Foreword

Each society builds over many centuries its encyclopedia of information and insights. These are what create the very possibility of finding and harvesting the resources of the land. For the Indigenous peoples of the Arctic and Subarctic, as for all who live by hunting and gathering, this expertise, with its detailed understanding of so much of the world in which they live and move, can be a matter of life and death.

Great compendia of knowledge have been passed on from generation to generation in stories and myths—oral culture that is held and shared in the language of each society. A way of speaking is also the intellectual zone where memory and territory converge. The meaning of a place can be said to be inseparable from the language used to describe, understand, and name it. I remember an elder in the North Baffin Island settlement of Mittimatalik saying, in an interview I was filming with him, “The land cannot be known, except by our knowledge.” And when I put together a place-name map for the area around his village, he looked at the myriad of names, which appeared to cover every possible topographical feature, and said, “You can see now how it is that we Inuit never get lost.”

This is a book that explores the many implications of this profound connection between language and land, revealing, in a set of remarkable essays, the detailed links between the way Northern intellectual heritage and language work and the relationships implied between people and their ways of living in their world. At the heart of the significance of each language is, of course, an issue of identity: every Northern culture has seen itself as a distinct people in significant measure because of a way of life and a territory they regard as theirs and a distinctive web of myth, stories, and histories. And of course, they have established and sustained their identity with, and in, their own language. Many Northern peoples have a word for themselves that can be translated as “the human beings” or “real people.” Inuit, Inupiaq, Yupik, Dene, Innu—all these peoples refer to themselves in this way. For them, as for so many hunter-gatherer societies around the world, the idea or even the possibility of being fully human centres on who they are. Other peoples, other ways of speaking and of knowing the land, are, by implication, different in some aspect of their humanity. The force and validity of this view lies in the way each language is tied, and each hunting system ties every member of its community, to a particular physical and intellectual landscape.

The colonial project—or set of projects—that has shaped the North also has to be part of Northern scholarship. Every person who lives with the challenges and transformations that have come to their communities and lands will speak to this aspect of history. From the arrival of whaling ships to the establishment of trading posts and missions, to the imposition of boarding school programs to climate change—Northerners’ lives speak again and again to this complex nexus of events and experience. As the essays here by William E. Simeone, Kenneth L. Pratt, and others reveal, analysis of Arctic and Subarctic heritage must include a deep understanding of how a “Native” land came to be claimed and remade as part of powerful newcomers’ territorial and economic domination and domains. Just as these colonists sought to make every part of the world their own by mapping it in their way, and mapping it into their imperial and dominating mindsets, Indigenous peoples have been taking on the task of making their own maps, and of asserting their own expertise, to restate, and where necessary reclaim, their world and their ways of knowing it.

So what happens if Indigenous languages are displaced by the language of the colonists and subsequent newcomers? Do the people now find that they do, after all, “get lost”? Non-speakers of the native language have come to be a majority in many Northern communities. But they still hunt, fish, trap, and tell their stories. Knowledge can be held and passed on in English, French, or Russian. Identity as Yupik, Inupiaq, Inuit, Dene, or Innu does not dissolve if, for instance, Inuktitut, Athabascan, or Inuaimun are no longer spoken by a person, a family, or even a whole society. The loss of a language can seem like the burning to the ground of an entire and irreplaceable library. But questions about what this loss means to those whose parents or grandparents were unable to pass on their language are of great importance. The colonial suppression of Indigenous languages is a central feature of the history of the North. These and related issues, as discussed in this book, lead us to what both language and language loss mean to an Indigenous person or community of the North at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

There are risks—intellectual and political—that come with a single-minded focus on what is lost. As Mark Nuttall indicates in his chapter here, there is a long tradition in the Arctic of lamenting all that has passed away, often accompanied by fatalistic predictions of cultural and social doom. The North can become a region defined by all that is deemed to be disappearing. Yet analysis of Indigenous societies in the Arctic must include complex understandings of how change is also adaptive, and resilience a feature of Indigenous peoples’ history—both modern and ancient. Much scholarship has led to new understandings of both continuity and loss. Compelling research to this effect has come from a range of disciplines—from linguistics to ethnobiology to landscape archaeology to cultural mapping. Each of these, as the reader will discover, can make fascinating contributions to our understanding of Northern peoples, languages, and landscapes by paying the closest possible attention to what Northern peoples say, know, and do. This is not salvage ethnography so much as the continuing and compelling application of academic discourse to Indigenous knowledge.

Understanding place names—dependent at their foundations on Indigenous peoples’ links to their territories—has long been an important element in research on the North. To talk about the land is to use the names for places that are of local and regional significance. For Northern hunting peoples, there are many kinds of significance. The features of the landscape itself—headlands, bays, and hills, as well as lakes, rivers, and shorelines; sites where people have often wanted to live—the spring hunting site, the place where there are many ringed seals, the sheltered area; the location of a piece of ancient history—the spot where a group once starved, where a landslide happened; or of modern history—where a ship was wrecked or a qallunaaq (an outsider from the South) is buried; and places of mythic significance. As I learned when living in the Arctic, there are wonderful riches to these place names: the island that is like a pisspot, the red cliffs, the place for quarrying green soapstone. To know these names is to know the territory, to feel linked to the landscape. The essays here show that to document such places, as a matter of scholarship and cultural preservation, is to find and celebrate and sustain a huge, almost infinite treasury of Northern heritage. Michael Chlenov, Robert Drozda, and Murielle Nagy, among others in this volume, take us deep into this fascinating intellectual domain. Gary Holton makes the vital point: “Landscape is a semantic domain.”

Indigenous peoples face both the old, all-too- familiar difficulties, and the many new challenges, including modern forms of poverty, self-harming, and socio-political marginalization. Language loss sits among these as both an example and a symbol. Yet the defiance of difficulty, and the refusal to accept losses, are also at the heart of Northern cultural life. Identity is bound up with history and territory, with memory and landscape, as well as with language. It is also linked to the present, and to what is called “modernity.” Understanding and appreciating the ancient markers of heritage is one part of understanding the nature of, and risks to, identity. A generation of Arctic leaders and spokespersons testifies to the multifaceted nature of Yupik, Inupiaq, or Athabascan identity. Meaning in life, the meaning of a heritage, cannot be reduced to language or a particular form of activity. Language, memory, and landscape are given their sounds, contents, and significances in a multiplicity of ways. Scholarship explores and discovers the nature of a part of the whole, often by revealing the features of one particular facet. Only with the help of compendia of scholarship does meaning as a whole—of culture as it is and languages as they are spoken—begin to be revealed.

Recovery of history, defending and reclaiming of territory, claiming and augmenting memory—these are part of what it means to be a Northern Indigenous person. Identity turns on what we are, and, with crucial and life-giving relevance, on what we fight to sustain. Scholarship is a vital and enduring part of this battle. Hence the significance of the research and analysis, the data and the reflections on data, set out in this fascinating and invaluable book.

Hugh Brody