Microsoft Word - Chambers final.doc TO CITE THIS ARTICLE PLEASE INCLUDE ALL OF THE FOLLOWING DETAILS: Chambers, Cynthia (2010). “I was Grown up Before I Was Born”: Wisdom in Kangiryarmuit Life Stories. Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 7(2) http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci   “I was Grown up Before I Was Born”: Wisdom in Kangiryarmuit Life Stories Cynthia Chambers University of Lethbridge I grew up in the Canadian north, an only child in a family of migrant bush pilots. As a young woman, I landed in Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories; it was there, at St. Patrick’s High School, I earned the nickname, “99.” “Ninety-nine” was a pun on both my alleged academic scores (a percentage I rarely, if ever, actually achieved) and the competent and ever faithful “Agent “99” of the 1960s Get Smart sit-com fame. Agent “99” was the intelligent sidekick who tirelessly rescued the bumbling secret agent, Maxwell Smart, from himself, while she simultaneously saved the free world from KAOS and its nefarious plots to take over the entire world. KAOS was a thinly disguised spoof on the Soviet KGB. By assigning me the nickname “99,” my northern friends suggested that I was perhaps too smart for my own good, and not quite smart enough in ways that truly mattered.1 Rather than “get smart,” the nickname was an admonishment to “smarten up,” a familiar northern reprimand for lack of maturity and social intelligence with the potential to harm self or other. After high school, marriage, children, divorce, teaching and working all in no particular order, “99” moved to southern Canada for graduate school—there are no universities in the Canadian north. Encumbered with a doctorate, I remained in the south, teaching at a university, getting even smarter in that bookish way of the academy. In 2003, Helen Balanoff, a researcher with the Northwest Territories (NWT) Literacy Council, invited me to be part of a northern research project. Given our shared interest in language and literacy, the research questions we lighted on were: What might literacy mean? How might it be practiced in northern communities? What was literacy in these predominantly indigenous communities? Before the global reach of multinational corporations and the relentless babble of English? Before the heavy weight of the Cross, and the dark corners of the church- operated residential schools? Before diamonds, before oil? Emily Kudlak was from the small arctic community of Ulukhaktok, Northwest Territories. It was she who had peaked Helen’s interest in these questions. Emily Kudlak was, and is still, a tireless community volunteer and a fierce advocate for the survival of Inuinnaqtun, the predominant local Indigenous language. Emily had applied for funds to offer drum dancing and printmaking workshops as local literacy programs but, at the time, the territorial government rejected the proposals on the grounds they didn’t address “literacy.” Emily then turned to the NWT Literacy Council for help. She asked: Why isn’t drum dancing literacy? Why isn’t printmaking literacy? (Chambers & Balanoff, 2009). Thus, began a lengthy collaboration among Emily Kudlak and her community, Helen Balanoff and the NWT Literacy Council, and the University of Lethbridge and myself. Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     6 The research team: Alice Kaodloak, Helen Balanoff, Emily Kudlak, Cynthia Chambers In this research team made up of “insiders” and “outsiders,” I could not be Chief, even with a Ph.D. In this research team of northerners and southerners (which now I am technically), the project could not be under my CONTROL, the counter-intelligence agency to whom Agent 99 and Maxwell Smart reported. Headquarters could not be 123 Main Street, Washington, DC; nor could it be the University of Lethbridge. Headquarters had to be in the North. And this mission needed local agents. English-speaking graduate students raised and residing in the South would not do; they were not smart enough, not in the right way. We needed community-based researchers and we needed salaries to pay them. After two years of relentless proposal writing, Helen Balanoff and I secured a few small grants to begin the project: salaries for the community-based researchers and dollars needed to cover the exorbitant costs for travel and accommodation in the arctic (Chambers & Balanoff, 2009). In the winter of 2004, Helen and I journeyed to Ulukhaktok, NWT to meet with Emily Kudlak who arranged for community members to interview us. Ulukhaktok is a small community of five hundred, mostly Inuinnait and Inuvialuit, on Victoria Island in the Arctic Archipelago. Three hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. Seventy degrees latitude. Seventy degrees north, that is. Not that Ulukhaktongmiut locate their home in this way. