Inuit
Violence against Inuit Women
A support group has launched a campaign to foster awareness and actions that will help Inuit women who suffer from violence within their families. Nunatsiaq Online, reporting on the story early last week, indicated that the focus of the new program is to involve other people—bystanders, office colleagues, neighbors—in suspected cases of violence. Pauktuutit Inuit Women […]
Truth and Reconciliation for the Inuit
Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued a summary of its final report last week, which urged Canadians to find ways of reconciling with indigenous people who were harmed by their forced attendance at residential schools. News accounts of the unveiling of the long-anticipated report emphasized that the 94 points in the summary represent the start […]
Inuit Men Helping Each Other
Piita Irniq argues that the best way to overcome a tendency toward violence in young Inuit males is for other men to help them reconnect with their cultural history. As an example, he told Sarah Rogers, a reporter for Nunatsiaq Online last week, “I’d like to see men making small qamutiit [sleds] for babies and […]
Nunavimmiut Face the Future
The Nunavimmiut, Inuit from the northern third of Quebec called Nunavik, are a strongly united and determined people, according to a report from Nunatsiaq News last week. The news service reported that the Makivik Corporation, the governing body of the Nunavimmiut people, had just adopted a forward-looking declaration at their annual general meeting in Kuujjuaq. […]
Inuit Experiences of Historical Traumas [journal article review]
The concept of historical trauma, sometimes used to describe societies that have suffered from the stresses of serious traumatic events, might be an appropriate key to understanding recent Inuit experiences. Allison Crawford, a psychiatrist at the University of Toronto, examines the situation of the Inuit in the Baffin region of Nunavut, now known as the […]
Pond Inlet: The Old Days Are Gone
Pond Inlet has a spectacular setting. An Inuit community located along the northern edge of the enormous Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, the residents of Pond look out across Eclipse Sound at the mountains and glaciers of Bylot Island to the north. It is one of farthest north human settlements on earth. A reporter […]
Monsters in an Inuit Community
As Halloween approaches, many children shiver at the thought of ghosts, but the kids in one Inuit hamlet have quite valid reasons to be afraid of large, white, child-eating monsters. As a result, the people of Arviat have decided to cancel trick or treating this year in order to protect their kids from the polar […]
The Fate of the Lost Franklin Expedition
On Tuesday last week, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that scientists had found incontrovertible proof about the fate of the lost Franklin Expedition. Archaeologists had found, and gotten images of, the underwater remains of one of Franklin’s ships. The intriguing aspect of the news story is that it proves beyond a reasonable doubt the […]
Inuit Plural Marriages
Nunatsiaq News reported last week that an Iqaluit filmmaker named Alethea Arnaquq-Baril has just produced a dramatic romance film about the abandoned Inuit practice of multiple spouses. The filmmaker told the paper that the practice ended with colonization, but it appears from her comments as if she has been able to gain enough information from […]
Inuit Self Concepts—Are They Satisfied with Life? [journal article review]
Two scholars at the University of Laval wondered if money could buy happiness, a seemingly trivial question but one that can have serious implications for people such as the Inuit who live on the fringes of modern affluence. Their investigation, presented in a journal article last August, focused on the ethics of human happiness. What […]
