Why Keep a Community-Based Focus”. In: Times of Global Interactions? Paper presented at the Fi

• Main Author: Fikret Berkes
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2004
• Subjects: Arctic; Mackenzie Delta; Sachs Harbour; Beaufort Sea; Climate change; International Congress of Arctic Social Sciences; inuit; Inuvialuit
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.537.8528; http://www.umanitoba.ca/institutes/natural_resources/canadaresearchchair/Keynotes Topics in Arctic Social Sciences 5 33-44.pdf

IT IS A GREAT PLEASURE for me to give this address at the International Congress of Arctic Social Sciences. The guiding theme of this meeting, “Connections: local and global aspects of Arctic social systems”, is clearly the inspiration for my title. I will start with a story. A few years ago I was involved in a team project in Sachs Harbour in the Canadian western Arctic, the Inuit Observations of Climate Change study. The lead agency for the project was the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD). My role was to provide advice regarding the conduct of community-based research, especially with regard to local and traditional knowledge. Our IISD colleague who was in charge of the project planning meeting, came up with a very “Western looking ” workshop plan, with direct questions regarding climate change, involving the filling of index cards, and the generation of hypotheses with cause-effect linear thinking. I advised against some parts of the plan, and he did make some revisions. But the workshop was still carried out along what I thought were Western, rather than Inuit, lines of thinking and doing things. Imagine my surprise when he came back with what looked to be a lot of good workshop results and evidence of enthusiastic participation (Ford 2000). I had further surprises later when I went to Sachs Harbour myself and found out that the Inuvialuit people of Sachs were quite comfortable in the “white man’s ” style of meetings. Some of them laughed at my concerns about culturally sensitive study designs and said that these were “1970s kind of concerns”. They were no longer consid-ered to be burning issues here; the first Mackenzie Delta- Beaufort Sea oil boom in the 1970s had transformed Sachs Harbour into an English-speaking community. I did not need a translator, they said, even with the elders. I should qualify a few things. The Sachs Harbour experience is certainly not shared in all parts of the Canadian North. For example, in