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=Point of beginning=
<small>Estimated time to follow this cut without detours: 20 minutes (excluding 20 minutes animated graphic documentary.)</small>
This manuscript/cut and its related work emerges from five years of ongoing conversations between representatives of the Gjoa Haven’s Hunters and Trappers Association (HTA) in Gjoa Haven, Nunavut (figure 1) and Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario researchers. It is based on a series of community-based workshops conducted in the summer of 2019 for a ‘Genome Canada’ sponsored large-scale polar bear monitoring project entitled “BEARWATCH: Monitoring Impacts of Arctic Climate Change using Polar Bears, Genomics and Traditional Ecological Knowledge” – hereafter, simply, BW.
''"We want our “Voices of Thunder” to echo everywhere. We want everyone to know what happened to us. We seek acknowledgment and apologies for suffering the consequences of the quota regulations; a loss of culture and knowledge, as well as increased danger due to the rising number of polar bears around our communities. Inuit knowledge in terms of accuracy and inherent value needs to be recognized and better acknowledged. We want better integration of Inuit knowledge in survey research, like for example accounting for seasonal changes. Scientific monitoring surveys have limitations, we ask that researchers will recognize and take Inuit observations more seriously".''
[[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.]]
Gjoa Haven HTA (2021)
Several Inuit communities across Inuit Nunangat (homeland of Inuit of Canada’, ITK, 2018) have collaborated with the BW project to combine Inuit Knowledge with western science in developing a community-based, non-invasive, genomics-based toolkit for the monitoring and management of polar bears. One of these collaborating communities is Gjoa Haven, whose Hunters and Trappers Association (HTA) representatives have a research relationship with BW co-PI Peter Van Coeverden De Groot that has stretched across more than 20 years. Over the years, one issue that was brought up repeatedly by Gjoa Haven HTA representatives and other community members, concerned the effects of severe polar bear hunting quota reductions introduced to the community in 2001.
=Uqshuqtuuq (Gjoa Haven)=
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. Both Taloyoak and Cambridge Bay- unlike the residents of Gjoa Haven- however, also have traditional hunting grounds outside of the MC PBMU. So, when the quota in MC PBMU was significantly reduced from an average of 33 bears annually before 2000 (US FWS, 2001), to only 3 bears annually (NWMB, 2005), the community of Gjoa Haven was disproportionately impacted. 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. Hunting polar bears is an important part of Inuit culture. It facilitates inter-generational knowledge transmission of on-the-land skills, and provides a significant source of income within Inuit mixed-economies (Dowsley, 2008; Wenzel, 2011). After two generations of hardly being able to hunt polar bears, Gjoa Haven hunters still seek recognition for the impacts such quota-decisions have had in terms of lost income, loss of culture, and loss of intergenerational knowledge transfer.
This is a view across Uqshuqtuuq (Gjoa Haven), Nunavut. Most of the events along this cut take place in this community.
This work invites you to accept testimony to these ongoing impacts of such severe quota reductions through the recorded experiences of Gjoa Haven hunters and other community members. Such accepting testimony, however, isn’t limited to a ‘passive reading’ of the quota impacts on the community. You are instead invited to explore your own positioning- as a reader, a scientist, and collaborative meaning-maker responsively, alongside several other agential forces. What does it mean to ethically engage with these narratives? What responsibilities do we bear as readers? How are we implicated? What does it mean in the thick moment/um of reconciliation to share or accept testimony in accordance with the guiding principles of the [[Ethical Space of Engagement]] (Ermine, 2007)?
[[File:GjoaHaven2021Aug25_1_1.mp4|border|centre|600px|Uqshuqtuuq (Gjoa Haven) filmed by Peiwen Li (2021)]]
'''''Text will be added here - see google doc'''''
Uqshuqtuuq is pronounciated: [uq.suq.tuːq], meaning "lots of fat" in Inuktitut (the language spoken by Inuit), referring to an abundance of marine animals like seals. Its English name, "Gjoa Haven" is pronounced : [Joe.ha.ven] and was given by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen during his expedition to find the Northwest passage. Gjoa Haven was named after his wooden ship "Gjoa". It is the only hamlet on King William Island, located in the Kitikmeot region of Nunavut, Canada. Its current population is estimated around 1400 people.
