Learning About Wrecksites
The wrecksite is not a metaphorical figure. In the case of Gjoa Haven, two such sites, harbouring the shipwrecks of HMS Terror and HMS Erebus exist in proximity to the community. They speak to longstanding (knowledge) encounters between Qablunaat (non-Inuit people) and Inuit across time and space. Whether such encounters materialize through site-specific instances, by for example the repurposing of wood from these shipwrecks to create traditional objects, or through more generally encompassing structures like the Inuit Land Claim Agreements, the wrecksite refers, for me, to the materiality of larger agential apparatuses in encounter across time and space.
Whether such encounters are between the apparatuses of (inter)national science-based polar bear conservation, Inuit self-determination, or polar bear co-management and monitoring, the shipwreck is a figure that gestures towards the dynamic interplay of all such material agencies, within which the Bearwatch project, my knowledge-land-scape and your decisions are entangled. Here and there, the shipwrecks of such larger generative forces reveal themselves as materially constitutive agents in what can exist, and what can not exist as part of my research and this knowledge-land-scape. They just as well, however, emerge as sites of multiplicity and opportunity. They are both sites of ‘becoming reef’, as they are sites of ‘becoming heritage’.
You have learnt about all the phenomena that you may encounter in the knowledge-land-scape. Return to the instruction cut to end this tutorial.