INUIT IDENTITY IN THE
CANADIAN ARCTIC1
Edmund (Ned) Searles
Bucknell University
Contemporary Nunavut Inuit perceive their identity to be a combination of inherited
substances as well as knowledge, skills, and values that one must learn in order to be
considered authentically Inuit. Inuit understand the latter part of their identity as examples
of inuktitut, which is learning how to act in the Inuit way. Equally important for the
expression of Inuit identity is knowledge of qallunaatitut, the way of “white people.” This is
why Inuit identity is best understood as an ethnic identity that influences how Inuit perceive
themselves, their culture, and their relations to non-Inuit. The dominant discourse of Inuit
identity rests on a reified notion of culture as well as a logic that equates the boundary
between Inuit culture and Qallunaat culture as primordial and permanent. As such, Inuit
identity is experienced as a set of primordial ties to specific places and persons and as a way
of life that must be protected from the incursion of non-Inuit culture. (Ethnic identity,
Nunavut Inuit, Canadian Arctic)
In The Reinvention of Primitive Society, Kuper (2005) claims that only descent criteria
(i.e., parentage) matter in how indigenous peoples define their identity today, and
accuses anthropologists of relying on “obsolete anthropological notions and on a romantic and false ethnographic vision” (Kuper 2005:218). According to Kuper, communities
throughout the world have shifted the basis of their identity from cultural tests (e.g.,
speaking an indigenous language, possessing traditional knowledge and skills) to criteria
based on “ties of blood to ancestral soil” (Kuper 2005:218). Kuper claims that the
decline of cultural tests involves a concomitant rise in the importance of descent and
territoriality as the criteria peoples use to define themselves and their political agendas.
This essay examines Kuper’s dichotomy in light of ethnographic research conducted
with Inuit and non-Inuit residents of southern Baffin Island, Northwest Territories (now
Nunavut Territory), Canada, in the mid- to late 1990s and early 2000s in the town of
Iqaluit and in an adjacent hunting camp, known locally as the Kuyait outpost camp.
Iqaluit, the capital of the Nunavut Territory, is the largest and fastest growing town on
Baffin Island and has a diverse population that includes long-time residents who have
grown up in the north as well as recent arrivals who came to take advantage of employment opportunities in the regional government or to start a business in a booming
economy.2 Iqaluit is also home to some important Inuit organizations (e.g., Nunavut
Tunngavik Inc., the Baffin Regional Inuit Association), government agencies (the
Nunavut Implementation Commission), and an experienced cadre of Inuit leaders and
intellectuals who have helped make the plight of contemporary Inuit visible on a global
scale.
In the mid-1990s, the Kuyait outpost camp was one of about a dozen camps remaining in the southern half of Baffin Island. Inuit began to establish these camps in the
1970s in order to escape the pressures and problems of life in Iqaluit, a place that had
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ETHNOLOGY, c/o Department of Anthropology, The University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA 15260 USA
Copyright 2009 by The University of Pittsburgh. All rights reserved.
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grown more complex and crowded in the 1950s and 1960s as Inuit left their seminomadic pattern to live permanently in town. Although many Inuit enjoyed the
opportunities and attractions of life in Iqaluit (Honigmann and Honigmann 1965), others
found conditions there intolerable (Brody 1975). To accommodate disgruntled Inuit
families as well as to ease the ever rising demand for public housing (which always
exceeded the available supply), the Government of the Northwest Territories began to
issue loans and grants to Inuit families to build and then move into camps that consisted
of one or two extended families. Although many Inuit found life at the camps too
primitive for their taste (no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no access to stores, and no
regular mail service) and too far from the nearest hospital (a day’s journey by boat or
snowmobile), others preferred them to living in town.
My wife and I lived at the Kuyait outpost camp for a seven-month period in 1994.
The camp’s population consisted of an elderly camp leader, Aksujuleak, one or more of
his adult children, and my wife and me. Kuyait is approximately 150 miles southwest
of Iqaluit, the nearest town, and is located near the mouth of Wiswell Inlet, at the foot
of a large hill that protects the camp’s structures from the sudden powerful storms that
can sink a boat or flatten a home. The summit of the hill behind Kuyait provides a
spectacular view of Frobisher Bay, the second largest bay in Baffin Island, and a realm
of sea ice and coastline visited by walrus, seals, and polar bears—animals that constituted a major portion of the diet at camp. Research also included living with a family in
the town of Iqaluit, where time was spent visiting Qallunaat (“white people”) and Inuit.
Qallunaat constitute nearly half the population of Iqaluit.
Contrary to Kuper’s (2005) claims, Inuit living on Baffin Island do not consider
blood and soil to be the determining elements of their identity. Rather, Inuit of Iqaluit
and adjacent outpost camps refer to a wide range of criteria—some based on measures
of parentage, some based on tests of knowledge, skills, and values—to identify who is
or is not Inuit. Five assumptions inform the discourse Inuit use to define what it means
to be Inuit: (1) Inuit possess a unique way of living and learning about the world that
must be incorporated into daily life if Inuit culture and identity are to survive; (2) Inuit
inherit some of their identity through soul substance attached to Inuit names and through
biological substance generated through human procreation; (3) Inuit identity requires
particular places that nourish one’s Inuit identity (e.g., outpost camps), while other
places drain it away (e.g., Iqaluit); (4) Inuit are ethnically (and racially) distinct from
Qallunaat; and (5) the articulation of Inuit identity entails a positive affirmation of Inuit
culture and a simultaneous repudiation of Qallunaat culture. Although not all Inuit agree
with the validity and veracity of all of these assumptions, each was present during my
years of research in the Canadian Arctic.