My name is Saskia de Wildt, and I visited Gjoa Haven for the first time in 2021- during the second year of my PhD research.
=<span id="purveyor of voices"></span>From purveying voices towards accepting testimony.=
By then, however, I already knew quite a bit about the history of polar bear hunting restriction in Gjoa Haven.
In the summer of 2019, two [[Workshops Summer 2019|workshops]] were co-organized to discuss and document testimonies on the multiple impacts of the polar bear quota reductions on Gjoa Haven hunters and other community members. The recordings of these workshops and its accompanying notes became the primary materials which were transferred to me, as a new PhD student on the BW project in 2020, to be described in an academic publication, and presented to a larger academic audience.
<div class="next_choice">'''"Keep Going"''' to read what I had learnt before I ever came to the community.
As a researcher who had not yet set foot in the community of Gjoa Haven, such an "assignment" made me feel uneasy; Who was I to write an academic paper that conveyed the lived experiences of people who I had never even met? Viewing the writing on such a sensitive topic as polar bear quota reductions, as a mere descriptive practice- disconnected from the wider research landscape within which they emerged- did not only strike me as unethical, it also seemed impossible. It is hard to separate the practices of a research project like BW, that is directly focussed on the methodologies of polar bear monitoring, from the subject of harvest quota- considering that quotas are set, at least partially, based on the insights derived from such monitoring efforts. As such, it seemed necessary to [[Ethical Space of Engagement#ethical space|renegotiate]] my contributions in a way that provided for caution and with a sensitivity to how the BW project, and its non-Inuit researchers, are entangled with the larger legacy of scientific polar bear monitoring surveys and management processes that contributed to the impacts as shared in the workshop. Most crucial to such an approach became the extended conversations between the Gjoa Haven HTA representatives, myself and university-based BW PI’s.
Or,
Take a '''"Detour"''' to read an abstract of this cut</div>
The choice to continue close collaboration between Gjoa Haven representatives and BW researchers, was crucial to a research approach that sought to ethically engage with the experiences that were shared in the impact workshops of 2019. Not only to decide on how to process, interpret and present the workshop recordings, but also to discuss the purposes to which the community had requested the workshops in the first place- and to navigate what role university-based researchers should, or could, play in achieving such purposes?
=Inuit and Polar Bears=
We arranged a total of five separate meetings between the Gjoa Haven HTA, myself, and multiple BW PI’s- each lasting about three hours to navigate a collective decision making on how to proceed with sharing these narratives. Due to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic the first three of these meetings- and my introduction to the HTA-board- took place by remote conference phonecalls in 2020. Although these calls were not pre-structured or accompanied by an agenda, we did turn to a series of critical questions suggested by Linda Tuhawali Smith (1999) to guide us in our conversations; “What research do we want to do? Who is it for? What difference will it make? Who will carry it out? How do we want the research done? How will we know it is worthwhile? Who will own the research? Who will benefit?” Among multiple other insights, this led to a clear articulation of the main objective of Gjoa Haven HTA representatives for publishing the experiences shared in the workshops- collectively formulated as follows;
Polar bears and humans share an important relationship in Inuit culture.
''‘We want our “voices of thunder” to echo everywhere. We want everyone to know what happened to us. We seek acknowledgment and apologies for suffering the consequences of the quota regulations; a loss of culture and knowledge, as well as increased danger due to the rising number of polar bears around our communities. Inuit knowledge in terms of accuracy and inherent value needs to be recognized and better acknowledged. We want better integration of Inuit knowledge in survey research, like for example accounting for seasonal changes. Scientific monitoring surveys have limitations, we ask that researchers will recognize and take Inuit observations more seriously’.''
Within Inuit ways of knowing and being, polar bears are to be respected as powerful predators, and appreciated for being a source of sustenance.
