Making a living, making a life : subsistence and the re-enactment of Iglulingmiut cultural practices ...

• Main Author: Wachowich, Nancy
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2009
• Subjects: Arctic; Igloolik; Iglulingmiut; inuit; Iqaluit; Pond Inlet
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0099659; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0099659

This thesis is about the Inuit effort to adapt to a changing arctic environment through their engagement with outsiders in projects to document their "traditional culture". The Inuit ability to draw subsistence from what southerners perceive as an inhospitable Arctic environment has been an ongoing fascination to the western public. I argue that while westerners seek to reinforce these idealized and exotic notions of the pristine Arctic environment and of the "authentic Inuit" who inhabit it, Inuit themselves have simultaneously and deliberately drawn upon these western iconic categories to communicate their cultural knowledge for social and political ends. Based on 1997 fieldwork in the Eastern High Arctic Inuit community of Igloolik, as well as fieldwork undertaken between 1991 and 1998 in the neighbouring community of Pond Inlet, in Iqaluit and in Ottawa, my dissertation analyses various sites where Iglulingmiut (Inuit from Igloolik) and southerners come together to construct Inuit identities. Each ...