Knowledge-land-scape - User contributions [en]

Aesthetic Action

2024-11-05T07:35:28Z

103.69.224.100: /* Knowledge relating as ethical engagement; practice, process and values */

=Point of beginning=

=Abstract=

=Introduction=

Ever since the 1990’s there has been an ongoing and widespread interest among community-based environmental conservation researchers to engage with Indigenous Knowledge (IK). Such interest was initially mostly geared towards broadening and improving scientific knowledge and management in conservation research (see e.g., Freeman, 1992; Mailhot 1993; Berkes, 1994; Brooke, 1993; Inglis, 1993; Huntington, 2000). Over the last thirty years however, this question of how and whether it is even possible to relate knowledge systems rooted in two different ways of being and knowing the world - respectively western-based science and those knowledge systems specifically attributed to Indigenous peoples - has undergone major changes. Self-determination efforts, increased awareness around the need for western-based science to decolonize and become more inclusive, as well as a shifting paradigm regarding the relationship between the natural environment and Indigenous people, have all led for the efforts of knowledge relating in conservation research and management to become more equitable and inclusive. At least in theory. It has also been revealed to be a ‘site of significant struggle’ (Tuhiwai-Smith, 1999). Linda Tuhiwai-Smith identifies such struggle in research as taking place between ‘the interests and ways of knowing of the West and the interests and ways of resisting of the Other’ (ibid, p.2, capitalization in original). It brings to the fore questions of whose knowledge is deemed valid - according to whose qualifiers? And which research questions get asked in the first place. Whose interests are served with research? And who owns the research? Rather than a technical challenge of filling gaps in scientific knowledge, knowledge relating within environmental research and management has become more explicitly a question of relational encounter, and on whose terms such encounter takes place. The question of how to ethically relate Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledges has increasingly been recognized to be just as much about Indigenous and settler(-state) reconciliation as it is about various forms of knowledge co-production and ethical engagement within research.

==Reconciliation in Nunavut polar bear management and monitoring==

The Canadian Inuit, like the Norwegian Sami, have been at the forefront of Indigenous efforts around the globe to develop political structures and build autonomous governance regimes within their respective states (Wilson and Selle, 2019). The Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, now renamed Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK) was founded in 1971. As a representative organization, they pursued land claims and demanded a role in wildlife management. Their goals were for Inuit to ‘preserve the traditional way of life (…); enable them to become equal and meaningful participants in Canadian society; achieve fair compensation and benefits in exchange for their lands; and preserve the ecology of the Canadian Arctic’ (Lévesque, 2014 p.117). In 1993, their efforts led to the Nunavut act, creating the territory- and installing the Government of Nunavut (GN), funded through federal payments and representing all Nunavummiut (both Inuit and non-Inuit). At the same time the Nunavut Land Claim Agreement (NLCA) was passed. This ratified the Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. (NTI) with jurisdiction and responsibility to promote and develop Inuit culture and society in the domains of education, language, wildlife and culture. Wildlife management in Nunavut, as a result, is a co-management affair; a site of Inuit-Crown encounter with its terms of engagement outlined in the Aajiiqatigiinniq: Working Together agreement in 2011 (Government of Nunavut and NTI 2011).

The guiding policy document for polar bear management and research at the territorial level, is the Nunavut Polar Bear Co-Management Plan (Government of Nunavut, 2019). This document has been prepared by the GN-Department of Environment (Department of Environment) in cooperation with NTI, Regional Wildlife Organizations (RWOs), Hunters and Trappers Organizations (HTOs), and Inuit community members from throughout Nunavut. The plan refers to the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement (NLCA) as its overarching guiding framework in terms of conservation principles, which clearly reflects Inuit Qaujumajatuqangit (IQ); Inuit ways of knowing, -being and -valuing (reference). The NLCA is meant to ensure Inuit of meaningful engagement in the process of management and decision-making on polar bears, as well as IQ to be included in the data-collection that informs this decision-making process. In its executive summary the polar bear co-management plan even recognizes the heavy reliance on western-science for such data-collection in the past, and a commitment is made to increase use of IQ and Inuit participation in all aspects of its harvest management moving forward (GN, 2019).
Although recent years have seen the rollout of large scale Inuit-led research programs and initiatives, much of the infrastructure around polar bear monitoring and decision making continues to prioritize western-based science and -values. Polar bear monitoring in Nunavut remains natural science-heavy, while the philosophical and political challenges involved in meaningfully engaging different knowledge systems extend beyond the training of many natural scientists. As a result, conciliating knowledge in Nunavut polar bear research is often reduced to the technical design of various interfaces between explicit, categorial and transmittable data. It rarely concerns matters of process, or conversations on knowledge as part of a larger culturally embedded ‘system’ of practices, values and…. (McGregor, 2021; …). What is at stake in current approaches around knowledge integration include concerns about ongoing (settler) colonialism and the politics of accessibility to knowledge (Tuck, 2009), as well as questions on the process and purpose of bringing different ways of knowing together, and whose interests are served by doing so (Simpson, 2001; 2004).

==Knowledge relating as ethical engagement; practice, process and values==

ITK reported in 2018 in their Inuit National Strategy on Research that, despite prevalent claims of knowledge co-creation or -integration in wildlife research reporting from the Canadian Arctic, Inuit are rarely involved with setting the research agenda, monitoring compliance with guidelines for ethical research, and determining how data and information about people, wildlife, and environment is collected, stored, used, and shared (ITK, 2018). This indicates that legislative agreements like the NLCA, on its own, are not enough to secure meaningful engagement between western-based science and IQ. Power dynamics around knowledge relating takes place ‘in-between, beyond and underneath formal structures’ (Lindroth et al., p.8, 2022). Such is reiterated by the Indigenous Circle of Experts who state that relationships need to be negotiated at all levels, and on an ongoing basis (ICE, 2018). Establishing ethical relationships is a regenerative, situated process, and needs to be renegotiated in every context, at all scales. Reform at the institutional level to support- and resource Inuit-led research is just as important as negotiating terms of engagement and developing ethical research practices at the situated research project level. Relating different knowledge systems in its most radical form, if at all, should therefore not only be employed as a praxis of inclusive research, but it should also be its precursor; establishing terms of engagement, defining what inclusivity means - and whether that should be the goal in the first place. The Ethical Space of Engagement (ESE), as a guiding framework has potential to reframe the challenge of knowledge relating away from one that is data-driven, towards one of process and practice, and to include such negotiation of terms of engagement.