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the bush pilots in my family flew into Ulukhaktok (they called it Holman Island); I went to school with children from Holman in Aklavik and Inuvik; I was in day school but they were in residential school: All Saint’s (Anglican) and Immaculate Conception (Roman Catholic) in Aklavik, and Stringer Hall (Anglican) and Grollier Hall (Roman Catholic) in Inuvik, supervisors in the latter now convicted with sexual abuse of their young charges. But 2004, with Helen, was my first trip to the community of Ulukhaktok. Emily Kudlak agreed to be part of the research team if she could work with her aunt, Alice Kaodloak. Emily was re-learning to speak Inuinnaqtun and Alice Kaodloak was a fluent speaker. While Emily had grown up mostly in small village of Ulukhaktok, Alice was from one of the last Inuit families to move into town from the land and sea ice; Alice’s knowledge of the Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     7 language and “our ways“ would be invaluable to Emily and the project. Emily Kudlak, Helen Balanoff and I met with representatives from the Local School Authority, the Hamlet Council, the Inuvialuit Settlement Regional Development Corporation and the Student Council. Over tea and snacks, Helen and I pitched the project and the community members interviewed us. There were no formal meetings, no protocol agreements were signed; yet the community agreed to the project on the condition that Emily Kudlak and Alice Kaodloak were partners in the research team. Community members believed that Emily and Alice’s presence would protect the people’s interest. They agreed to the project if it meant that Emily and Alice would document Elders’ knowledge about the past. And their wisdom. The people knew their Elders were smart. The problem is, they said: how do we help our young people be smart like our ancestors were? Although a scholarly endeavour, this project offered that rare chance in life, as disco artist Maxine Nightingale sang, “to get right back to where we started from” (Edwards & Tubbs, 1975). With this research I found myself right back in the past, learning about a different kind of smart. The kind of smart the world needs now. Over the next two years, Emily Kudlak and Alice Kaodloak interviewed fourteen Ulukhaktok Elders in Inuinnaqtun. To begin, the four of us designed interview protocols on topics related to local literacies; drum dancing, songs and clothing; sewing and clothing; tool making and use; astronomy, weather, and travelling; storytelling; and names and naming for people and places. These interviews were moderately successful; Elders on their own, or in pairs and in groups of three, recalled what they remembered about each topic. Then Emily and Alice labored to translate the interviews into English. Reading the English translations of interviews, and Elders’ comments, such as “Why are you asking me my name when you already know it?” Helen and I realized what Emily and Alice had been perhaps too polite to tell us: “collecting” knowledge on topics following a set of questions, “designed to elicit” maximum knowledge and wisdom, wasn’t smart! It wasn’t how people in Ulukhaktok transfer knowledge. The transcripts were as disjointed and stilted as the steps of awkward dance partners struggling to follow an unfamiliar rhythm.2 Like Maxwell Smart and Agent “99,” the team needed another, smarter plan! The literacies of Ulukhaktok are living literacies, ways that people learn what they need to know and do in their daily lives. At one time, their daily lives were lived entirely on the land, and now they are lived primarily in town. In the past, people learned and practiced these literacies in a context: in particular places, in the midst of a particular life and language. The people were constituted as Ulukhaktongmiut as they practiced these literacies (Ingold, 2000). We hoped that stories of lives lived would reveal clues to these living literacies so Emily and Alice went back to the Elders of Ulukhaktok, and invited each of them in turn to tell their life story. Once again, Emily and Alice translated these stories, recorded in Inuinnaqtun, into written English. These English transcripts were only intermittently intelligible to Helen Balanoff and myself who were continually “lost in translation” (Hoffman, 1990). Like many non-indigenous researchers before us, we presumed that the Elders’ life stories would reveal fully accessible sets of (fixed) meanings that each man and woman had accumulated over his or her lifetime. Professional researchers and smarty pants that we were, we supposed that what Elders knew from lived experience—and were able to articulate in fluent, and often lyrical and elegant, Inuinnaqtun—could be (easily) translated into English. We unconsciously assumed the exchange was equivalent, that a word or idea in Inuinnaqtun has a meaningful equivalency in English and Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     8 vice versa. Helen and I were oblivious to the surplus of meaning that leaked out of either end of the transaction. We assumed that what the Elders knew could be transmitted outside of the