The Gjoa Haven HTA seeks recognition. The kind of recognition that they seek is however multifaceted. Beyond acknowledgement and apologies for the quota reduction impacts, the Gjoa Haven HTA also seeks validation, and better “integration” of their knowledge in research and management. The Gjoa Haven board also speak of wanting to have their voices of thunder “echo everywhere” - a vision of broad dissemination that extends beyond the scientific community, towards other Nunavut communities and wider Canadian society. Academic publishing alone will likely not achieve this. To more completely pursue such desired forms of wide recognition, we realized that additional avenues of knowledge creation were needed in parallel to academic publishing. We subsequently co-created multiple audio/visual [[#output|outputs]] that are better suited for broad dissemination through publicly accessible venues like social media, and internet, while we planned to co-produce one-pager communications that are more suitable for political advocacy.
In Canada, Inuit have a right to hunt polar bears. Such hunting takes place under "harvesting quota" regulations, and are managed per Polar Bear Management Unit (PBMU). Hunters from Gjoa Haven, Cambridge Bay and Taloyoak share the M’Clintock Channel (MC) PBMU.
The other outcome of our ongoing conversations is that it allowed for our collaborative work to better present Gjoa Haven’s voices and objectives, without the academic partners speaking for them. Instead of reproducing yet another damage-centered study that portrays an Indigenous community primarily as ‘broken, emptied, or flattened’ (Tuck, 2009), or the social scientists as an invisible and elevated ‘purveyor of voices’ for those that are suggested to be “voiceless” (Spivak, 1988 ; Simpson, 2007; Tuck and Yang, 2014)- we could explore how exactly each of our voices could be appropriately leveraged within different knowledge products.
[[File:(color) Figure 1 Map of the MC PBMU..jpg|thumb|500px|Fgure 1: 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.]]
==Multiple voices==
=Polar Bear Quota Reductions=
What initially was intended to be a unilateral descriptive (re)presentation of the recorded impacts of quota reductions as experienced by Gjoa Haven community members, slowly emerged to become a multi-vocal, co-creative process of engaging with these testimonies in ways that have been described as transformative to the relationship between some of the Gjoa Haven HTA representatives and the academic partners of BW.
At the start of this century, however, polar bears seemed to be declining in numbers, and the hunting quota in the MC PBMU was severely reduced.
Across the summer of 2021, and spring 2022, we arranged for an eight-week period of in-person co-creation and conversations in Gjoa Haven on how to proceed in sharing Gjoa Haven’s “Voices of Thunder”. During these periods, we discussed potential knowledge outputs and forms of writing- or otherwise- presenting the experiences shared in the workshops. We constructed narrative sequences and in 2021 we also started to co-produce on of our three main knowledge outputs; the motion graphic documentary In 2022, we reviewed versions of our academic paper, reconfirmed the meaning of several of the statements that were quoted in the workshop recordings through additional conversation, and we screened edited versions of several videos we had co-produced prior. Part of these processes, was to navigate the position of the academic scientists in ‘telling’ the story of quota reduction impacts for the community.
Between 2001 and 2004 the MC PBMU was subjected to a three-year polar bear moratorium (a full suspension of hunting).
In each of our co-created research outputs, respectively i) a 20 minute co-created motion graphic documentary, ii) an academic publication, and iii) a webpage, the academic scientists of BearWatch and the community-members of Gjoa Haven are positioned differently. The academic partners always present themselves as explicitly visible actors, distinctly differently positioned from their Gjoa Haven partners, but not as detached on the one hand, or as ‘ventriloquists’ of the community of Gjoa Haven, on the other hand (see Spivak 2010, p. 27). Taking our cues from Jones and Jenkins (2008), we conduct a ‘negotiation of voice’- we make explicit who speaks, and how our collaborative authorship is navigated. To clarify which of our respective voices are present as this cut unfolds, I will state who ‘we’ refers to in each narrative output. The voices shift, for example, between ‘we’, as I use it here, which includes Gjoa Haven community representatives and the academic partners of the BW project, towards ‘we’ as it is applied within the motion graphic documentary, where it refers to Gjoa Haven’s hunters, community-members and HTA project partners exclusively. In parts of the academic paper, on the other hand, ‘we’ refers to the voices of academic research partners of the BW project only. Such visible differentiation and shifting of voices, both eliminates the impression that this paper addresses phenomena that are completely disconnected from the position of the BW scientists, while it also seeks to avoid speaking from one harmonized voice. Based on the tension of our differences, rather than attempting to erase them, we have sought to create multiple sites of enunciation, while maintaining a pragmatic collaboration across them.
