inuit Studies Conference (see Nagy 2012b). I am grateful to Kenneth Pratt for organizing that session and for inviting me to participate. I offer most sincere thanks to all the Inuvialuit elders who participated in the oral history projects on Herschel Island, the Yukon North Slope, and Banks Island as well as to Inuvialuit research assistants Renie Arey, Elizabeth Banksland, Shirley Elias, Jean Harry, and Agnes White. Translations and transcriptions were done by Barbra Allen, Beverly Amos, Helen Kitekudlak, Agnes Kuptana, and Agnes White. The projects were administered by the Inuvialuit Social Development Program of the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation. Funding and logistical support were provided by Parks Canada; the Government of Yukon’s Heritage Branch; the Government of Northwest Territories’ Language Enhancement Program; the Government of Canada’s Polar Continental Shelf Program and Northern Oil and Gas Action Plan; and the Inuvik Research Centre. Finally, I want to thank two anonymous reviewers, Kenneth Pratt, Shirleen Smith, as well as the Athabasca University Press copyeditor Ryan Perks, senior editor Pamela Holway, and director Megan Hall for their comments, suggested revisions, and editing of the text.

1. 1 This said, I agree with Lyons (2009, 63) that “like individual identities, collective Inuvialuit identity is subject to multiple definitions and understandings, depending on context.”
2. 2 Ethnonym is used here to represent the name(s) a group of people calls itself or is called by others. Ethnonyms can be divided into endonyms or autonyms (self-given) and exonyms (given by others).
3. 3 Although the official Inuvialuktun name of Herschel Island is Qikiqtaruk, it was transcribed “Qikiqtqruk” by the transcribers of our Uummarmiutun interviews and “Qikiqtaryuk” by the transcriber of our Siglitun interviews (Nagy 1994).
4. 4 Contrary to Petitot, I do not use italics for ethnomyms in this text. As can be seen with the use of “ç” rather than “ch,” Petitot’s spelling system was not only very complex, but also inconsistent (Lowe 1991, 144).
5. 5 The sound changes from “c” (like in chair) to “ts” and “s” are explained in Fortescue, Jacobson, and Kaplan (2010, xvi).
6. 6 Petitot (1876, xi) had previously called Kragmalit the Anderson River people. Betts (2009, 6–7) did the same without taking into account that Petitot (1887) used Kragmalit to encompass people of a wider area than stricly the Anderson River.
7. 7 In previous texts, Lily Lipscomb’s last name was incorrectly spelled with an “e” at the end.
8. 8 Hart also mentioned the possibility that Siglialuk is the name of a person. Indeed, the suffix –aluk means “old, pitiful, from a long time ago” and can be used as a term of endearment (Hart 2011, 70; Lowe 2001, 189).
9. 9 Regarding the terminological change, see “Inuvialuit History,” Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, accessed 12 February 2022, https://irc.inuvialuit.com/about-irc/culture/inuvialuit-history.
10. 10 Regarding this Dene-speaking people, see Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation and Smith (2009).
11. 11 Concerning the different origins of the Uummarmiut other than Nunataarmiut, Ishamel Alunik specified families from Kuvuk (Kobuk River), Kotzebue, Point Hope, and Point Borrow (Nagy 1994a, IA90-35B, 8).
12. 12 In previous publications, I also called their language Inuinnaqtun but will designate it as Kangiryuarmiutun here.
13. 13 On relationships with the Gwich’in, see McCartney and Gwich’in Tribal Council (2020).
14. 14 Although Nagy (1993) lists 122 Inuvialuktun toponyms, some were pronunciation variations and thus spelled differently while others were not located in the Yukon North Slope.
15. 15 I thank Kenneth Pratt for this suggestion.
16. 16 Although I am not dealing here with cultural change but with memory of toponyms, I thank Kenneth Pratt for bringing to my attention the “early learning hypothesis” of Bruner (1956, 194): “That which was traditionally learned and internalized in infancy and early childhood tends to be most resistant to change in contact situations.” In the case of toponyms, the resistance would be against forgetting them.
17. 17 Previously transcribed as Arvakvik (“place of bowhead whale”), the proper spelling is Arvagvik (see Irrgang et al, 2019, 109).
18. 18 I am grateful to Shirleen Smith for making me aware of the reminiscence bump.

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