Essay

An Inuit family stands among the remnants of a ringed stone structure, what had evidently been a house or tent site and likely used by ancestral Inuit and earlier Thule and Dorset cultures. The man, woman, and child are dressed in a mix of clothing types, from a traditional fur-lined anorak to contemporary color-block synthetic outerwear. The scene appears on a poster aimed at protecting “Nunavut’s archaeological heritage for future generations,” as a related public service notice puts it.[1] In text written in Inuktitut (both syllabics and Roman orthography), French, and English, the poster cautions visitors to Inuit Nunangat: “Artifacts are protected by law in Nunavut. If you discover something; look at it; leave it; and report it.” The family looks at an artifact amid the stones (the object of their attention appears in an inset image on the poster’s upper left; perhaps it is a broken pair of snow goggles). In the right half of the composite image, the family then leaves the artifact behind as they walk from the site; and, as illustrated in a second inset image in the lower right, reports it via phone. For any viewers who wish to make their own reports, the notice provides contact information for the Inuit Heritage Trust and the Nunavut Department of Culture, Language, Elders & Youth.

I encountered the poster on the wall of the airport in Pond Inlet (Mittimatalik), Nunavut, in July 2019, where I took the tilted and poorly-framed iPhone photo you see accompanying this essay. The poster’s audience in the airport would seem to be hamlet residents and visiting Inuit family as well as the Qallunaat visitors (like me, a white American woman) who come through the community: scientific researchers, eco-tourists and adventurers, Canadian health and social services circuit riders. I had traveled to Pond Inlet with members of the Northwest Passage Project, an NSF-sponsored climate change expedition, which included a documentary film crew for which I served as Arctic historian. During the voyage we visited vestiges of stone structures similar to the one on the poster. At Radstock Bay (Qillarjuap qarmaviningit) on Devon Island (Tallurutit), for example, we observed Thule, Dorset, and Inuit housing used as campsites over the past 2000 years. The structures, constructed of turf, whalebone, muskox bone, and stone, share the tundra with metal trash (barrel staves, copper-fastened boards, cans) from nineteenth-century Qallunaat search parties for the missing British Franklin Expedition (1845-). Even before noticing the poster on the airport wall we followed its three-part directive: we looked at the objects and left them untouched; our Arctic guide (who held our expedition’s site permit) duly reported the condition of the artifacts to authorities.

At one point in my ongoing Arctic humanities research, this Teaching Arctic Environments entry could have been written about that historic camp site in Radstock Bay as an object lesson for Inuit land use versus settler or Qallunaat effects on the environment. (In writing such a piece I might have noted that the tundra around the camp sites is lushly verdant, a consequence of the nutrient-rich bones and remains of the whales, walruses, and muskoxen eaten and discarded onsite by Arctic Indigenous people over many hundreds of years, fertilizing the frozen ground; the British iron, tin, and copper trash discarded on site remains, too, but neither nourishes nor replenishes the land.) In my first research trips to the Arctic I understood my own impulse to “look at it, leave it, and report it”—that is, to report it by writing about what I observed on the land in Nunavut as part of the humanities methodologies in which I have been trained as a literary historical scholar.

Now, however, I see this poster with different eyes. I have come to understand the poster as a caution to me and to other Qallunaat who teach and research Arctic environments. The objects of our study, as in the materials and ideas we look at, should justly be left where they are; if reported in the form of our scholarship, such reports should only be done so in the service of Arctic communities. The research practices that have informed my literary-historical career to date (gathering information, analyzing it, and publishing it as a solo-authored intellectual product) are fundamentally incompatible with ethical knowledge engagement in the Arctic. In other words, methodologies premised on collecting or reporting the knowledge of others—knowledge of which the researcher has not been a coproducer—are considered exploitative and extractive by Inuit.[2] Knowledge is not a commodity to be claimed under an individual scholar’s byline; in pan-Inuit epistemes, knowledge is collective, shaped over time, and reflects the sustained interrelation of ecosystems and humans.

The artifact-protecting poster’s “look at it, leave it, report it” directive aims to alert the public that Inuit archeological and cultural heritage is not available for intellectual resource extraction. Artifacts are not only relics or remnants; they are nodes in networks of relation among Inuit (past, present, and future) and the land, water, and ice of the Arctic. The object lesson may be a methodology common to humanities storytelling, but the poster on the airport wall urges environmental humanists not to isolate objects from their embeddedness in their Arctic environment. In other words, one problem with collecting and recirculating stories—as academic research or otherwise—is their abstraction from the knowledge ecologies that create and sustain their meaning.