context in which it was learned; that, in spite of Paulo Freire’s warning to the contrary, the Elders’ knowledge could be deposited into our empty bank accounts available for withdrawal at a later date. We assumed that the narrator of a life history could explicate what he or she has learned in that life, and perhaps most naively, that researchers, such as ourselves, could decode their wisdom. Like someone without hands reading poems in Braille. So for several years Helen and I have bumbled and fumbled through those English transcripts searching for clues Both us more like Maxwell Smart than Agent “99.” But now, it is a different kind of KAOS that threaten the entire world: global warming and the melting of the polar seas and the ice caps. Irrevocable climate change brought on by the smart money of corporations, greedy bankers and Ponzi scheme promoters; the sassy practices of corrupt and ignorant politicians; and the habits of insatiable southern consumers and gullible citizens who bought into world domination by capitalism (anything is better than communism). Drawing Western societies and economies into debt, as Margaret Atwood (2008) reminds us, from which there is no default, for which the actual “payback” is unimaginable. “It seems like our earth is getting tired,” sighed Mary Akhoakhion, one of the Ulukhaktok Elders (2006-002, 286). “You know how it is when people are getting old and older; well, our earth is getting old, too,” Mary said, “and the weather is getting bad very quickly.” Of all regions on the planet, it is the arctic, and all its inhabitants, which smarts most intensely from global warming. Far away from the southern sites of production and consumption, Ulukhaktongmiut watch the ice melt, the polar bears decline, the snow deepen, the temperatures rise. Yet, dwelling in the arctic has never been easy for humans or any other beings; Ulukhaktongmiut have always needed smarts to dwell in nunakput, what the people call “our land.” And those smarts were both transferred and gifted rather than inherited, as in Western notions of intelligence. When describing how the ancestors made inukhuit, or stone structures which often resembled human form, to keep animals out of their food caches, Ohkeena (2007- 003 #079) remarked, “The people back then were smart” and her old friend, Taipana (2007-001, #353), concurred: “People back then were unbeatable.” Elsie Nilgak said, “We can’t top those people from the past.” For Ulukhaktongmiut, wisdom is not accumulated like capital or interest on a deposit. Nor are human beings naturally developing in civilized Darwinian style. Rather knowledge and skill, and what it takes to maximize both, seem to be retrospective rather than progressive. Describing the variety and ingenuity of the tools of that “our parents, and their parents and the ancestors before them used,” Kapotoan said, “Making tools, our ancestors were very smart, while us we don’t know how.” When Rene Oliktoak describes the tiny copper needles the women made and the even tinier stitches those needles made, she said, “People back then— unanminaitut—you couldn’t beat them…Today we use these wide needles and our stitches … get too big.”3 Tiny stitches help keep clothing waterproof and windproof.4 What is gained with ease is lost in quality. It seems that mediocrity threatens to triumph in the north, as it has in the south.5 Perhaps smarts, and the returns on them, are diminishing rather than accumulating. Akoakion (2005-003, #349) said, “It seems like we were smart when we were younger, back then. But today we are not smart anymore.” When he was young, the people read the directions Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     9 of drifting snow to find their way in terrible arctic snowstorms. To wayfind (Davis, 2009; Ingold, 2000) was to visualize the destination before departure and throughout the trip so you could see it even when you couldn’t see it. Finding your destination, in the midst of a whiteout: that was smart. Akoakhion tells the story of his father, Niakoaluk. Once Egotak, my father, and myself caught a polar bear way out on the sea ice where there is no land to be seen. We were in a storm on our way back and used the snowdrifts formed by the west wind, and the wind direction to get home to Pitotak. We came to land right at Nauyaat (where our camp was). I thought Niakoaluk was very smart.6 Smart people learned the names and movement of the stars; they knew how to use the stars to guide them when they travelled, and to tell the time of day in the darkness of winter.7 Morris Nigiyok said: Long ago the people would travel in the dark, using only dogs —no headlight, using only dogs. Black, nothing but black. When there are completely no clouds, they would use the stars to guide them Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     10 to their destination. Just like a compass to them.8 When these Elders were young, there were no two-way radios or telephones, certainly no cell phones or Internet. No electronic