The ESE, as formalized by Ermine in 2007, derives from Indigenous traditions of nation-to-nation conciliation, and can be applied to create a space or physical site that functions as an in-between; a meeting space that can facilitate trans-cultural dialogue and cross-validation between different communities, nations, or knowledge systems. By providing an in-between, or a ‘third space’ (see for another example of third space Turnbull, 1997), the model re-imagines opportunity for encounter and opens space to explore and practice the principles of respect and reciprocity underlying such encounter (Ermine, 2015; Indigenous Circle of Experts, 2018).

By engaging this framework to think of ethical space not as an absolute state or existing physical site, but rather in terms of how the ethical space can facilitate encounter(s) through an ongoing state of negotiation and becoming, as a field of tension and a coming together in difference, it parts from past science-based practices and may resist the western-based academic research establishment along the following lines;

Understanding knowledge relating as a set of practices and values: The western-based scientific tendency to compartmentalize knowledge(s) into narrow codifiable packages of data, conceptualizes the practice of knowledge relating as a static binary of siloed knowledge systems and a data gap to be navigated through approaches like ‘bridging- ‘, ‘integrating-’, ‘linking- ‘or ‘blending’ knowledges. As the ‘perceived degree of separation’ between different knowledges ‘narrow’ (Evering, 2012), intersecting spaces, interfaces or similarities among IK and western science are sought out, as to then create opportunities for collaboration, co-creation and co-learning on the premise of this ‘common ground’ (e.g., Foale, 2006; Berkes et al. 2006; Aikenhead and Michell, 2011). The theoretical ideal of such a common ground approach (see middle diagram in figure 1) focussed on similarity, and in practice often results in an integrative scientization of Indigenous Knowledges (see left diagram in figure 1). Scientization of indigenous knowledge happens when scientists only engage with those elements of IK, for example narrowly defined Traditional Ecological Knowledge, that allow for western-based categorisation (Agrawal, 2002), translation (Smylie, 2014) and validation (see Brook, 2005, in response to Gilchrist et al. 2005) – or where IK is ‘distilled’ and translated until nothing more is left than numbers and polygons prepared for easy incorporation into western-based research and management (Nadasdy, 1999; Agrawal, 2002). The consequences of such scientization are non-trivial. It does not only ‘displace the very thing it is meant to represent—the lived experience’ (Miller & Glassner 2004), it also renders knowledge integration ‘a neutral, technical exercise (…) towards which nobody can politically object’ (Nadasdy, 2005). The integration of TEK in western research and management framework becomes a technical problem to be solved (e.g., Huntington, 2005; Wenzel, 1999 ; Natcher and Davis, 2005; Clark et al. 2008). As such, knowledge integration can potentially assimilate Indigenous knowledge and people into Euro-Canadian governance systems, de-politicizing the system of co-management itself, and forming a barrier to self-determination (Nadasdy, 2003; Agrawal, 2002; Simpson, 2001; Stevenson, 2004; White, 2006; Ellis, 2005). Applying the ESE as a guiding frame, shifts thinking about knowledge relating from a static end-goal, towards a dynamic and ongoing state of becoming in a third space. This space, conceptually outside of each knowledge system, allows for the mediation of terms by which different are related. While cultural difference, diverse positionalities and institutional mediation between Indigenous peoples and western societies can all be acknowledged, it is the practice of negotiating encounter that is central to this framework. ‘The space offers a venue to step out of our allegiances, to detach from the cages of our mental worlds and assume a position where human-to-human dialogue can occur.’ (Ermine, 2007). The ESE takes into account relations, values, and knowledge and aims to build new agreement beyond those of already existing treaties or mandates. By focussing on such processes, it allows for knowledge relating to be approached as a political issue, rather than a technical project (e.g., Laurila, 2019).

Respecting incommensurability: The ethical space of engagement as a political frame also leaves room for irreconcilability; for elements of each knowledge system not to be engaged with (Simpson, 2001; Tuck and Yang, 2014) or to be considered sacred (Archibald, 2008). Knowledge relating that takes incommensurability into account, does not dismiss the project of encounter, but it embraces difference (Jones and Jenkins, 2008) and acknowledges the fact that processes needed for ethical engagement can claim space outside of western institutes (Robinson and Martin, 2016). It involves the resurgence of Indigenous knowledges, laws, languages, and practices as integral elements of Indigenous self-determination, rather than its incorporation into dominant way of knowing and being in the world (Corntassel 2012 ; Simpson, 2004; 2011, p 17). What is required from settler(-immigrant) researchers wanting to ethically and equitably engage with Indigenous knowledges and peoples, is solidarity rooted in the acceptance of difference rather than common ground, solidarity that endures in a state of unsettlement, and solidarity that accepts the existence of demarcated spaces, stories and culturally protected knowledge which remain sacred, and are to be kept within the community (Tuck, 2009; Tuck & Yang, 2014; Archibald, 2008). Such commitments need to move beyond theory, or metaphorical applications that allow for settler ‘moves towards innocence’ (Tuck and Yang, 2018). In accordance with the work of foundational Indigenous thinkers like Smith (1999), Wilson (2008) and Kovach (2010) it’s not so much about what you say you will do as a researcher, it’s about the practices that accompany those words and the consequences of such actions.