And in 2005 Gjoa Haven and Cambridge Bay signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU<ref>Nunavut Wildlife Management Board (2005, 8 March) Polar Bear Management Memorandum of Understanding for the management of the ‘M’Clintock Channel’ polar bear population. [Memorandum of Understanding]. Cambridge Bay</ref>) with the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board (NWMB) for alternating quotas of one and two tags per year until 2015, while Taloyoak did not receive any tags from the MC management unit between 2001 and 2015.
For example, in the motion graphic documentary, the experiences shared by the workshop participants speak for themselves, through the voices of Gjoa Haven community members. In the academic paper, on the other hand, the voices of the BW scientists are more prominently present. Not through the employment of theoretical frameworks and methodological analysis to translate, validate or otherwise explain the experiences shared by Gjoa Haven’s HTA representatives, hunters and community members, but rather by conducting a direct, ‘unromantic’, (sensu Jones and Jenkins, 2008) “testimonial reading”, as further elaborated on in section 1.3. A ‘testimonial reading’ facilitates an engagement with the experiences of Gjoa Haven’s community members that asks the reader to move beyond passive empathy towards an acceptance of testimony that requires bearing responsibility; it asks the reader to commit - to rethink their assumptions, to challenge the comfortable concept of being a ‘distant’ other, and to recognize the power-relationships between the reader and the testimonial text (Boler, 1997). By conducting such a testimonial reading of the experiences shared by Gjoa Haven community members, we can both engage with the experiences shared in the workshop, ànd the appeal of the Gjoa Haven HTA for wider recognition, in a way that aligns with the principles of Ethical Space of Engagement (Ermine, 2007).
==Testimonial reading==
Terms like ‘testimony’ or ‘witnessing’ are ideologically and politically loaded, and may mean different things within different contexts. To ‘witness’, when considered in the context of this cross-cultural research collaboration, doesn’t take up the western legal definition of being an (eye)witness as it would in the context of a legal court. It may rather take up meaning that aligns with Indigenous traditions of witnessing, in the way it was applied in the public fora of Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Committee hearings for example. Witnessing as defined in schedule N and later on the TRC website (TRC.ca) is to take responsibility for ‘accepting testimony’ on historical events, even if one hasn’t directly experienced these events themselves.This form of witnessing is active. It is not merely listening. To witness, is to enter into a very specific and powerful relationship between witness and storyteller (Nock in Gaertner, 2016 p.138). This is particularly important to Indigenous cultures that use oral traditions. “Oral traditions form the foundation of Aboriginal societies, connecting speaker and listener in communal experience and uniting past and present in memory.” They are “the means by which knowledge is reproduced, preserved and conveyed from generation to generation” (Hulan & Eigenbrod in Gaertner, 2016 p.139). In other words, accepting testimony comes with responsibilities. Whether these are responsibilities to remember, or a commitment to take forward, teach others and spread the word, accepting testimony is not a passive act- nor is it a one-time event.
<small><references /></small>
This act of witnessing and giving testimony between Inuit community members and non-Inuit BW researchers begins, in the case of our research, when BW researchers acted in response to the issue of quota reductions in a meaningful way. By resourcing, planning, and co-designing two workshops with Gjoa Haven HTA representatives to take place in the community, the space was created to engage in the kind of attentive listening that is needed to meaningfully accept testimony; the kind of listening that changes you, and connects you to the speaker. The recording and documenting of the process could be understood as another part of accepting testimony, described above as the commitment to “take forward” and “spread the word”. There are however tensions involved with such practices when it comes to the cross-cultural partnership of the BW project. Primarily the fact that these understandings of accepting testimony derive from Indigenous definitions as shared by the TRC., and that, as explained above, there are risks and power dynamics at play when western researchers take on the responsibility of sharing Indigenous testimonies in academic publications. Different forms of knowledge outputs, presence of voices, and anticipated “listeners” require different approaches to accepting testimony. For the academic publication, the BW researchers have chosen to accept testimony by conducting a ‘testimonial reading’.