means of contact across large expanses of sea ice, coastline and land. But people would meet, converge, disperse and meet again, all at predetermined times and destinations. At first, we would travel together; then, when it is time to separate, we would go our own way. We would camp overnight; then, the next day when the weather is fair we would all separate and continue checking our traps. … They had no radios, but they would tell each other that in four days they would meet in the same area. They would meet each other again. People were smart back then.9 Today younger Inuit rely increasingly on satellite-operated GPS to find their way and the Internet to predict weather (Aporta, 2003). And older Inuit are getting, well, older. The Elders’ life stories were filled with stories of others, of the people that others looked up to, the ones the people depended on. Smart people. They told stories of dancers who were very smart. Men like Kangoak: “The women would help him sing and Kangoak would be their dancer.” Or women like Mimi: “an old lady who could follow the fiddler and jig even without a partner” (Andy Akoakhion, 2005-002, #866). These were very smart people: Kangoak with his capacity to learn drum dance songs with no pen or MP3 player, and to remember those songs so he could dance long into one winter night and then all through the next without repeating a single song. And Mimi, the jigger, with her ability to follow the fiddle and its music, instead of a male partner. Very smart, the Elders said. Taipana tells the story of Milukhuk and how the place, Ulukhaktok, came by its name. The ancestors knew they could find ulukhahat, the slate material used to make arrowheads and the ulu, or woman’s knife at the site of present-day Ulukhaktok. Ulu means “woman’s knife” and Ulukhaktok means “the place of the material used to make the woman’s knife.” The ancestors knew there was ulukhahat, the flat, soft but sharp rocks, on the large steep cliff next to the present-day town. Although the ancestors knew the location of the ulukhahat no one bothered to Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     11 climb in search of them. No one, that is, until Joe Milukhuk. He dared climb the steep cliff high above the sea and he returned with the rocks used to make the ulu. Taipana says, “[Milukhuk] must have been smarter than all the rest; he never tumbled down the steep cliff” (2006-005, 398). Smart people are agile and courageous; qualities needed to locate and collect materials essential for living. They are skilled at making tools with those materials—knives, needles, iglus, fish hooks, floats and toggles. They are dexterous in using those tools. They knew how to store, maintain and repair the tools needed for living.10 For Ulukhaktongmiut, smart people understand what is required to “make a living” in this place. Alice cutting orange with ulu Inuinnait, like other indigenous peoples, learned to live, and to live well, in the places that sustained them. Ulukhaktongmiut call these places nunakput, our land and that includes all the other-than-human beings who live there. And hila, the sphere that encompasses the land: the ocean and tides and all the beings who live there such as the fish and the seals, as well as the sky, and all the beings who inhabit these places, including the birds, the sun, the moon, and the stars. And then there is weather—perhaps the most powerful element in hila, the force from which the people have learned many lessons. Smart people learn from experience and adapt to what is both predictable and changing. “Our earth is getting old,” Mary Akoakhion said, “and the weather is getting bad, very quickly.” At the end of a long, and sometimes bitter, doctoral program, I interviewed for a tenure- track position in qualitative research at Ohio State University. Near the welcome end to a two- day interview marathon, a distinguished and elderly member of the search committee turned to me and asked: “How did you get to be so smart?” In the end, Patti Lather, the distinguished feminist scholar, and qualitative researcher, got the job. Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     12 How did Ulukhaktongmiut get to be so smart? Eugenics aside, in Western education, intelligence is generally considered an individual trait. However, Ulukhaktok Elders referred to the collective smarts of their teachers, the masters: “the ancestors,” the previous generations to whom people today simply cannot hold a candle. Clues to how smart the ancestors were and how they got that way are found in the stories: Niakoaluk brings home the hunters in a whiteout; Milukhuk defies death on the cliffs of Ulukhaktok in search of the elusive materials needed to make the ulu. Animals are smart, too. People studied the animals carefully, and shared what they learned in stories.11 Taipana (2006- 005, Side A: #038) says there are many stories about …our ancestors, their way of life, angayuqapta hivuliita, and the way they hunt, and the animals they see, and