Knowledge as fluid and -ever becoming: Knowledge itself, like culture, is not static, and actively regenerated across time and space. Knowledge as something more practical/tacit that flows in-between, among, and around different performative bodies is often not acknowledged in more positivist traditions of science that seek static, objective and representative measurability. It however aligns well with Indigenous theories of knowledge that view ways of being and knowing as existing and manifesting through a web of more-than-human relationships. Many Indigenous people share an understanding of knowledge not as simply understanding relationships within Creation, but rather as Creation itself (McGregor 2004a). Knowledge is something one does. To ensure its ongoing existence, knowledge, like land, is something that needs to be practised, not harnessed, captured, incorporated or integrated. Knowledge as creation is constantly in motion. This convergent process itself reinforces the idea of knowledge in terms of ongoing practice, rather than historically static ‘tradition’ (Ingold, 2010). The middle circle of the ESE where different knowledge systems may ‘encounter’ is no different, rather than a static blending of data, it represents an ongoing process and practice of being with. This focus on process and practice of the ESE affirms Indigenous conceptualisations of knowledge as not being something to be accumulated or measured as neatly codifiable data, but rather something that proceeds along ways of life, and is then shared via narrative forms.

=Aesthetic action and the ESE=

=Aesthetic (in)action in BearWatch=

[[Point of Beginning Animated Graphic Documentary|Voices of Thunder - Animated Graphic Documentary]]

[[Point of Beginning (Pre-)workshops|(Pre-)workshops]]

Aesthetic Action

2024-11-05T07:32:35Z

103.69.224.100: /* Introduction */

Wayfaring the BearWatch Project

2024-11-04T17:04:58Z

103.69.224.100: /* Covid-19 */

=Point of Beginning=

=Abstract=

=Introductie=

Polar bears have captured the public imagination for being charismatic and as one of the most politicized animals in the world (e.g. Strode 2017; Slocum 2004). There is little disagreement across cultures regarding polar bears as a species of importance, whether as a keystone predator, a sentinel of changing Arctic environments, a cultural icon, as a more-than-human relative, or a source of income through the guiding of sports hunts. The reconciliation of such differences within polar bear management is, on the other hand, less straightforward. Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (IQ, the Inuit way of knowing and being in the world) considers humans and bears, for example, to co-exist in a relationship that requires harmonic balance for it to remain ongoing (see for example Keith 2005; Karetak et al. 2017), while western formulations of wildlife conservation conceptualise polar bears, on the other hand, as a species in need of management to ensure its survival. The importance of reconciling such seemingly opposite ways in which polar bears matter across cultures, has increasingly been recognized, and even formalised through Territorial Land Claims Agreements across Inuit Nunangat (the Inuit Homelands, see ITK, 2018).

The polar bear co-management regime in the Nunavut Settlement Area for example, is based on the Nunavut Land Claim Agreement (NLCA), which states that ‘Inuit must always take part in decisions on wildlife’ (NTI 2004), while ‘the guiding principles and concepts of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (IQ) are to be described and made an integral part of the management of wildlife and habitat’ (Wildlife Act 2003). Despite such formalised co-management, tensions remain. Significant data-gaps, and the international pressures to fill such gaps, as well as a rapidly changing Arctic environment and the difficulties of conciliating vastly different ways of knowing and being in wildlife conservation continue to haunt in particular the management and monitoring of polar bears in Inuit Nunangat.

This cut focusses in particular on the challenge of conciliating western sciences and IQ in community-based polar bear monitoring. More precisely, it asks the question of what it means within the larger apparatus of community-based polar bear research to practise knowledge conciliation under guidance of the principles of the ethical space of engagement, rather than by data-driven needs. I ask this question as a non-Indigenous PhD researcher as part of a larger project that’s called ‘Bearwatch: Monitoring Impacts of Arctic Climate Change using Polar Bears, Genomics and Traditional Ecological Knowledge’ – hereafter referred to as ‘Bearwatch’. Bearwatch ran between 2015 and 2023, during which it sought to meaningfully engage IQ in its development of a new non-invasive genomic polar bear monitoring toolkit. The project was a collaboration between northern communities in the Nunavut Settlement Region and the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, HTAs in Gjoa Haven and Coral Harbor, the Inuvialuit Game Council, the governments of Nunavut, Northwest Territories, and Yukon, the Canadian Rangers, and researchers and students from multiple universities across Canada. Most researchers and policymakers in the field of polar bear science more generally- and on the Bearwatch project more particularly- are either western-educated scientists from a variety of natural sciences, or Inuit knowledge- and rights holders. I, myself, am a white, queer, settler-guest researcher from the Netherlands with a background in the arts and social sciences. Approaching this research context as a non-Indigenous researcher from such a different cultural and disciplinary place of beginning than the other Bearwatch team members and most people in the field, has added another layer of complexity to the already challenging issue of ethical knowledge-relating across cultures. I have aimed to leverage this intra-cultural complexity to seek additional disciplinary ways of understanding- and possibly practising- knowledge conciliation, in accordance with the guiding principles of ‘the Ethical Space of Engagement’ (Ermine, 2007), within the western science-heavy field of polar bear monitoring.

I explore whether it’s possible to rethink the challenges of ethical reconciliation between IQ and data-driven western science in polar bear monitoring through an arts-based, post-disciplinary practice-based approach. As will become clear in the following pages, I don’t attempt to formulate a “new-”, “alternative”, or “innovative” problem-solving approach to knowledge conciliation across cultural differences. Instead, I perform a particular positioning and ongoing opening-, through a practice of wayfaring (as forwarded by Ingold, 2010) that’s guided by the concept of ‘ethical space’ (as forwarded by Ermine 2007).

