Voices of Thunder
Estimated time to follow this cut: minutes
"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)
Uqshuqtuuq (Gjoa Haven)
This is a view across Uqshuqtuuq (Gjoa Haven), Nunavut. Most of the events along this cut take place in this community.
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. 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.
Or,
Take a "Detour" to read an abstract of this cutQuota Reductions
Polar bears and humans share an important relationship in Inuit culture.
Bears are both to be respected as powerful predators, as they are appreciated as 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.
_Figure_1_Map_of_the_MC_PBMU..jpg)
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.
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 seek recognition for the impacts such quota-decisions have had in terms of lost income, loss of culture, and loss of intergenerational knowledge transfer.
Moving forward, you will trace 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.
Although you can make your own way along those trails, you will always do so alongside the cut of my PhD research. in it, I seek to understand what it means to practice knowledge conciliation guided by the principles of the ethical space of engagement, rather than by data-driven needs.
You are invited to make such meaning alongside me.
"Check out the Vista"
Or,
"Keep Going" to learn more about the BearWatch project.
Vista: The Ethical Space of Engagement
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 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. 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 underlying such a project.
Stay with the trouble: The Politics of Recognition
Detour to Cut 3: Workshops Summer 2019
Ongoing Conversations
With support of my supervisors 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.
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 calls 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’.
To more completely pursue such desires we realized that additional avenues of knowledge creation were needed in parallel to academic publishing.
You have run into an "Ice-Pressure Ridge".
If you want to learn more about these different knowledge creations, you first need to feel your way across the conditions Covid-19 created for this work with the Gjoa Haven HTA.