their way of hunting the animals… They would tell stories of where the animals have been. These stories are told to the next generation, and to the next generation, so the next generation after next generation can know those stories Dogs—the early means of rapid transit—were much smarter than snowmobiles. Mary T. Okheena told us (2005-012, Side B: 329): Dogs knew how to follow the weather, even if it is dark out… they knew where to go. They could not get lost Dogs would announce the arrival of strangers, particularly dangerous ones. When Morris Nigiyok was very young, he spotted a polar bear outside the iglu. He immediately yelled for his father to come outside. His father did not hurry because the dogs were not barking a warning. Morris’ polar bear turned out to be an arctic hare. That is when Nigiyok (2006-003, Side A: #300) learned: The dogs will be the first to know Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     13 if a polar bear comes. They will know before me. And the dogs will not keep quiet about it. There are other stories about when the animals “take their hoods off” so human and other- than-human could speak to each other, a time when animals and humans shared a language, shared their experiences and their stories: shared their smarts. These are stories of transformations where animals turn into humans and conversely, smart and powerful humans can turn into animals (qanuqliqaq havaktut).12 These are the “smart stories,” said Andy Akoakhion (2005-003. #596), the stories that are “disappearing.” Part of being smart is having the power to act, to enact, and to make things happen. To come out on top, or at least alive, in dangerous situations. And part of the path to becoming smart is to listen to and to learn the stories. Keeping the stories alive would be really smart. Being smart is also a gift, not necessarily a reward from God for the good behaviour of your parents—the opposite of the sins of the father. Not really karma, either, not a reward or punishment for the good (or bad) deeds of your soul from a previous lifetime and different bodily manifestation. For Ulukhaktongmiut, being smart has more to do with what might be poorly translated in English as reincarnation. Families can give a child a path, one that, if followed, may lead the child to being smart. Elsie Nilgak (2004-001, #016) explains: When a couple is going to have a child, [or] when their child is born, when they want to name the child, either grandmother or grandfather picks… [the] name of a family member that has passed on… Giving a baby an atiit, or name of someone who was smart, “helps” the child, gives him a path. As a hunter, a seamstress, someone who treats others well. Babies or children “inherit” the traits of their namesake, as well as her life experience and kin relations, her wisdom.13 Referring to his namesake, Jimmy Memogana (2005-01, #928) said, Memogana. I have his name. [And so] I was grown up before I was born… When asked why the people named their children in this way, Elsie Nilgak said matter-of- factly, “Because a person cannot live without a name” (2004-001, #033). A name of an ancestor gives a child a path and a life. Rather than starting fresh at birth, with a name each newborn is Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     14 given the possibility of accessing the smarts of their namesake. Naming a child also continues the life of the namesake, keeping alive the wisdom, knowledge, memories, stories and traits of the deceased person. Keeps the smarts of several lifetimes in circulation. Morris Nigiyok (2004- 016, Side A: # 148-172) lost his parents when he was very young. Later he wanted to name one of his children named after Kongoatohuk, the one who “watched over him and fed him” when he was orphaned. He wanted one of his children to be Kongoatohuk’s namesake so he could “keep her” and still “see her.” Like Morris Nigiyok, names may be given in gratitude. Families of the namesake may respond in gratitude for the continued life of their loved one, presenting gifts to the newborn.14 Smart people pay attention to dreams, and the instructions the dreams may bring. Like other knowledge necessary for living smartly, instructions for choosing the best name for a newborn often comes from dreams. A deceased person may appear in a dream and in some way indicate that he or she wants to be, or should be, a namesake. Songs come in dreams as well. Jean Ohkeena (2005-011, #291) tells this story of her late husband, Kagyut. William Kagyut drumming Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     15 Kagyut’s song that is sung often came from his dream. When he returned from the hospital (he was hospitalized in Edmonton at the Charles Camsell hospital for ten years with TB), no wonder he was going to get better, the dream that he had, he made it into a song. In his dream, this person that he did not know was teaching him this song, so when he awoke he made that song that he learnt in his dream. The dream not only gifted