This ethical space, as I will explain later, emerges both through principled practices and as a condition for (non-)Indigenous sciences and knowledge systems to re-position themselves as more equitable partners-in-encounter. In this cut, I invite you along with my own post-disciplinary art-based research, to experience how the principles of ethical space have helped me reposition myself within the BearWatch project. This cut also provides possibilities to gain insights on how these principles have guided me in my attempts to practice my methodological wayfaring in respectful dialogue with IQ and western natural sciences. This cut does not so much manifest in a list of conclusive take-aways, but rather seeks to provide the conditions for you as a reader to find your own way and gain emergent insights on what it means to ethically encounter and engage.

==Invitation(s)==

Throughout this knowledge-land-scape, and thus also along this cut, I invite readers to become an intra-dependent agent of meaning making, and as such an implicated part of my research. My writing and research-creations function as an extended site of encounter across reader, author and the more-than-human intra-active agents, practices and events that were part of my fieldwork in the hamlets of Uqsuqtuuq (Gjoa Haven) and Salliq (Coral Harbour) of the respective Kitikmeot- and Kivalliq region in the territory of Nunavut. This extended site of encounter allows readers the possibility to respond-. In other words, it draws on the reader's abilities and willingness to ethically, and responsibly engage with some of the diffractive possibilities as they were encountered by me during my research within the BearWatch project. To facilitate possibilities for such intra-active response, I have extended multiple invites to trail-off from each main cut. The purpose of such possible wandering is to facilitate engagement across the multiple sites of encounter in which my research has taken place, through the possibilities of wayfaring, as put forward by Tim Ingold (2010).

==Wayfaring==

Ingold (2010) describes the wayfarer as ‘a being who, in following a path of life, negotiates or improvises a passage as he goes along’ (Ingold, 2010 s126). Wayfaring is a body-on-the ground, material way of knowing that emerges along the course of everyday activities, rather than built up, gathered or collected from ‘fixed locations’. Rooted in the ‘weather-world’ of complex entanglements and partial perspectives, it drives the research along as a process that is unfixed, fluid and in constant motion of coming to know-, or becoming -other. As a transcultural, methodological practice, I argue that a process of wayfaring allows for ethical knowledge conciliation to be understood as a space, practice and process of engagement, that can take place in correspondence with the Ermine’s ethical Space of Engagement (ESE, 2007)- instead of as a data-driven endeavour. Knowledge can be seen as ongoing, fluid and place-based, rather than frozen in time, packageable and exportable. It makes it possible to attune to the seasons and make meaning through navigating both the physical, relational and the institutional landscape through an ethics of care and attention.

In its simplest form, wayfaring is a practice of responding, correspondence, and of practicing one’s own response-ability. Relying on such response-ability in this knowledge-land-scape is the difference between an open-ended, future-oriented practice of collective sense-making, and a dead-end, unidirectional trajectory of me guiding you towards a description of best research practices in accordance with publicly available Inuit guidelines on ethical engagement, like for example those of the ICC’s ‘circumpolar Inuit protocols for Equitable and Ethical Engagement’ (2022) or the National Inuit Strategy on Research (ITK, 2018). This proposition is not in any way meant to discredit such guidelines. It rather points out that such guidelines will not be very effective if they are not being responded to or enacted with gestures of meaningful intent.

The publication of such guidelines can perhaps be, in following with Ingold, compared to the lines of an architectural drawing. Such lines are a descriptive gesture, an instruction. What we get to read in the publication of such guidelines, is the final result of a creative process; an instructive product about protocols, rather than insights of the productive process that has brought these protocols themselves into being. In other words, the 2022 ICC publication can be understood as a trace of agreements about ethical engagement, rather than as an active practicing of ethical engagement itself. It is hard to be in lively correspondence with a trace – beyond, of course, the act of narrowly following it to its final destination. Such a trace tells a story, but it is itself not story-ing: it doesn’t move, change or respond in relation to your engagement with it. For such lively intra-action, correspondence, or relational resonance, one needs to consider guidelines on ethical practices as a multi-directional verb. Not a retro-spective trace-ing, but rather for example a prospective thread-ing (Ingold, 2020 p.181).

The difference between the trace and the thread as an intentional practice of moving through the world is directional. The trace is both retro- and/or prospective, it describes a one-sided story of a past or future event. The thread, perhaps as a ball of yarn -as Ingold asks us to think about it- is on the other hand, neither retro- nor prospective. It is emergent, and winds or unwinds as you proceed through the world with it (Ingold 2020). This emergent quality of continuously opening up to the world is what makes the thread alive and respondent. To wayfare as a thread, is not so much about moving forward, or towards something, but is rather about transformation. A movement in which nothing remains static; nature- and the researcher included -become emergent; being necessarily turns into becoming, and representing turns into performing ongoing movement. This is what navigating the knowledge/land/scape affords. It allows for you, as a reader to engage, return, and be in correspondence with my research. It is an ongoing process of re-positioning.

==Wayfaring the BearWatch project==

The explorative goal of this cut is therefore, not so much to argue for a specific outcome or practice of knowledge relating, but rather to deepen our understanding of how, as researchers operating with(in) the traditions and institutes of western science, we can practice ethical research under open-ended conditions of uncertainty. In pursuit of such a goal, I have moved away from presenting solutions, towards facilitating a process of becoming.

This cut performs certain key-moments of the BearWatch project that took place during the period that I was part of the project, as possible sites of encounter and ethical engagement. You are invited to follow along the unfolding of the project through these key moments. They are performed as sites of diffractive im/possibilities between narrative vignettes, ethical dilemmas, research-creations, and auto-ethnographic fieldnotes that emerged from my own practice-based engagements within the communities of Gjoa Haven and Coral Harbour. Along the way in-between such sites you are either re-directed by the material forces of emergent ice-pressure ridges (a land-based metaphor for the more-than-human agencies that intra-act to shape the conditions under which some of this work has taken place), or invited to trail-off on unexpected side-tracks (which perform the possibility of wandering). Such redirections provide possibilities to orient or gain emergent insights on what it means within this particular research context to practice polar bear research as an ethical space, or process of engagement.

