Editing Chores Around Town

Being present in the community has taken many shapes for me over the course of my multiple field visits. In Gjoa Haven such presence has often taken shape around material intra-dynamics between an old truck, the elements and the multiple project-related requirements that had me drive across town for multiple purposes. My first introduction to how the material agencies of such intra-active elements created both possibilities and limitations in terms of community interaction patterns, was when the truck got stranded on the beach and flooded by the rising tide of the ocean. The collective efforts required to pull the truck out of the ocean is what co-Pi de Groot terms his “vulnerability narrative”: a performative display of the intra-dependent relationship of he understands his relationship with the community at large to be comprised of. 

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=Preparing and Packing for an ATV Ride=

The environmental conditions in Inuit Nunangat seem initially a fitting context to easily debunk anthropocentric ontologies. For example, any visiting researcher who has tried to prepare, pack or pull a qamutiq (sled) across the land outside of Arctic Summer for the first time, like I did in 2021, has likely encountered the limits of human agency as well as the particular teachings of humility. The land itself invites one to move away from anthropocentric tellings - towards narrations of becoming knowledgeable in company with the seasons, snow, ice, wind, rocks, and caribou. Such stories leave room for us as researchers, but are importantly not about us. Donna Haraway calls such stories “netbag stories” (2016, p.38). She argues, inspired by Ursula le Guin (1986), that the kind of stories we need telling in these times are not those of the Antropos. Not those of the capitalized Human in History and all the weaponized tools such a Human might carry, but those of the netbag, the basket, or any other concave shape. Such a netbag, or even a pair of cupped hands enables carrying things along, and receiving and giving away. Such exchange suggests ongoing stories of becoming with-; a collective making and unmaking of the world with ‘companion species’ as ‘kin’ (Haraway, 2003 ; 2016). These stories acknowledge messy, earthbound, multispecies entanglements, rather than man-making tales of the single hero.

=Camping at the Weir=

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