=Impacts for Gjoa Haven=
Megan Boler (Boler, 1997, p.255), who named the method of ‘testimonial reading’, places the act of taking responsibility central in her work on testimony. She wrote; ‘’While empathy may inspire action in particular lived contexts (…) I am not convinced that empathy leads to anything close to justice, (or) to any shift in existing power relations’’. To shift such relations, ‘’one must recognize oneself as implicated in the social forces that create the climate of obstacles the other must confront’’ (ibid, p. 257). Suggesting a practice of accepting testimony by which a reader or listener places themselves to be implicated with the events one accepts testimony for, aligns with the guiding principles for reconciliation put forward by the TRC (TRC, 2015c p. 113). These principles consider reconciliation as an opportunity to practice an ‘awareness of the past, acknowledgement of the harm that has been inflicted, atonement for the causes, and action to change behaviour’ (ibid). In other words ‘The TRC (...) puts responsibility for change squarely on the shoulders of all Canadians’ (McGregor, 2018 p.823 emphasis mine)- not just the Indigenous people who take up responsibility for sharing their experiences publicly.
Both Taloyoak and Cambridge Bay- unlike the residents of Gjoa Haven- however, also have traditional hunting grounds outside of the MC PBMU. So, when the quota was so drastically reduced, the community of Gjoa Haven was disproportionately impacted.
To conduct a testimonial reading of the impact of quota reductions, as shared by Gjoa Haven community members, thus requires the academic partners of BW to assess how they themselves are entangled with the institutional apparatus that has facilitated the lack of recognition and the impacts to which Gjoa Haven’s testimonies speak. The method of testimonial reading, as such, deliberately prevents engaging with Gjoa Haven’s experiences without also asking questions about responsibility between speaker and listener. Not only does this make it possible to redirect from a “damage-centred” narrative that “speaks for’ the community of Gjoa Haven towards one that draws attention to the colonial legacies and structures that have caused those impacts- it also direction for other academic “listeners” to accept testimony in appropriate ways.
No other community in Nunavut or the Northwest Territories has experienced such a (near) moratorium over such an extended period of time.
=<span id="output"></span>Voices of Thunder; Testimonies of polar bear quota reduction impacts in Gjoa Haven, Nunavut=
[[File:Signing MoU (drawing by Danny Aaluk, 2021).png|thumb|Signing the MoU (illustration by Danny Aaluk, 2021)]]
The knowledge outputs shared here have emerged from the ongoing conversations and agreements between the Gjoa Haven HTA representatives and BW scientists, as described above. You can choose to directly engage with any of them on this page, or you can click the links below to trace the collaborative processes that have lead to each of those final outputs.
=Seeking Recognition=
After two generations of hardly being able to hunt polar bears, the Gjoa Haven hunters and Trappers Association have asked the researchers of the BearWatch project to help them gain recognition for the impacts such quota-decisions have had in terms of lost income, loss of culture, and loss of intergenerational knowledge transfer.
[[Voices of Thunder impacts paper]]
<div class="next_choice"> Notice, that you have stumbled upon a Vista. This Vista is a viewpoint, it will help you orient. This one is called "The Ethical Space of Engagement".
[[Voices of Thunder Motion Graphic Documentary]]
'''"Check out the Vista"'''
[[Voices of Thunder Webpage]]
Or,
'''"Keep Going"''' to learn more about my PhD research in the BearWatch project, sought to assist in sharing the impacts of these quota reductions across multiple audiences.
</div>
<span class="pop-up vista link" data-page-title="Ethical_Space_of_Engagement">[[Ethical Space of Engagement|Vista: The Ethical Space of Engagement]]</span>
=Joining the BearWatch Project=
My PhD research is part of a larger project: ‘Bearwatch: Monitoring Impacts of Arctic Climate Change using Polar Bears, Genomics and Traditional Ecological Knowledge’.
In the summer of 2019, just before I joined the project in the fall, two workshops were co-organized to discuss and document community testimonies on the multiple impacts of the polar bear quota reductions on Gjoa Haven hunters and other community members.
The recordings of these workshops and its accompanying notes were transferred to me in 2020. I was requested to translate Gjoa Haven’s experiences into an academic publication, as to share them with a larger academic audience.