Deriving value from this work requires immersion and attentiveness. Such is the futurity that this dissertation aims to enable and contribute to; extended ethical knowledge encounters between Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge holders, multidisciplinary research teams, and academic readership, based on ethical and attentive engagement. Remaining a distanced spectator will not do. As such, this cut starts by taking you along to a series of workshops that were conducted in Gjoa Haven, during the Summer of 2019.

=Workshops Summer 2019=

The M’Clintock Channel (MC) Polar Bear Management Unit (PBMU) used by hunters from Gjoa Haven, Cambridge Bay and Taloyoak (see figure 1), was in 2001 subjected to a three-year polar bear moratorium (a full suspension of hunting). In 2005, the moratorium was lifted and Gjoa Haven and Cambridge Bay signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board (NWMB) for alternating quotas of one and two tags per year, while Taloyoak did not sign the MOU at all, and therefore did not receive any tags from the MC management unit between 2001 and 2015. No other community in Nunavut or the Northwest Territories has experienced such a (near) moratorium over such an extended period of time. Despite a more recent rise in tags in 2022, these impacts continue to be felt today. Based on a desire for recognition and acknowledgement of the impact of these polar bear quota regulations, two workshops were co-organized, in the summer of 2019, to discuss and document testimonies of Gjoa Haven hunters and other community members.

[[File:(color) Figure 1 Map of the MC PBMU..jpg|thumb|Map of the M’Clintock Channel Polar Bear Management Unit area (Vongraven and Peacock, 2011). Adapted with permission to include the locations of Gjoa Haven, Cambridge Bay and Taloyoak, who each hunt within this area.]]

[[File:Mapping TEK Gjoa Haven 2019.jpg|thumb|Participants discussing during BearWatch TEK workshop 2019]]

The workshops were advertised over the radio in both English and Inuktitut (Inuit language), and interested individuals signed up through the HTA. One workshop was held May 15, 2019 in the evening with 10 participants and one on May 16 in the morning with 11 participants. These participants comprised mainly older male community members, many of whom had hunted, or still hunt polar bears. There were two female participants in each workshop. Three of the participants were between the ages of 20 and 40, with the remainder older. The two workshops focused specifically on the impacts of polar bear hunting quota reductions on the community. The workshop questions were co-designed by the BW academic researchers and HTA representatives and were asked in both English and Inuktitut to prompt discussion. The format however remained open-ended, meaning that "off-script" discussions were encouraged during the workshop, and occasionally specific members were asked to participate in answering particular questions because of their connection to the issue, as identified in previous interviews or by other community members. Two BW researchers and an interpreter would ask the pre-designed questions and prompt discussion, while a third BW researcher made notes. Both workshops were audio-recorded.

These recordings and workshop notes became the primary materials which were transferred to me, as a new PhD student on the BW project in 2020, with the purpose of having these experiences written out and shared with a larger academic audience, through academic publishing, as part of the overarching research project. This purpose however presented me with multiple dilemmas;

'''[[Voices of Thunder#purveyor of voices|Explore (or return to) my deliberations around non-Indigenous scholars presenting Indigenous experiences in academic research, as purveyors of voices]]'''

'''[[Voices of Thunder#output|Go straight to the different narrative outputs that BearWatch scientists, the Gjoa Haven HTA and several community members eventually co-created, building off of these workshops.]]'''

'''[[TEK workshops|Read about the other workshops that were co-organized in Gjoa Haven during this Summer as part of the Bearwatch project, with the purpose of collecting Inuit Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) to inform upcoming sampling activities in the region.]]'''

=='''[[Politics of recognition|Stay with the trouble and engage with the "politics of recognition"]]'''==

=Coral Harbour First trip 2020=

'''[[Caribou hunt|Invitation]]:Join along for a Caribou hunt'''

=Covid-19=

When the spread of Covid-19 was declared a pandemic it shaped an ice-pressure ridge that was so immense, that it not so much required me to redirect- as it asked me to re-position. Both figuratively and literally. Having just arrived in Coral Harbour, for my first fieldwork trip and my first travel up North, I was requested upon arrival to return immediately. The pandemic was declared while I was in the air, and by time I landed the local “Northern” store, like many other stores across the country, was sold out of toiletpaper and hand sanitizer. As described above, I was, nevertheless, warmly welcomed by local PI Leonard Netser and his family- who made sure I was comfortable.

This pandemic has functioned as a double-edged sword. On the one hand it has caused a significant delay, and obstruction in terms of building community relations in the field. After I was finally able to leave Coral Harbour once the blizzards had ended, it took almost a year and a half before I could return North again, and start building relationships in the way that they are built most effectively- in person, and on the land. On the other hand, it has also allowed for more time to think about how to contribute to the BearWatch research project, in a way that honours my professional background, and ethical values. It has also opened pathways to initial remote connections with research partners in Gjoa Haven through communication platforms like zoom and conference calls. Nonetheless, the endemic has had significant and lasting impacts on the material circumstances under which I continued to work on my PhD.

'''[[Covid 19 personal whereabouts|Explore deeper:]] Personal whereabouts during Covid-19'''

=Covid-19 Remote interviews=

[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03098265.2024.2406292/Getting Punk and personal publication]

=Fieldtrip BW team Summer 2021=

==Coral Harbour==

====Driving the Island====

====Drinking Coffee====

==Gjoa Haven==

===HTA meetings presentations===

===Voices of thunder meetings===

====Stranding the car====

====ATV ride====

====Camping at the Weir====

'''[[Conference calls from the road#Butter|Invitation]]:Trail-off to understand better how my whereabouts influenced my writing, reading and broader relationship to the country after this fieldtrip'''

=Meetings Spring 2022 Gjoa Haven=

====Checking seal dens====

====Collecting ice====

=Meetings Spring 2022 Coral Harbour=

====Spending time in Yan's Cabin====

====Qamutiq building and riding====

====Walking the same road every day====

=====Seasonal changes=====

=====Illness=====

=====Gender based violence=====

In text link to [[Point of Beginning Mx. Science]]