Most Inuit are not deeply concerned with the comprehensiveness or coherence (or
even consistency) of their claims about the differences between Inuit and Qallunaat.
Rather, the two serve as reference points by which Inuit make sense of their everyday
world, which has gone through great changes in the past 60 years. In addition, Inuit often
make use of a reified concept of culture that is particularly noticeable in the official
documents and publications produced by Inuit organizations (Searles 2006). The
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241
different ways of imagining identity create paradoxes and puzzles that are considered
in this essay.
INUIT IDENTITY: BACKGROUND
Inuit identity is a type of ethnic identity forged in the structural relations between
Inuit and Qallunaat, a relationship characterized, until recently, as one in which
Qallunaat possessed most of the governmental authority and monetary wealth in the
Canadian Arctic (Briggs 1997; Kennedy 1982; Kishigami 2004; Omura 2002; Paine
1977; Tanner 1993). A dominant trend in the ethnographies of the period examines the
ways in which cultural beliefs and practices inform a collective sense of Inuit identity.
These include subsistence hunting and food sharing (Bodenhorn 2000; Condon et al.
1995; Freeman et al. 1998; Searles 2002a; Wenzel 1991), naming and the experience of
kin ties (Bodenhorn 1997; Feinup-Riordan 2001; Nuttall 1992), language use and
storytelling (Cruikshank 1998; Dorais and Sammons 2002; Hensel 1996; Kaplan 2001;
Kulchyski 2006), and the transmission of traditional values and the experience of specific cognitive states (Briggs 1997, 2001; Stairs 1992). Recent studies of cultural and
ethnic identity in Alaska, Greenland, and Canada have tended to focus on the capacity
of these identities to adapt to modernity, maintain continuity with the past, and resist
colonialism, emphasizing how cultural identity has enabled individuals and groups to
adapt a traditional way of life and values to an increasingly nontraditional (or even antitraditional) world (Brody 2001; Clifford 2004; Cruikshank 1998; Dorais 1997; Dybbroe
1996; Fienup-Riordan 2000; Hensel 1996; Kennedy 1982; Nuttall 1992; Therrien 1999).
Anthropologists continue to insist that the values and customs enshrined in traditions by
which contemporary Canadian Inuit and Alaskan Eskimo identities are forged are conceptual tools, practical skills, and timeless wisdom that allow traditions to survive, and
even thrive, in the modern world (Briggs 1997; Dorais 2005; Graburn 2006; Omura
2002; Stairs 1992; Therrien 1999).
One unresolved question that emerged in the literature on Inuit identity is whether
that identity is derived through genealogical ties or through other factors, such as the
practice of tradition or the acquisition of traditional knowledge. In terms of North
American Inuit identity, two views stand opposed. On one side is the claim that identity
rests heavily, if not entirely, on kin group identity (genealogy, or blood) and its territory.
This is supported by Burch’s (1988) research on the social organization and culture of
the northwest Alaskan Eskimos, whose carefully defined boundaries separate demarcated kin groups. In this context, one’s identity is conferred at birth and is composed
largely of biological ties connected to a specific territory or home range (Burch 1988).
Opposed to Burch’s view are Guemple (1972) and Bodenhorn (2000, 2004) who argue
that biology has little if any influence on how Inuit imagine how they relate to others,
to a specific geographical location, or how they develop a personal identity. Guemple
says kinship relations as “a source of personal identity and a device for securing succession, do not exist in Qiqiqtamiut [Belcher Island Inuit of the Hudson Bay Region]
society” (Guemple 1988:132). According to him, Inuit develop a social identity through
living with other Inuit (who may or may not be related by blood), through co-operation
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as defined by traditional rules, and through regular contact with members of that group
(Guemple 1972, summarized in Nuttall 2000). Bodenhorn (2000) provides a similar
model of relatedness and identity for Inupiat Eskimos living along the northern coast of
Alaska. There, one becomes Inupiat not by birth but through a relatedness that involves
numerous obligations and responsibilities (Bodenhorn 2000). For example, one informant claimed that “it is possible to turn a tanik (white person) into an Inupiaq (a real Inuit
person) by letting him work with you” (Bodenhorn 2004:4).
The rules of relatedness that structure group formation for Inuit living in southern Baffin fall between these two extremes. Baffin Island Inuit consider their Inuit
identity to originate, in part, from soul substance inherited from their namesakes and
from their parents’ biological substance (see also Jolles and Oozeva 2002; Kishigami
2004; Pullar 1992). They also consider that having this matrix of biological and soul
substance sets them apart from Qallunaat, a category of persons with its own set of
attitudes, customs, and values. In some contexts, Inuit also imagine that their cultural
identity can be increased or decreased depending on their upbringing, living conditions,
and life circumstances. Last, Inuit identity is also a physical property of geographical
location. Whereas spending time at an outpost camp makes one more Inuit (a claim
made by some Inuit), spending time in a multiethnic town like Iqaluit can have the
opposite effect. Some Inuit say that even the most traditional Inuit person or family can
become Qallunaat if the right social conditions are in place (Rasing 1994; Active 2000).