This "assignment" made me feel uneasy however;
'''"Who was I to convey the lived experiences of people who I had never even met, and provide context to a situation that I had no connection to?"'''
<div class="next_choice"> What would you do?
The most straightforward solution to these questions seems to be to organize a call with the Gjoa Haven HTA, and have a conversation about what they expect from such a publication. The Principle Investigators of the project are supportive and are willing to organize such a meeting.
'''"Keep going"''' to find out what happens after setting-up this call.
Or,
First gather more information on the workshops that were conducted in 2019. '''"Detour to Cut 3".'''
Or,
'''"Stay with the Trouble"''', to explore some of the complexities underlying such a project.
</div>
<span class="pop-up stay-with-the-trouble link" data-page-title=" Politics_of_Recognition " data-encounter-type="Stay-with-the-trouble">[[Politics of Recognition|Stay with the trouble: The Politics of Recognition]]</span>
<span class="detour to-cut-3 link" data-page-title="Wayfaring the BearWatch Project" data-section-id="10" data-encounter-type="detour">[[Wayfaring the BearWatch Project#Going on the Record|Detour to Cut 3: Workshops Summer 2019]]</span>
=Ongoing Conversations=
With support of my supervisors a special meeting with the Gjoa Haven HTA was organized to discuss how they wanted their testimonies to be shared. A total of five separate meetings took place between the Gjoa Haven HTA, myself, and three BearWatch PI’s In 2020 and 2021 - each lasting about three hours.
Among multiple other insights, this led to a clear articulation of the main objectives of Gjoa Haven HTA representatives for publishing their experiences;
[[File:Gjoa Haven's Appeal.mp3|thumb]]
We realized that additional avenues of knowledge creation were needed in parallel to academic publishing, if we were to pursue such a broad spectrum of recognition.
<div class="next_choice">You have run into an '''"Ice-Pressure Ridge"'''.
It's 2020 and we are in the middle of a Covid-pandemic.
Feel your way across the Ice-Pressure Ridge to understand how this work with the Gjoa Haven HTA was subjected to conditions created by the Covid-19 pandemic.</div>
<span class="redirective ice-pressure_ridge link" data-page-title=" Covid 19 Personal Whereabouts " data-section-id="0" data-encounter-type="ice-pressure_ridge">[[Covid 19 Personal Whereabouts|Ice-pressure ridge: Covid 19 Personal Whereabouts]]</span>
Latest revision as of 15:26, 16 August 2025
Estimated time to follow this cut without detours: 20 minutes (excluding 20 minutes animated graphic documentary.)
"We want our “Voices of Thunder” to echo everywhere. We want everyone to know what happened to us. We seek acknowledgment and apologies for suffering the consequences of the quota regulations; a loss of culture and knowledge, as well as increased danger due to the rising number of polar bears around our communities. Inuit knowledge in terms of accuracy and inherent value needs to be recognized and better acknowledged. We want better integration of Inuit knowledge in survey research, like for example accounting for seasonal changes. Scientific monitoring surveys have limitations, we ask that researchers will recognize and take Inuit observations more seriously".
This is a view across Uqshuqtuuq (Gjoa Haven), Nunavut. Most of the events along this cut take place in this community.
Uqshuqtuuq (Gjoa Haven) filmed by Peiwen Li (2021)
Uqshuqtuuq is pronounciated: [uq.suq.tuːq], meaning "lots of fat" in Inuktitut (the language spoken by Inuit), referring to an abundance of marine animals like seals. Its English name, "Gjoa Haven" is pronounced : [Joe.ha.ven] and was given by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen during his expedition to find the Northwest passage. Gjoa Haven was named after his wooden ship "Gjoa". It is the only hamlet on King William Island, located in the Kitikmeot region of Nunavut, Canada. Its current population is estimated around 1400 people.
My name is Saskia de Wildt, and I visited Gjoa Haven for the first time in 2021- during the second year of my PhD research.
By then, however, I already knew quite a bit about the history of polar bear hunting restriction in Gjoa Haven.
"Keep Going" to read what I had learnt before I ever came to the community.
Polar bears and humans share an important relationship in Inuit culture.