=Fall 2022 Coral Harbour=

In text link naar [[Aesthetic Action#Design consultation pre-workshop & workshop Coral Harbour|Design consultation pre-workshop & workshop Coral Harbour]]

=====remote planning=====

=====illness=====

=====tension=====

=====absence=====

==Wayfaring Calendar pilot==

=Arctic travel=

=Fall 2022 Gjoa Haven=

In text link naar [[Aesthetic Action#Design consultation pre-workshop & workshop Gjoa Haven|Design consultation pre-workshop & workshop Gjoa Haven]]

====Preparing cabin pre-workshops====

====Cooking/ Sharing food====

====Prayer====

=====Truck Flat Tire=====

In text return to [[Workshop Gjoa Haven#Preparation Gjoa Haven workshop|Preparation Gjoa Haven workshop]] in the Workshop Gjoa Haven trace.

=====Broken Thermostat=====

====Bingo====

====Making posters====

=Winter 2022 Final Workshops=

====Ethics====

Wayfaring the BearWatch Project

2024-11-04T16:57:35Z

103.69.224.100: /* Covid-19 */

=Point of Beginning=

=Abstract=

=Introductie=

Polar bears have captured the public imagination for being charismatic and as one of the most politicized animals in the world (e.g. Strode 2017; Slocum 2004). There is little disagreement across cultures regarding polar bears as a species of importance, whether as a keystone predator, a sentinel of changing Arctic environments, a cultural icon, as a more-than-human relative, or a source of income through the guiding of sports hunts. The reconciliation of such differences within polar bear management is, on the other hand, less straightforward. Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (IQ, the Inuit way of knowing and being in the world) considers humans and bears, for example, to co-exist in a relationship that requires harmonic balance for it to remain ongoing (see for example Keith 2005; Karetak et al. 2017), while western formulations of wildlife conservation conceptualise polar bears, on the other hand, as a species in need of management to ensure its survival. The importance of reconciling such seemingly opposite ways in which polar bears matter across cultures, has increasingly been recognized, and even formalised through Territorial Land Claims Agreements across Inuit Nunangat (the Inuit Homelands, see ITK, 2018).

The polar bear co-management regime in the Nunavut Settlement Area for example, is based on the Nunavut Land Claim Agreement (NLCA), which states that ‘Inuit must always take part in decisions on wildlife’ (NTI 2004), while ‘the guiding principles and concepts of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (IQ) are to be described and made an integral part of the management of wildlife and habitat’ (Wildlife Act 2003). Despite such formalised co-management, tensions remain. Significant data-gaps, and the international pressures to fill such gaps, as well as a rapidly changing Arctic environment and the difficulties of conciliating vastly different ways of knowing and being in wildlife conservation continue to haunt in particular the management and monitoring of polar bears in Inuit Nunangat.

This cut focusses in particular on the challenge of conciliating western sciences and IQ in community-based polar bear monitoring. More precisely, it asks the question of what it means within the larger apparatus of community-based polar bear research to practise knowledge conciliation under guidance of the principles of the ethical space of engagement, rather than by data-driven needs. I ask this question as a non-Indigenous PhD researcher as part of a larger project that’s called ‘Bearwatch: Monitoring Impacts of Arctic Climate Change using Polar Bears, Genomics and Traditional Ecological Knowledge’ – hereafter referred to as ‘Bearwatch’. Bearwatch ran between 2015 and 2023, during which it sought to meaningfully engage IQ in its development of a new non-invasive genomic polar bear monitoring toolkit. The project was a collaboration between northern communities in the Nunavut Settlement Region and the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, HTAs in Gjoa Haven and Coral Harbor, the Inuvialuit Game Council, the governments of Nunavut, Northwest Territories, and Yukon, the Canadian Rangers, and researchers and students from multiple universities across Canada. Most researchers and policymakers in the field of polar bear science more generally- and on the Bearwatch project more particularly- are either western-educated scientists from a variety of natural sciences, or Inuit knowledge- and rights holders. I, myself, am a white, queer, settler-guest researcher from the Netherlands with a background in the arts and social sciences. Approaching this research context as a non-Indigenous researcher from such a different cultural and disciplinary place of beginning than the other Bearwatch team members and most people in the field, has added another layer of complexity to the already challenging issue of ethical knowledge-relating across cultures. I have aimed to leverage this intra-cultural complexity to seek additional disciplinary ways of understanding- and possibly practising- knowledge conciliation, in accordance with the guiding principles of ‘the Ethical Space of Engagement’ (Ermine, 2007), within the western science-heavy field of polar bear monitoring.

I explore whether it’s possible to rethink the challenges of ethical reconciliation between IQ and data-driven western science in polar bear monitoring through an arts-based, post-disciplinary practice-based approach. As will become clear in the following pages, I don’t attempt to formulate a “new-”, “alternative”, or “innovative” problem-solving approach to knowledge conciliation across cultural differences. Instead, I perform a particular positioning and ongoing opening-, through a practice of wayfaring (as forwarded by Ingold, 2010) that’s guided by the concept of ‘ethical space’ (as forwarded by Ermine 2007).

This ethical space, as I will explain later, emerges both through principled practices and as a condition for (non-)Indigenous sciences and knowledge systems to re-position themselves as more equitable partners-in-encounter. In this cut, I invite you along with my own post-disciplinary art-based research, to experience how the principles of ethical space have helped me reposition myself within the BearWatch project. This cut also provides possibilities to gain insights on how these principles have guided me in my attempts to practice my methodological wayfaring in respectful dialogue with IQ and western natural sciences. This cut does not so much manifest in a list of conclusive take-aways, but rather seeks to provide the conditions for you as a reader to find your own way and gain emergent insights on what it means to ethically encounter and engage.