DESCENT CRITERIA OF INUIT IDENTITY
The Utkuhikhalingmiut (a central Arctic Inuit group) create kinship ties by birth, by
betrothal or marriage, by adoption, and by naming (Briggs 1970:36). This corresponds
accurately to contemporary life in Nunavut. These four means of creating kin ties also
serve as an important dimension of Inuit identity, as it is ascribed to individuals, in part,
through the inheritance of substances passed from generation to generation. Moreover,
it is through the creation of new kin that the substance of Inuit identity is generated and
regenerated.
One of the most widely recognized transmitters of Inuit identity substance is the soul
name. A belief among many Inuit throughout the North American Arctic and Greenland
is that souls are embedded in Inuit names, such that to confer a name upon a newborn
is equivalent to giving that baby a soul (Alia 2007). Through atiit (names) individuals
begin to acquire the substance that constitutes Inuit identity. One receives atiit from
biological relatives (usually grandparents), distantly related kin, and even from people
who share no known genealogical ties. Generally, one receives a name from someone
who has recently died, because Inuit believe that the dead live again in that name and in
the body of another. But this is not a reincarnation because it is not the person who is
reincarnated, but rather “the spiritual element that is the name—the name-soul—that
joins the child, remaining with him and protecting him throughout his life” (Bennett and
Rowley 2004:3).
The name-soul gives a child an Inuit ethnic identity, a family or community identity,
and a personal identity. A name can transmit all those substances attached to the soul,
INUIT IDENTITY
243
like memories and distinctive personality traits (Guemple 1994; Kublu and Oosten 1999;
Searles 2007). I once observed the name-soul cosmology at work with an Inuit family
in 1994, when a child’s fear of submersing his head in water was linked directly to the
fact that his namesake had drowned in a kayaking accident (Searles 2002b). An individual can inherit multiple names, as many as ten or more, and therefore name-souls,
some of which become more prominent during various phases of the life course (Kublu
and Oosten 1999).
An interesting feature about the practice of naming in Nunavut is that unlike the
idiom of sharing blood or other biogenetic substances, which tends to make the ethnic
boundary separating Inuit and non-Inuit like a racialized identity, name-souls have the
capacity to transcend this boundary. One two-year-old girl of white parents in Iqaluit in
2001, who had no Inuit kin, was named Aksujuleak, a name that belonged to an elderly
Inuit man who died a year prior to her birth. The adult children of Aksujuleak were close
friends and neighbors of the parents, and they called the little girl “ataata” (father) and
gave her the same love and affection they gave their father.3
Marriage is another way in which new kin (and new substance) are created. Marriage
implicates newlyweds and their families into a set of rules that structure relations and
provide guidelines for social interaction. These guidelines provide an array of norms by
which the Inuitness of actions and ideas are evaluated for how well they conform to the
rules and obligations of relatedness and what it means to be Inuit. Such notions include
the importance of never refusing a relative’s request for support or financial aid (Wenzel
1995, 2000).
Considering the flexibility of Inuit kinship (or its seeming nonexistence) and the
relative absence of clans or other sharply defined descent groups (Guemple 1988; cf.
Jolles and Oozeva 2002), one would expect a similar flexibility in how children of mixed
marriages would be allowed to claim an Inuit or white identity if they so desired. The
Inuit I interviewed in 1994 and 1996 had conflicting views about the identity of children
of Inuit-Qallunaat parentage. I knew a family in which the mother was a white woman
born and raised in Saskatchewan and the father was an Inuit man born in Iqaluit and
raised there and in adjacent hunting camps. Everyone in the community identified their
children as Inuit. They all had been given many name-souls, and their Inuit relatives
referred to them with kinship terms and personal names that belonged to their deceased
relatives.
On the other hand, I heard a story about an Inuit man who suffered discrimination
because his mother was Inuit and his father was white. Students at his high school in
Iqaluit called him “half-breed” and bullied him. But several elderly Inuit I interviewed,
including this man’s maternal uncle, had no doubts about his Inuit identity. He reminded
them, one man told me, of his namesake, a famous Inuit hunter and community leader
who died in the early 1960s.
Inuit throughout the North American Arctic have very high rates of adoption,
particularly when compared to the adoption rates of non-Inuit (Alia 2007), and adoption
is another means of creating kin and thereby creating the substance of Inuit identity. The
Inuit I knew who were adopted at birth had all been adopted from one Inuit family into
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another, which did not alter the adoptee’s ethnicity as having at least one Inuit parent
confers Inuit identity.
At the outpost camp, an older (adopted) son of Aksujuleak often referred to his little
brother (also adopted) as the “Frenchman,” a reference to the fact that his brother’s
biological father was from Quebec. But none of the Inuit and Qallunaat I knew in Iqaluit
and in the outpost camps ever questioned the “Frenchman’s” ethnicity as anything other
than Inuit. The older brother often used this term to deride his brother, who he thought
was less helpful with chores around the camp. Resentment might also have motivated
his choice of reference, for the father favored the younger son with gifts of tobacco and
ammunition, which he seldom gave to the older one, despite the fact that the latter was
more responsible with performing everyday chores.