Kagyut with a song but with the healing he needed after a long illness. Okheena (2005-011, #308) continues: The first part of the song got him back on his feet. The last part of the song is about his catches during his hunts. He added those so he would be able to get back on his feet. …It seemed like he was not going to get cured, but he was cured Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     16 and around for many years afterwards. Namegiver concept map But an atiit, a name, is not like a password that activates computer software. Newborns are smart because they are grown up before they are born, and because they are so smart they have a say in their name; they have what poststructuralists might call “agency.” A baby can reject his name (atiqluaqpakpa); she can cry or be sick until she is given a different name. If the new name is acceptable, the crying will cease, the illness will subside. Kapotoan (2004-008, Side B: #732) tells this story: My first born didn’t survive, the infant was a boy. He didn’t live long. The next one was Elsie. Higona. Her name was Poinik. Egyokhiak gave her that name. He had named her after one of his parents Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     17 so they can have a namesake, but it was very hard. She didn’t seem like she was going to survive; she always stopped breathing. She was like that for a long time… When the minister, Mr. Sperry, came he would put her above the Coleman stove, where it is warm, keeping her there …until she would start to breathe again. She was like that for a long time. There were a lot of people down there at Kitikat waiting for spring. It was around May. Algiak and the minister had come in. While they were there she kept having trouble breathing. People were all at my tent. The old man, Unayak, finally started to yell from their tent (to ours)… “Give her another name. Name her Higona.” He was yelling loudly, “Name her Higona. She wants a name.” After they gave her the name Higona, she did a lot better. Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     18 Mabel Nigiyok interview with Emily and Alice Even before a child was born, the Elders said that parents would amaaqtuq, a practice which could be roughly translated as “modelling”.15 Parents would rise early in the morning, before others are awake, to work, do chores and help others. In the darkness and stillness of early morning, parents would do the very things they wanted the baby to eventually learn to do, things the child would use throughout his lifetime. Parents would practice those traits they wanted their children to have. If a son was born, it was the mother’s responsibility to amaaqtuq, (to practice cooking, cleaning, hunting, and helping others) for the baby. If a daughter was born, these responsibilities fell to the father. Kapotoan remarked on the sacrifice that parents made to lay down a good path for the child. “They don’t get tired,” she said, acknowledging both the stamina of the previous generations and the toll this practice must have taken in spite of their endurance. Kapotoan wasn’t sure she could parent in this way: “I would be so frustrated!” But she acknowledges the wisdom and steadfastness of “our parents’ parents, and their parents’ parents before them” (Elsie Nilgak, 2004-016, #421). “They were so smart…following their beliefs and traditional ways from way back. That is how they were” (Nigiyok, 2004-016, #416). People tried to borrow or capture the smarts of animals, on behalf of their children. Elders, such as Kalvak, a renowned shaman and healer of the Kangiryuarmiut, attached atatat (poorly translated in English as “amulet”) to the sleeves and hoods of the first clothes of small children: a loon’s throat for a singer, a ptarmigan’s beak for a great ptarmigan hunter, a weasel for a light-footed drum dancer.16 Atatat transferred the powers and smarts from an accomplished human to a newborn: scrap material from the work of a renowned seamstress were attached so the girl would grow up to be a great sewer, miniature kamiks (called “mukluks” in English) so she would grow up to make the perfect tiny stitches necessary for waterproof shoes. Atatat are Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     19 strong and they give strength and power to small that can last a lifetime (Ohkeena, 2005-011, #844). The people from back then were very strong, people were very strong back then, right? Must have been very strong. They had very good helpers (amulets). (Nilgak, 2005-011, #455) Adults can help children become smart, to build their skills and confidence. They can give newborns a strong name and a powerful helper (an amulet); parents can ammayuq—practice the important character traits they want their children to have. Adults also train children in specific tasks, particularly by giving them opportunities to practice. From the time children were young enough to play outside they practiced making snow blocks and building iglus “because this was not learnt easily” (Akoakhion, 