==Invitation(s)==

Throughout this knowledge-land-scape, and thus also along this cut, I invite readers to become an intra-dependent agent of meaning making, and as such an implicated part of my research. My writing and research-creations function as an extended site of encounter across reader, author and the more-than-human intra-active agents, practices and events that were part of my fieldwork in the hamlets of Uqsuqtuuq (Gjoa Haven) and Salliq (Coral Harbour) of the respective Kitikmeot- and Kivalliq region in the territory of Nunavut. This extended site of encounter allows readers the possibility to respond-. In other words, it draws on the reader's abilities and willingness to ethically, and responsibly engage with some of the diffractive possibilities as they were encountered by me during my research within the BearWatch project. To facilitate possibilities for such intra-active response, I have extended multiple invites to trail-off from each main cut. The purpose of such possible wandering is to facilitate engagement across the multiple sites of encounter in which my research has taken place, through the possibilities of wayfaring, as put forward by Tim Ingold (2010).

==Wayfaring==

Ingold (2010) describes the wayfarer as ‘a being who, in following a path of life, negotiates or improvises a passage as he goes along’ (Ingold, 2010 s126). Wayfaring is a body-on-the ground, material way of knowing that emerges along the course of everyday activities, rather than built up, gathered or collected from ‘fixed locations’. Rooted in the ‘weather-world’ of complex entanglements and partial perspectives, it drives the research along as a process that is unfixed, fluid and in constant motion of coming to know-, or becoming -other. As a transcultural, methodological practice, I argue that a process of wayfaring allows for ethical knowledge conciliation to be understood as a space, practice and process of engagement, that can take place in correspondence with the Ermine’s ethical Space of Engagement (ESE, 2007)- instead of as a data-driven endeavour. Knowledge can be seen as ongoing, fluid and place-based, rather than frozen in time, packageable and exportable. It makes it possible to attune to the seasons and make meaning through navigating both the physical, relational and the institutional landscape through an ethics of care and attention.

In its simplest form, wayfaring is a practice of responding, correspondence, and of practicing one’s own response-ability. Relying on such response-ability in this knowledge-land-scape is the difference between an open-ended, future-oriented practice of collective sense-making, and a dead-end, unidirectional trajectory of me guiding you towards a description of best research practices in accordance with publicly available Inuit guidelines on ethical engagement, like for example those of the ICC’s ‘circumpolar Inuit protocols for Equitable and Ethical Engagement’ (2022) or the National Inuit Strategy on Research (ITK, 2018). This proposition is not in any way meant to discredit such guidelines. It rather points out that such guidelines will not be very effective if they are not being responded to or enacted with gestures of meaningful intent.

The publication of such guidelines can perhaps be, in following with Ingold, compared to the lines of an architectural drawing. Such lines are a descriptive gesture, an instruction. What we get to read in the publication of such guidelines, is the final result of a creative process; an instructive product about protocols, rather than insights of the productive process that has brought these protocols themselves into being. In other words, the 2022 ICC publication can be understood as a trace of agreements about ethical engagement, rather than as an active practicing of ethical engagement itself. It is hard to be in lively correspondence with a trace – beyond, of course, the act of narrowly following it to its final destination. Such a trace tells a story, but it is itself not story-ing: it doesn’t move, change or respond in relation to your engagement with it. For such lively intra-action, correspondence, or relational resonance, one needs to consider guidelines on ethical practices as a multi-directional verb. Not a retro-spective trace-ing, but rather for example a prospective thread-ing (Ingold, 2020 p.181).

The difference between the trace and the thread as an intentional practice of moving through the world is directional. The trace is both retro- and/or prospective, it describes a one-sided story of a past or future event. The thread, perhaps as a ball of yarn -as Ingold asks us to think about it- is on the other hand, neither retro- nor prospective. It is emergent, and winds or unwinds as you proceed through the world with it (Ingold 2020). This emergent quality of continuously opening up to the world is what makes the thread alive and respondent. To wayfare as a thread, is not so much about moving forward, or towards something, but is rather about transformation. A movement in which nothing remains static; nature- and the researcher included -become emergent; being necessarily turns into becoming, and representing turns into performing ongoing movement. This is what navigating the knowledge/land/scape affords. It allows for you, as a reader to engage, return, and be in correspondence with my research. It is an ongoing process of re-positioning.

==Wayfaring the BearWatch project==

The explorative goal of this cut is therefore, not so much to argue for a specific outcome or practice of knowledge relating, but rather to deepen our understanding of how, as researchers operating with(in) the traditions and institutes of western science, we can practice ethical research under open-ended conditions of uncertainty. In pursuit of such a goal, I have moved away from presenting solutions, towards facilitating a process of becoming.

This cut performs certain key-moments of the BearWatch project that took place during the period that I was part of the project, as possible sites of encounter and ethical engagement. You are invited to follow along the unfolding of the project through these key moments. They are performed as sites of diffractive im/possibilities between narrative vignettes, ethical dilemmas, research-creations, and auto-ethnographic fieldnotes that emerged from my own practice-based engagements within the communities of Gjoa Haven and Coral Harbour. Along the way in-between such sites you are either re-directed by the material forces of emergent ice-pressure ridges (a land-based metaphor for the more-than-human agencies that intra-act to shape the conditions under which some of this work has taken place), or invited to trail-off on unexpected side-tracks (which perform the possibility of wandering). Such redirections provide possibilities to orient or gain emergent insights on what it means within this particular research context to practice polar bear research as an ethical space, or process of engagement.

Deriving value from this work requires immersion and attentiveness. Such is the futurity that this dissertation aims to enable and contribute to; extended ethical knowledge encounters between Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge holders, multidisciplinary research teams, and academic readership, based on ethical and attentive engagement. Remaining a distanced spectator will not do. As such, this cut starts by taking you along to a series of workshops that were conducted in Gjoa Haven, during the Summer of 2019.