The link between parentage and native status has become complicated by the
legalization of identity that occurred with the passage of the Nunavut Land Claims
Settlement Agreement. Those Inuit with no cultural identity are entitled, it seems,
to claim beneficiary status under one of the four regional land-claims settlements.4
Kishigami (2004) suggests that a growing number of individuals with Inuit ancestry but
no strong ties to Inuit culture or to Arctic communities are referring to themselves not
as Inuit but as Canadians of Inuit descent—a process of prying apart cultural and ethnic
identity. It is entirely possible that one of the criteria listed in the Agreement, “Inuk [an
Inuit individual] as determined in accordance with Inuit customs and usages,” could
include a set of rules about parentage, although nowhere in the document are such rules
specified or alluded to (Tungavik Federation of Nunavut 1993).
Although descent is not included as a criterion for defining legal status according to
Nunavut’s settlement, it is not ruled out. Asked if parentage matters, an enrollment
committee member in Nunavut said that, indeed, parentage did matter. Her committee
recently rejected an application because the applicant could not prove to the satisfaction
of the committee that she had the proper “bloodlines.” Other factors may have worked
against the applicant, such as the fact that she lived outside of Nunavut for a long time
and that she had not maintained regular contact with family members living in the
community she was seeking to be enrolled in. Research on recent decisions made by
enrollment committees should identify any patterns on ethnic identity emerging from
those decisions.
Contemporary Baffin Island Inuit believe their identity is conferred partly through
spiritual substance transmitted by name-souls. The inheritance of name-souls is significant for identity because the names are thought to endow individuals with memories and
personality traits that belonged to the name giver. The inheritance of biogenetic substance is significant for identity because it allows individuals to conceive of their Inuit
identity as something based on descent or ancestry, a situation that has precedent in
some but not all parts of the North American Arctic.
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TRAITS AND TESTS OF INUIT IDENTITY
Inuit also pay a great deal of attention to the ways in which Inuit identity is
constructed in everyday activities. The concept of inuktitut illustrates this principle
concisely:
Inuit use [inuktitut] to mean how they speak; it also refers to the way in which they do things. A person can
talk, hunt, walk, eat, sleep, raise children, dance, and even smile inuktitut. Everything the Inuit do is
revealed in their manner of doing it. A distinctive identity is bound up as much in the details of everyday
behavior as in the use of language. (Brody 1987:151)
“Inuktitut” stresses the importance of knowledge, action, and ability in the articulation
of Inuit identity and establishes a set of cultural tests through which Inuit define what
it means to be Inuit. Equally important to understanding what constitutes inuktitut is the
concept of qallunaatitut (the way of a white person), a concept that Brody curiously
ignores. For as much as one can eat, breathe, and sleep in the way of an inuk (an Inuit
person), one can also eat, breathe, and sleep in the way of a white person (qallunaaq).
Both Inuit and Qallunaat sometimes remark about how some Inuit person is acting
Qallunaat, or is on the way to becoming a qallunaaq, but Inuit may also say that some
Qallunaat are better at being Inuit than many Inuit.
The concepts of inuktitut and qallunaatitut provide the foundation of a dominant
discourse of identity that is reinforced in many private and public contexts and builds
on the notion that identity is an attribute that is achieved rather than ascribed. What is
less clear, however, is what Inuit think about the location of the boundary that distinguishes the categories of inuktitut and qallunaatitut. For some, the boundary between
Inuit and Qallunaat is based solely on ethnic or racial criteria. For others, the boundary
is situated in attitudes, beliefs, and values. Following his election to the presidency of
Nunavut Tunngavik, Inc., an Inuit corporation established to oversee the distribution of
funds transferred to Inuit by way of the 1993 Nunavut Land Claims Settlement, Josie
Kusugak declared that “Inuit have always had a way of taking what they wanted from
western culture without becoming Qallunaatized” (Gregoire 1994). Kusugak seems
to be saying that although Inuit society has changed over time (and will continue to
change), this change has not caused the loss of Inuit culture and identity; Inuit and
Qallunaat still belong to two distinct worlds.
In one of the publications of the Pauktuutit Inuit Women’s Association, The Inuit
Way: A Guide to Inuit Culture (Pauktuutiit 2006), the authors distinguish between
the old ways and values and the ways of the broader Qallunaat-dominated society.
Pauktuutiit’s definition of culture makes heavy use of the dichotomy of modernity and
tradition, and emphasizes that “Inuit can thus become torn between values of the broader
society and those of Inuit traditional values” (Pauktuutiit 2006:33). Also significant
about the model of culture and interethnic relations expressed in The Inuit Way is that
Qallunaat traditions and values are timeless and fixed.
An example of how the dominant discourses about Inuit and Qallunaat identities
settled into the everyday language of ordinary Inuit is Rasing’s (1994) research in the
late 1980s and early 1990s in Iglulik, a town devoted to the preservation of traditional
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Inuit culture (Wachowich 2006). According to Rasing, the people of Iglulik identify
three classes of Inuit: inummariit, Qallunaamiut, and Qallunaamariit. Inummariit are
“real Inuit” who grew up in the early part of the twentieth century when interactions between Inuit and Qallunaat were rare or nonexistent, and when Inuit had little,
if any, access to Western trade goods and government support. Qallunaamiut (literally,
people of the white people) refers to Inuit who came of age during the 1950s and ‘60s,
a period of sedentarization when Inuit began to abandon their seasonal camps to live
in one of the dozens of settlements built by whites from southern Canada and other
parts of the British Commonwealth. Inuit and non-Inuit scholars identify this period
as a pivotal phase in Inuit history (e.g., Graburn 1998; Matthiasson 1992), a time when
Inuit sacrificed (or were forced to sacrifice) much of their autonomy by moving
into towns controlled by white administrators, teachers, and missionaries (Tester and
Kulchyski 1994; Damas 2002). While inummariit never had to learn to speak English,
Qallunaamiut had no choice but to learn the language and culture of the Qallunaat.
