Voices of Thunder

"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".

Gjoa Haven HTA, 2021

Gjoa Haven

Uqshuqtuuq (Gjoa Haven) filmed by Peiwen Li (2021)

This is a view across Uqshuqtuuq (Gjoa Haven). 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 is pronounced : [Joe.ha.ven] was given by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, during his Northwest passage expedition, after his wooden ship "Gjoa". Gjoa Haven 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. 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 bears hunting restriction in Gjoa Haven. Let me share some of what I had learnt before I ever came to the community.

Quota Reduction Impacts

Polar bears are managed per Polar Bear Management Unit (PBMU). Hunters from Gjoa Haven, Cambridge Bay and Taloyoak share the M’Clintock Channel (MC) PBMU (see figure 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. From an average of 33 bears annually before 2000 (US FWS, 2001),to only 3 bears annually after 2005 (NWMB, 2005). Between 2001 and 2004 the MC PBMU was even subjected to a three-year polar bear moratorium (a full suspension of hunting). 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 until 2015, while Taloyoak 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 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.

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 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 cut follows the collaborative processes and practices of researchers in the BearWatch project and multiple Gjoa Haven community members as they recorded and shared the impacts of these quota reductions across multiple audiences. You are invited to make your own way along their trails, and find out how these practices come to matter in terms of ethical knowledge conciliation.

But before you keep going, notice that you have stumbled upon a Vista. This Vista is a viewpoint, it will help you orient. It is called "The Ethical Space of Engagement". Perhaps it will help you direct your course along the way.

Vista: The Ethical Space of Engagement

Joining the BearWatch Project

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 describe Gjoa Haven’s experiences in an academic publication for a larger academic audience.

I had however not yet set foot in the community of Gjoa Haven, and such an "assignment" made me feel uneasy; 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? The most straightforward solution to these questions seemed to be to organize a call with the Gjoa Haven HTA, and have a conversation about what they expect from such a publication.

What would you do?

The Principle Investigators of the project are supportive and are willing to organize a meeting. "Keep going" to set-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 you sense to underly this project, considering that the BearWatch project and its Qablunaat (non-Inuit) researchers seem to be entangled with the larger apparatus of science-based polar bear management that have contributed to the impacts as shared in the workshop.

Stay with the trouble: The Politics of Recognition

Detour to Cut 3: "Workshops Summer 2019

Ongoing Conversations

In 2020 and 2021 a total of five separate meetings took place between the Gjoa Haven HTA, myself, and three BearWatch PI’s- each lasting about three hours. Due to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic the first three of these meetings- and thus also my introduction to the HTA-board- took place by remote conference phonecalls in the fall of 2020. 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- which we collectively formulated as follows;

‘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’.

The Gjoa Haven board speaks 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. 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.

You want to learn more about these different knowledge creations, but you can't keep going on this track. You have run into an "ice-pressure ridge", and first need to feel your way across. Explore this ice-pressure ridge to learn more about the ways in which my research was submitted to the conditions created by Covid-19, and eventually find a way through, as to continue this work with the Gjoa Haven HTA.

Ice-pressure ridge: Covid 19 personal whereabouts