The Life of Field Stations: a History of Community Participation in Scientific Practice at the Igloolik Laboratory (1974-2004)

Project Summary

News broadcasts about the impact of climate change on the indigenous peoples of the Arctic Inuit are increasingly familiar. One recent report described Inuit Elders gathering to create new terms to describe changes in the weather. With the onset of strange weather, traditional vocabulary is no longer fully adequate for the task of offering precise description of changing patterns. What the excellent news coverage doesn't tell us is how Inuit Elders have been able to gain access to specialised scientific knowledge and organise their own political and cultural responses to issues like climate change. The story of the Inuit finding ways to bridge their own traditional knowledge with the sciences can be traced back to their encounters with the scientific travellers of the nineteenth century. However the moment of real dialogue between knowledge systems began when governments opened semi-permanent scientific field stations based in Inuit communities. Over time Inuit Elders became regular features of field station life, managing their own projects as well as advising and assisting visiting researchers from distant universities. Understanding how Inuit turned to a field station to preserve and even increase their mastery of their own highly precise environmental vocabulary is the little known story behind much of today's news about the Inuit and Arctic science.

This project is a study of the field station in Igloolik, a small but culturally resilient and creative community of 1200 people in Canada's High Arctic territory of Nunavut. A distinguishing feature of this field station opened to researchers in 1974 was that from the outset the government hoped that Inuit would take part in scientific projects / but what did 'taking part' entail? To answer that question, the project is organised around an investigation of three historical phases. In the first or 'Founding' phase (1974-1985), participation meant assisting visiting experts and finding ways to make their science useful to the local community. In the second or 'Community Engagement' phase, the community initiated its own projects and worked in collaboration with the field station managers who were themselves also members of the community. One of the most exciting projects was a new traditional knowledge, oral history project based at the station and managed by the Igloolik Elders' Society. Life histories and interviews with Elders, several hundred in total, covering topics as diverse as Inuit astronomy or traditional justice, were recorded and transcribed (a skilful and labour--intensive process), producing an archive of Inuit life unprecedented in the richness of its vocabulary and historical detail about their values, knowledge, and skills. The result was a unique blend of a 'living dictionary of words' and a 'biographical dictionary'. In the third or 'Traditional Knowledge' phase, the newly created Inuit government of Nunavut (f.1999) required all policies to be informed by traditional Inuit values. They increasingly referred to the Igloolik Elders' project as the only systematically recorded archive of traditional knowledge. In spite of its remarkable achievements, the Igloolik field station was closed in 2004 and the Elders' Project, rather than being replicated in other communities, is now continuing in Igloolik unfunded and staffed by volunteers. The project therefore seeks to clarify what conditions enable community participation at field stations to be so successful, what policymakers can reasonably expect to ask of community-based knowledge projects, and in return what approaches to strategic funding are needed for projects like these to proliferate elsewhere.