As a consequence, Qallunaamiut have assimilated Euro-Canadian values (Rasing
1994:200). The Inuit of Iglulik still consider qallunaamiut to be true Inuit (although not
as true as inummariit), because they “have learned to operate within the new sociopolitical framework [of settlement life], while retaining [traditional] values and norms”
(Rasing 1994:200).
The third category, Qallunaamariit, refers to those persons whose credentials for
being Inuit rest only on parentage. Qallunaamariit (literally, “real white people”) refers
to individuals of Inuit descent who act like Qallunaat, as exemplified by patterns of
behavior and lifestyle choices. For example, Qallunaamariit prefer to socialize with
whites instead of Inuit. From an outsider’s perspective, one can interpret the actions of
Qallunaamariit as upsetting the boundary separating the Inuit way from the Qallunaat
way, for it challenges, or even subverts, a discourse of identity based on the principle
that culture (i.e., tradition) can only be refashioned by exogenous forces, not by internal
ones (i.e., by individuals with tastes, desires, and attitudes that depart from the norm).
The creation of a new Inuit government of the Nunavut Territory on April 1, 1999,
after a long process of development and planning, has reinforced what separates Inuit
from Qallunaat values in a way that celebrates the former while repudiating the latter.
One of the most potent markers of this divide is the concept of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit
(“IQ”). Those Inuit hired to design the Nunavut territorial government consulted with
elders to develop a plan to make traditional Inuit knowledge a key aspect of workplace
ethics, protocol, and planning. According to The Inuit Way, IQ refers to the Inuit way
of knowing, or traditional knowledge: “IQ has been adopted as an official policy of
the Government of Nunavut, in its commitment to develop practices and policies that
are consistent with the culture, values, and language of the Inuit majority” (Pauktuutiit
2006:6). Alexina Kublu, an Inuktitut language instructor and linguist at Nunavut’s Arctic College, defines the concept literally as “things Inuit have known for a long time.”
The phrase implies a time that predates the arrival of whites, and the implication is that
IQ developed during an era when Inuit supported themselves entirely through their labor
and through relationships with other Inuit, a time when, many Inuit believe, true or real
Inuit identity first came into being. But equally crucial to its meaning is the implied
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247
absence of Qallunaat Qaujimajatuqangit (“QQ”), a Western way of knowing. The goal
of creating an IQ government is to design a government more effective and efficient than
one managed by QQ principles alone.5
The speeches of Inuit politicians and the language in official guides to traditional
knowledge provide an array of concepts, images, and icons that fuel and feed off a
discourse of Inuit identity, a discourse built on the idea that culture, whether Inuit or
Western, is a fixed body of knowledge and values formed in the past. The discourse also
rests on the idea that Inuit and Qallunaat cultures (and by implication Inuit and white
persons) have been and will remain distinguishable in form and function.
DIFFERENCE THROUGH DIET, PROPERTY, AND TIME
Other domains of daily life, such as diet and the experience of time, provide
signifiers used to bring into relief the differences dividing Inuit and Qallunaat cultures.
Whereas some whites might view eating raw meat as indicating that Inuit need
civilizing, this same practice symbolizes to Inuit the superiority of their diet (Searles
2002a). This double-edged aspect of contemporary Inuit identity, a celebration of tradition and a repudiation of things Qallunaat, transforms ordinary activities like hunting at
the ice-floe edge into symbols of identity and difference. Inuit emphasize how eating
raw seal meat or hunting at the floe edge produces healthy bodies and intelligent minds
that in many ways are superior to bodies raised according to town lifestyles and minds
educated in Canadian (non-Inuit) schools. One Inuit woman told me how her father had
taken her brother out of school when he was seven or eight to teach him how to live off
the land. This brother, she claimed, was the most patient person she knew. She then
explained how Inuit raised on the land learn to be patient and calm when faced with
building a shelter in a blinding blizzard or fixing an outboard motor in a sea churned by
gale-force winds. Her reference to her brother’s patience was a way to criticize her white
colleagues at work, whom she found easily frustrated, quick to anger, and unable to
control their emotions. In a backhanded way she had also condemned the local Canadian
school system, for it was her “raised on the land” brother and not her “schooled in the
settlement” siblings (all of whom completed the government schooling that was available to them) who stood out as having qualities attributed to real Inuit. She was not alone
in thinking that spending time hunting, fishing, and camping exposed Inuit to challenges
and experiences that made them develop emotional control, autonomy, and patience
(Briggs 1991; see also Briggs 2001), traits that symbolize the opposite of the Qallunaat
way.