Within Inuit ways of knowing and being, polar bears are to be respected as powerful predators, and appreciated for being a source of sustenance.
In Canada, Inuit have a right to hunt polar bears. Such hunting takes place under "harvesting quota" regulations, and are managed per Polar Bear Management Unit (PBMU). Hunters from Gjoa Haven, Cambridge Bay and Taloyoak share the M’Clintock Channel (MC) PBMU.
Fgure 1: 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.
At the start of this century, however, polar bears seemed to be declining in numbers, and the hunting quota in the MC PBMU was severely reduced.
Between 2001 and 2004 the MC PBMU was subjected to a three-year polar bear moratorium (a full suspension of hunting).
And in 2005 Gjoa Haven and Cambridge Bay signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU[1]) with the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board (NWMB) for alternating quotas of one and two tags per year until 2015, while Taloyoak did not receive any tags from the MC management unit between 2001 and 2015.
↑Nunavut Wildlife Management Board (2005, 8 March) Polar Bear Management Memorandum of Understanding for the management of the ‘M’Clintock Channel’ polar bear population. [Memorandum of Understanding]. Cambridge Bay
Both Taloyoak and Cambridge Bay- unlike the residents of Gjoa Haven- however, also have traditional hunting grounds outside of the MC PBMU. So, when the quota was so drastically reduced, the community of Gjoa Haven was disproportionately impacted.
No other community in Nunavut or the Northwest Territories has experienced such a (near) moratorium over such an extended period of time.
Signing the MoU (illustration by Danny Aaluk, 2021)
After two generations of hardly being able to hunt polar bears, the Gjoa Haven hunters and Trappers Association have asked the researchers of the BearWatch project to help them gain recognition for the impacts such quota-decisions have had in terms of lost income, loss of culture, and loss of intergenerational knowledge transfer.
Notice, that you have stumbled upon a Vista. This Vista is a viewpoint, it will help you orient. This one is called "The Ethical Space of Engagement".
"Check out the Vista"
Or,
"Keep Going" to learn more about my PhD research in the BearWatch project, sought to assist in sharing the impacts of these quota reductions across multiple audiences.
My PhD research is part of a larger project: ‘Bearwatch: Monitoring Impacts of Arctic Climate Change using Polar Bears, Genomics and Traditional Ecological Knowledge’.
In the summer of 2019, just before I joined the project in the fall, two workshops were co-organized to discuss and document community testimonies on the multiple impacts of the polar bear quota reductions on Gjoa Haven hunters and other community members.
The recordings of these workshops and its accompanying notes were transferred to me in 2020. I was requested to translate Gjoa Haven’s experiences into an academic publication, as to share them with a larger academic audience.
This "assignment" made me feel uneasy however;
"Who was I to convey the lived experiences of people who I had never even met, and provide context to a situation that I had no connection to?"
What would you do?
The most straightforward solution to these questions seems to be to organize a call with the Gjoa Haven HTA, and have a conversation about what they expect from such a publication. The Principle Investigators of the project are supportive and are willing to organize such a meeting.
"Keep going" to find out what happens after setting-up this call.
Or,
First gather more information on the workshops that were conducted in 2019. "Detour to Cut 3".
Or,
"Stay with the Trouble", to explore some of the complexities underlying such a project.
With support of my supervisors a special meeting with the Gjoa Haven HTA was organized to discuss how they wanted their testimonies to be shared. A total of five separate meetings took place between the Gjoa Haven HTA, myself, and three BearWatch PI’s In 2020 and 2021 - each lasting about three hours.
Among multiple other insights, this led to a clear articulation of the main objectives of Gjoa Haven HTA representatives for publishing their experiences;
We realized that additional avenues of knowledge creation were needed in parallel to academic publishing, if we were to pursue such a broad spectrum of recognition.
You have run into an "Ice-Pressure Ridge".
It's 2020 and we are in the middle of a Covid-pandemic.
Feel your way across the Ice-Pressure Ridge to understand how this work with the Gjoa Haven HTA was subjected to conditions created by the Covid-19 pandemic.
_Figure_1_Map_of_the_MC_PBMU..jpg)
.png)