=Workshops Summer 2019=

The M’Clintock Channel (MC) Polar Bear Management Unit (PBMU) used by hunters from Gjoa Haven, Cambridge Bay and Taloyoak (see figure 1), was in 2001 subjected to a three-year polar bear moratorium (a full suspension of hunting). In 2005, the moratorium was lifted and Gjoa Haven and Cambridge Bay signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board (NWMB) for alternating quotas of one and two tags per year, while Taloyoak did not sign the MOU at all, and therefore did not receive any tags from the MC management unit between 2001 and 2015. No other community in Nunavut or the Northwest Territories has experienced such a (near) moratorium over such an extended period of time. Despite a more recent rise in tags in 2022, these impacts continue to be felt today. Based on a desire for recognition and acknowledgement of the impact of these polar bear quota regulations, two workshops were co-organized, in the summer of 2019, to discuss and document testimonies of Gjoa Haven hunters and other community members.

[[File:(color) Figure 1 Map of the MC PBMU..jpg|thumb|Map of the M’Clintock Channel Polar Bear Management Unit area (Vongraven and Peacock, 2011). Adapted with permission to include the locations of Gjoa Haven, Cambridge Bay and Taloyoak, who each hunt within this area.]]

[[File:Mapping TEK Gjoa Haven 2019.jpg|thumb|Participants discussing during BearWatch TEK workshop 2019]]

The workshops were advertised over the radio in both English and Inuktitut (Inuit language), and interested individuals signed up through the HTA. One workshop was held May 15, 2019 in the evening with 10 participants and one on May 16 in the morning with 11 participants. These participants comprised mainly older male community members, many of whom had hunted, or still hunt polar bears. There were two female participants in each workshop. Three of the participants were between the ages of 20 and 40, with the remainder older. The two workshops focused specifically on the impacts of polar bear hunting quota reductions on the community. The workshop questions were co-designed by the BW academic researchers and HTA representatives and were asked in both English and Inuktitut to prompt discussion. The format however remained open-ended, meaning that "off-script" discussions were encouraged during the workshop, and occasionally specific members were asked to participate in answering particular questions because of their connection to the issue, as identified in previous interviews or by other community members. Two BW researchers and an interpreter would ask the pre-designed questions and prompt discussion, while a third BW researcher made notes. Both workshops were audio-recorded.

These recordings and workshop notes became the primary materials which were transferred to me, as a new PhD student on the BW project in 2020, with the purpose of having these experiences written out and shared with a larger academic audience, through academic publishing, as part of the overarching research project. This purpose however presented me with multiple dilemmas;

'''[[Voices of Thunder#purveyor of voices|Explore (or return to) my deliberations around non-Indigenous scholars presenting Indigenous experiences in academic research, as purveyors of voices]]'''

'''[[Voices of Thunder#output|Go straight to the different narrative outputs that BearWatch scientists, the Gjoa Haven HTA and several community members eventually co-created, building off of these workshops.]]'''

'''[[TEK workshops|Read about the other workshops that were co-organized in Gjoa Haven during this Summer as part of the Bearwatch project, with the purpose of collecting Inuit Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) to inform upcoming sampling activities in the region.]]'''

=='''[[Politics of recognition|Stay with the trouble and engage with the "politics of recognition"]]'''==

=Coral Harbour First trip 2020=

'''[[Caribou hunt|Invitation]]:Join along for a Caribou hunt'''

=Covid-19=

The Covid-19 The obvious first limitation affecting my research is the COVID-19 pandemic. This pandemic has functioned as double-edged sword. On the one hand it has caused a significant delay, and obstruction in terms of building community relations in the field. It has also caused me to move back to my country of origin; the Netherlands, where I now work on my research not only remotely, but in a different time zones as well. It has also allowed for more time to focus on some of my contributions towards the BearWatch research which have turned out to be valuable in terms of making space for ongoing conversations between the university-based researchers in the project. It has also opened pathways to initial remote connections with research partners in Gjoa Haven through communication platforms like zoom.

'''[[Covid 19 personal whereabouts|Explore deeper:]] Personal whereabouts during Covid-19'''

=Covid-19 Remote interviews=

[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03098265.2024.2406292/Getting Punk and personal publication]

=Fieldtrip BW team Summer 2021=

==Coral Harbour==

====Driving the Island====

====Drinking Coffee====

==Gjoa Haven==

===HTA meetings presentations===

===Voices of thunder meetings===

====Stranding the car====

====ATV ride====

====Camping at the Weir====

'''[[Conference calls from the road#Butter|Invitation]]:Trail-off to understand better how my whereabouts influenced my writing, reading and broader relationship to the country after this fieldtrip'''

=Meetings Spring 2022 Gjoa Haven=

====Checking seal dens====

====Collecting ice====

=Meetings Spring 2022 Coral Harbour=

====Spending time in Yan's Cabin====

====Qamutiq building and riding====

====Walking the same road every day====

=====Seasonal changes=====

=====Illness=====

=====Gender based violence=====

In text link to [[Point of Beginning Mx. Science]]

=Fall 2022 Coral Harbour=

In text link naar [[Aesthetic Action#Design consultation pre-workshop & workshop Coral Harbour|Design consultation pre-workshop & workshop Coral Harbour]]

=====remote planning=====

=====illness=====

=====tension=====

=====absence=====

==Wayfaring Calendar pilot==

=Arctic travel=

=Fall 2022 Gjoa Haven=

In text link naar [[Aesthetic Action#Design consultation pre-workshop & workshop Gjoa Haven|Design consultation pre-workshop & workshop Gjoa Haven]]

====Preparing cabin pre-workshops====

====Cooking/ Sharing food====

====Prayer====

=====Truck Flat Tire=====

In text return to [[Workshop Gjoa Haven#Preparation Gjoa Haven workshop|Preparation Gjoa Haven workshop]] in the Workshop Gjoa Haven trace.

=====Broken Thermostat=====

====Bingo====

====Making posters====

=Winter 2022 Final Workshops=

====Ethics====