Discourse about the healthful effects of eating Inuit food (i.e., food obtained locally
by hunting, fishing, and gathering, or purchased in government regulated co-operatives)
provide another set of symbols revealing the sharp divide separating Inuit and Qallunaat
identity (Searles 2002a). Eating Inuit food, as Inuit informants reiterate, cures illnesses,
makes one strong, and provides a level of energy and stamina Qallunaat foods lack. One
Inuit man, who had spent much of his youth at a hunting camp and later moved to live
in Iqaluit, said that his town diet of white foods made him weak, lazy, and ill equipped
to deal with the strength and stamina needed to live off the land. Today, at age 30, this
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man claimed that his father’s health and level of energy were far superior to his own,
even though his father is more than 40 years his senior. The son attributed his father’s
strength and endurance to a diet of Inuit foods and a daily regimen of chores associated
with living at a hunting camp throughout the year.
The idea that most Qallunaat find the smell of boiled seal and walrus meat offensive
or repulsive, a sentiment corroborated by many white residents in Iqaluit, seemed to
increase the salience of the claim that Inuit food was far superior to Qallunaat food. Not
only did foods like seal and walrus meat build healthier and stronger bodies, Inuit would
remind me, they also helped to make the differences between Inuit and Qallunaat seem
innate and natural, even as these two populations worked together, attended church
together, and even raised children together.
The concepts of private property and personal possessions generate behaviors and
values that reinforce the idea that Inuit and Qallunaat inhabit two distinct worlds. In the
first month at the hunting camp in the winter of 1994, our Inuit host family encouraged
my wife and me to “eat whatever you want from the meat shed,” whenever we wished.
This ethic of sharing contrasted with their perceptions of town life in which food and
other necessities had to be purchased with cash or credit. One Inuit woman living in
Iqaluit told me she was astounded when her brother made her pay for a husky dog she
was going to add to her sled team, saying “Relatives should share and not make their
relatives pay.” In this case, the brother was acting in the Qallunaat way and not in the
Inuit way.
The categories of time and temporality provided another domain of discourse in
which the Inuit way and the Qallunaat way were easily differentiated. Several Inuit
informants stressed how the pace of life at an outpost camp is more natural and healthy
than that experienced in Iqaluit. When living at camp, our Inuit hosts explained that in
order to succeed in living off the land, one has to adapt to a new pace of movement and
activity that is much different than that in Iqaluit. One young Inuit man explained that
when he began living with his father at a hunting camp, his father said that he did not
need to rush anything. “He told me to take my time.” Only by learning to take one’s
time, by learning to approach tasks patiently and calmly, can a person become a successful hunter, an activity that requires a great deal of persistence and patience. Although
some Inuit find the pace of life in Iqaluit to be more exciting than that at the outpost
camp, it is not the Inuit way. Some Inuit went even further in contrasting the experience
of time at an outpost camp with the experience of time in town. Because of its fast pace,
a person living in town is more prone to be emotionally tumultuous and anxious to have
everything completed by some arbitrarily imposed time. One Inuit woman thought that
Qallunaat plan everything in advance as if they can control the future, whereas traditional Inuit learn how to relinquish a desire to control time in order to become more
aware of, and therefore better able to yield to, the rhythm and movements of weather,
tides, animals, seasons, etc.
As in small settlements like outpost camps and hamlets, everyday life in town is
punctuated with reminders that Inuit and Qallunaat do things differently and occupy
separate cultural worlds. It seems that increased contact and co-operation (and conflict)
between Inuit and Qallunaat in places like Iqaluit has made it easier to tell the two
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249
cultures apart. Despite predictions of acculturation and a progressive erosion of Inuit
tradition and identity, regular contact between Iqaluit Inuit and Qallunaat and increased
exposure to Western persons, objects, and values have made Inuit culture more secure
and Inuit identity more robust.
When our Inuit host family in Iqaluit in 1994 was playing the board game, Sorry,
it seemed odd that no one expressed joy or disappointment when the winner’s piece
crossed the finish line. Excitement was focused on who would finish last. The last-place
finisher, we learned, would be responsible for cleaning a day’s worth of dishes, cups,
and utensils stacked in the kitchen sink. A white woman who was watching explained
that Inuit and Qallunaat have different goals when they play the game. Unlike Qallunaat,
whose aim is to win, Inuit are concerned with who loses. Focusing attention on the
winner, as Qallunaat tend to do, makes that person feel superior to others playing the
game. The woman ventured the opinion that having the loser “pay” for not keeping up
with the rest stresses the importance of the group over the individual.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, an emphasis on exposing the differences between Inuit
and Qallunaat ways inevitably leads to contested claims about culture and identity and
disagreements about what precisely constitutes the Inuit way and the Qallunaat way. One
example involves the government public school system in Iqaluit. In the mid-1990s,
many Inuit and Qallunaat regarded the school system as progressive because of the
greater emphasis placed on Inuit language and culture. Any child could be enrolled in
the Inuktitut-only language track from kindergarten through third grade, and the local
school board, which included Inuit and Qallunaat members, had revised major portions
of the grade-school curriculum to include more components on Inuit language, culture,
values, and learning style.
Despite these changes, some Inuit claimed that schools continue to be places of
discrimination and racism, places where teachers place white students in accelerated
classes and Inuit students in remedial ones. These Inuit felt that teachers taught and
evaluated Inuit students with a set of standards and expectations different than Qallunaat
ones, which was evident in the extra time given to Inuit students to complete their
assignments.
