NWT RESEARCH DATABASE

Regions: Inuvialuit Settlement Region, Gwich'in Settlement Area

Tags: social sciences, aboriginal community, Inuvialuit history, community-based research, decolonization

Objective(s): To work with elders, knowledge holders and youth to develop a visual documentary project highlighting Inuvialuit perspectives on their history and heritage.

Project Description: This licence has been issued for the scientific research application No.5285. The Inuvialuit Living History (ILH) Project is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada-funded community-based research project. It aims to present and celebrate Inuvialuit culture through events and the project website: http://www.inuvialuitlivinghistory.ca/. The research team want to explore how Inuvialuit are engaging with the past and these engagements inform their present concepts of cultural identity, heritage, and envisioned futures. This research examines how Inuvialuit of different ages and from different communities within the Inuvialuit Settlement Region (ISR) are engaging with their culture and heritage in person and through digital and social media. It asks whether and how they are using these different means to participate in broader national and international conversations about Indigenous resurgence, decolonization, and Indigenous futures, and how these engagements inform their present concepts of cultural identity, heritage, and envisioned futures. This study will shed light on the specifics of how Inuvialuit are engaging with material culture and cultural practices in person and through digital and social media which can help communities and heritage institutions to collaborate to repatriate cultural materials and to present and celebrate Inuvialuit culture and heritage in meaningful and relevant ways. It can also contribute to developing relevant educational materials. Specifically, the team will ask: 1. How are Inuvialuit engaging with their pasts to (re)create and negotiate cultural heritage, identity, and narratives of future through lived experiences, digital platforms, and social media? 2. How do these engagements relate to conversations about Indigenous futures among Indigenous groups across Canada and internationally? Are Inuvialuit participating in these conversations? If so, with whom and how? 3. How do individual and group identities shape how Inuvialuit draw on the past to shape their futures? This research will specifically help to inform the ILH project about how Inuvialuit are engaging with heritage so we can best tailor the ILH in-person and online experiences accordingly with the goal of presenting and engaging with community members of different generations, communities, and groups. As a project, the research team try to meaningfully engage with Inuvialuit communities to ensure that the diverse Inuvialuit perspectives and cultural experiences are represented on the online platforms. Furthermore, the Principal Investigator (PI) hope that this project may serve as a guide for other archaeologists working with Indigenous communities to approach their work in a collaborative way to ensure their research is reflective of local perspectives and serves the community. Moreover, this work will outline the importance of reflexivity to understand the teams’ roles and consequences of the research methods and approaches, to ensure the team are not imposing their cultural values and standards on another culture already severely impacted by colonialism. This project will outline the underlying processes and actors involved in the engagement of material culture to (re)create and negotiate cultural heritage, identity, and narratives of future. Having a more thorough understanding of how material culture is being used in these processes, the team can improve the ways they are engaging communities and making material culture accessible to the communities in which they work. This research will include a series of focus groups, interviews, and digital media workshops with Inuvialuit beneficiaries of all ages from all communities within the ISR. The PI will speak to Inuvialuit youth, adults, and Elders of various ages to better understand how they are accessing, engaging with, or creating cultural heritage materials and how doing so informs their own cultural identity and shapes their connection to their culture. The PI will examine how they use social and digital media in these efforts. The PI am also interested in learning about who Inuvialuit beneficiaries look to for cultural knowledge and connection and through which mediums they connect with and learn from others to engage with their cultural heritage. Finally, the PI is interested in learning if Inuvialuit beneficiaries are connecting with non-Inuvialuit Inuit or non-Inuit Indigenous people on issues of their culture, heritage, and imagined futures, and what form these connections are taking. The PI will work with Inuvialuit youth to workshop cultural heritage representations in social and digital media to gain a deeper and applied understanding of how Inuvialuit youth are using social and digital media to engage with cultural heritage. The outcomes of this work could inform educational products and be integrated into the curriculum. The PI plans to work with existing Inuvialuit social and digital media creators to help plan and lead the workshop and to share their experiences. Participants will be required to review and sign a letter of information, in which they can state their image and identification preferences and state their consent. People appearing in photographs and video taken during participant observation activities will be offered to sign a photo and video release form. Youth under the age of 14 will require parental consent to participate. The PI will work with my Inuvialuit Living History Project team members, both local Inuvialuit and non-Inuvialuit, to plan and reflect on my research. The PI will present the research progress and results to the communities she will be working in periodically throughout the research collection and upon completion of the research project to share the findings. These will be community presentations for stakeholder organizations and the broader public (e.g., Parks Canada, Inuvialuit Cultural Resource Centre (ICRC), Aurora Research Institute, and to the Community Corporations). In addition to the data collection portion of this project, which will work directly with community members, project team members will also make ourselves available to the wider community in a variety of ways through project social media (e.g., project Facebook page, project website - www.inuvialuitlivinghistory.ca), and through Inuvialuit Regional Corporation (of which ICRC is the cultural branch) social media channels. The research team will be participating in all public events hosted by the Inuvialuit Living History team including community meetings. The team will also make themselves available to local news and media channels and will be distributing project updates through a biannual newsletter distributed to all Inuvialuit beneficiaries through the Inuvialuit Community Corporations. The results of this research will be disseminated to the community through the project website, social media, and community meetings. These channels will allow the community to respond to and engage with the research to mobilize any important results within the community. The results of this research and requests for feedback will be disseminated to the communities in a variety of ways. The results will be presented during community meetings in Inuvik and a summary of the results will be made available to interested parties on the website for the Inuvialuit Living History Project (http://www.inuvialuitlivinghistory.ca/) through blog updates or on a page dedicated to the research. Finally, experience suggests that the research will be of interest to northern media outlets. The research team will take every opportunity to solicit feedback and disseminate the results through TV, radio, and print media. All participants will have access to the finished PhD dissertation through a link provided to them upon completion. Any named and quoted interview participants will be given the opportunity to approve whether, how, and in what context their quoted statements appear in the final products. With participants’ permission, copies of the interviews will be kept on file at the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation's (IRC) Inuvialuit Cultural Resource Centre (ICRC). The fieldwork for this study will be conducted from January 13, 2023 to December 31, 2023.