Another example of educational reform was attempted in the mid-1990s by a young
Inuit woman who wanted the school system to be more appreciative of Inuit values and
traditional knowledge. She intended to introduce a program of experiential learning
developed in Britain in the early 1940s, called Outward Bound. Together with another
resident, the two women started a chapter of Outward Bound in Iqaluit to provide educational adventures to stimulate the intellect, improve self-esteem, lead to the discovery
of innate abilities, and inspire a sense of responsibility towards others. Because it teaches
self-reliance and the importance of helping others, it appears to closely resemble the
Inuit way of education.
The Inuit woman claimed that Outward Bound incorporates many values and
educational techniques that are similar to how her parents and grandparents were taught,
techniques that were not part of the federal day-school curricula forced on Inuit children.
One example of the Inuit way is learning to control one’s emotions. The absence of such
control can be disastrous, even fatal. The worst response to an unexpected storm or to
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ETHNOLOGY
a broken motor hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement is to panic so that one
cannot think clearly or calmly. Outward Bound, like traditional Inuit child rearing
practices, trains youngsters to confront their fears and to feel their way out of difficult
situations. Qallunaat educational methods, she believed, do not encourage students either
to think independently or to develop emotional stability. Instead, they encourage students to be discouraged when they get the wrong answer or to respond to failure with
disappointment and fear. Rather than shield one’s children from adversity, as Qallunaat
tend to do, one must challenge them to make them more emotionally resilient (Briggs
1998). This Inuit woman’s borrowing from one tradition (British) to explain another
(Inuit) reveals how the content of Inuit culture can be stretched sometimes to include
Western knowledge and values without blurring the boundary that separates the Inuit
way and the Qallunaat way.
In addition to being stretched to accommodate anomalies, the classification system
used to divide Inuit and Qallunaat can also be contracted to exclude certain people and
places. For example, Inuit in Clyde River (a small settlement in northern Nunavut) assert
that “no Inuit live in Iqaluit.” This is perplexing because there appear to be thousands
of Inuit living in Iqaluit, including prominent Inuit leaders and intellectuals, some coming from small settlements like Clyde River, who devote much of their adult lives to
protecting and promoting Inuit traditional knowledge.
The claim made by Clyde River Inuit reflects a demotic discourse of Inuit identity—
that living in close proximity to Qallunaat changes Inuit into Qallunaat. Whether such
claims are still being made is unknown, but they do expose a tension that exists in how
far the divide separating one group from another can be stretched or contracted before
that divide is no longer valid or worth maintaining.
A final case study involves an Inuit man for whom the border between Inuit and
Qallunaat provided opportunities as well as obstacles. While many aspects of his life
history reveal a strong commitment to the ideals embodied in the concept of IQ, he also
had desires that seemed more in keeping with the Qallunaat way than the Inuit way.
Such desires often got him in conflict with his peers and members of the Inuit community, which seemed to him even more evidence that the Inuit way was in need of reform
and revitalization.
In many ways, this man’s life was similar to other Inuit of his generation. He was
a competent hunter and adept in many different kinds of habitat (tundra, sea ice, open
ocean). He spoke Inuktitut fluently and belonged to a large, well known southern Baffin
Inuit family, which bestowed on him many name-souls, including the name of a
renowned Inuit hunter, a leader of one of the bands of Inuit that relocated to Iqaluit in
the mid-1950s. Because he worked several jobs and was an active member of the local
fire department, it was difficult for him to hunt as much as he wanted. But his freezer in
Iqaluit was always filled with seal meat, caribou meat, and arctic char, which he shared
freely with family and friends.
Some community leaders in Iqaluit were mentoring him to become a person who
could bring Inuit values into the regional government. With the consent of government
officials, he won a contract to oversee the supervision and rehabilitation of young Inuit
criminal offenders. Unlike standard government procedure, which was to place young
INUIT IDENTITY
251
offenders in custody facilities in Iqaluit, this man recruited two Inuit elders and some
younger Inuit to take the young offenders to an outpost camp 150 miles from Iqaluit and
teach them traditional Inuit knowledge and values as part of their sentencing. One goal
of the program was to transform a government program for young offenders from the
Qallunaat way to the Inuit way.
In a previous job, he similarly bridged the Inuit and Qallunaat worlds. While still in
high school, a multinational telecommunications company hired him to help set up their
infrastructure in various parts of the Northwest Territories. Because of his language
skills, kinship ties, and knowledge of the environment, he facilitated communication
between the Inuit and non-Inuit employees of the company. His experiences taught him
the value of wage work and private enterprise in building character and growing the
local economy, goals he thought were essential for future generations of Inuit and their
communities.
His many years of work in the private sector also affected his views of the relationship between poverty, government intervention, and economic development. He
regularly criticized the programs and policies of the territorial government designed to
help those in need, programs like social assistance and family allowance, which he
thought provided financial support to individuals who were capable of working for a
living. These welfare programs, he thought, only made Inuit more dependent on
Qallunaat, which for him symbolized a move away from being a real Inuit. As an example, he mentioned how his relatives took advantage of the young offenders program by
taking more than a fair share of supplies of fuel, tobacco, and soda. He also attributed
the high rate of substance abuse in Iqaluit to the existence of welfare.
In 1996, his contract with the outpost camp ended, but he was already engaged in
starting an information technology company which would give him exclusive rights to
provide internet service to large parts of the Northwest Territories. He beamed with pride
as he related how a young, inexperienced Inuit entrepreneur managed to outbid a group
of elite white businessmen to win this contract. Rather than interpreting his new business
venture as a departure from his maintenance of Inuit traditional knowledge and values,
he saw it as a continuation, as bringing the Inuit way into the private sector and showing
the world that Inuit could be just as successful in realms of activity that many associated
exclusively with Qallunaat culture. Convinced himself, he wanted to convince others
that Inuit culture could be created anywhere.
His story reveals the many-sided and contradictory dimensions of Inuit identity and
the kinds of subjectivities it engenders. From the perspective of Clyde River Inuit, other
Inuit from Iqaluit, and some members of his own family, he was a Qallunaat. His distaste
for big government and welfare programs were antithetical to the views of Inuit who
imagined these programs as like the Inuit way because they mirrored the social support
networks that Inuit relied on in the past.
One aspect of group identity that appears to be clear is that as the Inuit become more
economically stratified and culturally differentiated, “they [will] mature into status
groups in the classical Weberian sense of the term” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992:65).
That is, the bonds that unite Inuit will seem more and more like primordial ties.
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ETHNOLOGY
CONCLUSION
The discourse of Inuit identity in Nunavut draws from a range of criteria, including
some based on principles of inheritance and some based on principles of performance.
Some aspects of Inuit identity are conferred at birth through substance transmitted from
biological parent to child, while other parts of Inuit identity are conferred around the
time of birth, as well as later on in life, through spiritual substance transmitted by namesouls. The discourse of Inuit identity also makes use of two twin concepts, inuktitut (the
way of an Inuk) and qallunaatitut (the way of a white person), as well as their counterparts, Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (Inuit traditional knowledge and values) and Qallunaat
Qaujimajatuqangit (Qallunaat traditional knowledge and values), in establishing a
cultural, intellectual, physiological, and psychological boundary between the Inuit and
Qallunaat worlds. Inuit associate each culture with a range of activities and experiences,
including hunting seals on the sea ice, learning how to read and write in a classroom,
playing the game of Sorry with family and friends, and having a cup of coffee at the
office. Inuit also agree that these cultures show little or no signs of converging or overlapping in the future, even as changing conditions make the socioeconomic divide
between Inuit and Qallunaat less pronounced in some settings, as more and more Inuit
adopt a middle-class lifestyle similar to their Qallunaat neighbors, and more pronounced
in others, as the wage earning gap and poverty rate between Inuit and Qallunaat persist.
Although it is still too early to tell if Kuper’s (2005) prognosis—that contemporary
indigenous political movements will soon be dominated by Eurocentric notions of blood
and soil—will come to pass in Nunavut, the ethnographic data from this region suggest
that cultural tests of identity remain important to Inuit, even if what Inuit consider to
be cultural tests vary from community to community, family to family, and person to
person. The data also suggest that it is the boundary between the Inuit way and the
Qallunaat way that is regarded as permanent, not the traits and values associated with
each (Barth 1969), so it is likely that new ways of interpreting and defining the boundary
will persist. Pace Kuper, however, the situation in Nunavut indicates that descent-based
criteria and cultural tests are mutually compatible frames of reference for defining Inuit
identity.
Recent events, including the establishment of entitlements for the beneficiaries of
Inuit land claims in the Canadian Arctic, have led to the adoption of new criteria of
identity, evident in the Inuit use of terms like “blood lines,” to determine who qualifies
for beneficiary status. More research is necessary, however, to determine the full range
of factors used by enrollment committees to decide who is authentically Inuit and who
is not, and whether these factors include criteria like possessing Inuit traditional knowledge and values, engaging and maintaining certain types of relations with other Inuit,
and having the proper parentage.
Also unclear is how social and cultural divisions emerging among the Inuit in
Nunavut, divisions caused by shifting residency patterns (i.e., town and village) and by
increased socioeconomic stratification, will lead to a reconfiguration of what counts as
a cultural test of identity and to new ways of imagining Inuit ethnicity. To what extent
and by what means the boundary between the Inuit way and the Qallunaat way will shift
INUIT IDENTITY
253
remains an open question, and may well be another case of the more things change, the
more they stay the same.
NOTES
1. I am grateful to the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, the US-Canadian
Fulbright Exchange Program, the Canadian Embassy, the Faculté des Sciences Sociales at Université Laval,
and the National Science Foundation’s Division of International Fellows for supporting this research.
2. According to the 2001 Canada census, Iqaluit was home to 5,235 people, approximately 60 percent
of whom defined themselves as Inuit (Dorais and Sammons 2002).
3. See also Fienup-Riordan (2001:235) for an example of how Yup’ik names made her a “real person”
and related her to a Yup’ik family and community.
4. These are the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (passed in 1978), the Inuvialuit Final
Agreement (1984), the Nunavut Land Claims Settlement Agreement (1993), and the Labrador Land Claims
Agreement (2004).
5. To be fair, one of the architects of Nunavut, John Amagoalik, claims that he and the other Inuit who
helped to design the Nunavut Government refused to create an ethnic government. They wanted a government that would welcome anyone, regardless of ethnic identity, to serve in its parliament or work in one
of its departments.
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