2005-002, Side A: #381). Young girls began by sewing small items such as doll clothes and mitts; later they progressed to larger and more difficult projects. Good teachers combined show and tell. Taipana (2005-007, Side B: #879) describes how she learned to sew as a young girl: Kongoatuhuk and Agligoitok were very good teachers. They showed me how to make the marks with the ulu, woman’s knife, on the area where I will cut by, because there were no pencils… [They’d] tell me not to make the stitches too tight. How do you say it in English? “Don’t wrinkle it.” Young children “tagged along” with fathers and grandfathers to learn how to hunt and trap. Mary Akoakhion (2006-001, Side A: #457) said, I would follow either my grandfather or my father when they are going hunting, and that is how I learned… Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     20 Mary Akoakhion learned to trap for fur by following her mother on her short trap line near the camp. While Mary Akoakhion’s first kill was a seal, ,most young hunters start with small birds, and progress to small animals, like rabbits, and then on to big game.17 Andy Akoakhion explains: When a person follows their father on hunting trips like polar bear hunts, it is like this; their father would let them shoot their first bear. When there are three or two bears they were taught to shoot the cub. Outside of Tukhuk, my father shot the mother bear and he had me shoot the cub. Girls are smart enough to learn to hunt and they are taught in the same way. Taipana (2005-007, Side B: #906) learned to hunt before she learned to sew: My parents didn’t have any male children, so when I got old enough to carry a gun and bow and arrow, my father and my uncle would let me hunt small animals like birds, rabbits and others. They would bring me closer to the animals and let me try to make a kill. That is how they taught me, so I would try my best. I was taught the hunting skills first. Taima ingilrat pivaktuniqtut: it was the way of the ancestors, They taught their young apprentices how to walk and walk, without giving up, how to find inukhuit (stone structures) and Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     21 other signposts left to mark important places, such as fishing holes, camping spots, river crossings, as well as caches of food and supplies. Ida Kuneyuna describes how she learned. Taima ingilrat pivaktuniqtut, that was the way of our ancestors —walking, walking and going fishing even during the winter, where the markers are that tell you where to fish, when they get to the places where they know. My adoptive father taught me by letting me walk down onto the ice and he would stay way up on the land. And then, when I got very small he would gesture with his arms, to let me stop. That is where we would make fishing holes. Even after the young were able to hunt larger animals, their apprenticeship continued.18 Elders told their sons about ice conditions and the dangers of travel. Young people learned to listen to what their Elders had to say. Akoakhion (2005-002, Side A, #495) was critical of the modern order where teaching is a profession, rather than a social relation among master, apprentice, the places they inhabit and the other beings with whom they dwell. Today, he said children follow the words of professional teachers rather than their parents; they are learning to dominate rather than participate. Back then, our parents would lecture us on pitquhikhaptingnik, what will be our ways, like scolding us. But today children don’t get scolding from their parents. Because they have teachers now they do not get scolding from their parents, and now children are running Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     22 their parents’ lives, bossing them around. Back then, we were not the bosses; we followed their words. We would hunt following their words. We didn’t do what ever we wanted ihumainaqtungitugut. When the Elders were young, the smarts that a person needed to make a living, to support his family, were learned from others. Although some Elders spoke about being “self-taught,” these were not the skills at which they excelled. Mary T. Okheena (2005-012, Side A: #381) attributed her present-day difficulty with sewing to how she was taught when she was young: [My adoptive mother] would try to teach me sew, how to make the stitches. She would tell me, ‘You are very hard to teach.’ No wonder sometimes I have a hard time trying to sew. The Elders expressed profound gratitude for the adults in their life who took the time and had the patience to teach them and to teach them well. Noah Akhiatak (2005-015, Side A: #144- 369) was an orphan and so when Mona, his older sister, began living with Kuneyuna, he was both relieved and grateful. [Kuneyuna] was to be my brother-in- law and I really cared and loved him because I had no male to teach me hunting skills. When they got together, I was very thankful [to him] for teaching me. Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     23 I am not sure how old I was [but] …I was very thankful when he started teaching me because I had no male teacher. Although their Elders gave them plenty of direct instruction, they also were given plenty of opportunity to play and to learn on their own. Sometimes there were very few children in a camp, and so the times when families gathered together at one place were very important for the children as well as the adults. Children played at games where they honed the skills and smarts they would need to support themselves one day. Taipana (2005-007, Side B: #799) explains: They would play together, games like pretending to be a wolf, hide and seek, rope skipping, string games, also other games. Then, during the spring and summer, we would pretend to make kikhuk, fire on rocks, and play house with rocks, making them look like a campsite… Although women in the past were so smart they delivered their own babies, the Elders said quana—“thank you”— for Western medicine and doctors, for social programs, employment and the security of food supplies. They acknowledge that life is a fragile and risky venture for which all the best efforts and intentions of parents cannot guarantee a win.19 And they remembered the hard times when parents were forced to choose between the survival of those infants with a name and a namesake, and the burden of those without. Mothers often had to “throw their newborns” away, never able to forget the sound of the infant left crying for his name.20 As important as courage and steadfastness, as critical as stamina, dexterity, and ingenuity, as indispensible as craft and skill, the Elders told us that being smart is about living well. It is about loving and being loved, about caring for one another. It is about relations and relationships. When parents practiced amaaqtuq (see above) with newborn babies, they taught these things as well. Contemporary parents may not always rise early to do chores as a way to set a path for their newborns. But like their parents and grandparents before them, contemporary Ulukhaktongmiut are still devoted parents, always showing babies, toddlers, and young children affection and Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     24 practicing infinite patience. Jean Briggs (1970), the eminent anthropologist, memorialized the consequences of losing patience, especially with young children, in her classic ethnography of an Inuit camp entitled Never in Anger. For Inuit, open displays of anger suggest a lack of self- control and constitute a serious threat to group safety and cohesion. Brigg was ostracized and without the social and economic support of her adopted Inuit family, she could not survive in the camp. Her fieldwork was over. For Inuinnait, you must be as patient and respectful of children as you would be of adults because, as Jimmy Memogana said, children “are grown up before they are born.” The child you encounter is not only a son or a daughter but also a namesake, perhaps a deceased grandmother or great-uncle. Inuit ancestors are not dead; instead they live on, happy, healthy, and never hungry, accessible from the realm where they now dwell. When aghalingiak (the northern lights) flicker, you see the ancestors playing a never-ending game of ball.21 Smart people know the importance of respecting other beings, particularly animals, such as the caribou and the polar bear. Death transforms animals, as it does humans, but it does not destroy them. If treated properly at the time of death, large animals make themselves available to be killed again, their flesh, bones and hides continuously available for human consumption and use. Treating animals respectfully means disposing of their bones properly (Kapatoan, 2006-004, #032). Morris Nigiyok tells the story of a time when starvation came, “when the land ran out of food.”22 Morris and Kapotoan were newly wed, and there were so few seal that their dogs were starving. The couple resorted to feeding their sled dogs the sealskin bags they used to store and carry food; with this sacrifice, they saved five dogs out of a team of eleven. Eventually, Morris and his hunting partner tracked and killed a polar bear. The hunters knew they must never feed polar bear heads to dogs but Morris’s partner tossed the head of the kill to their famished huskies; they gnawed and crushed the bear’s skull into tiny slivers and fragments of bone. The polar bear had his revenge; Kapotoan (2006-004, Side B: #32) laments: “From there it did not go well and we had [even more] hardship…” For Inuinnait, human mistreatment of the larger animals precipitates hardship, and even disaster. The people must never violate the protocols between humans and these animals—even in times of great hardship. In the arctic, smart beings know the power of words. People learn to speak carefully and respectfully to, and about, all beings, one another, as well as, animals. For Inuit, animals are smart and powerful beings: they understand human language and they can hear across great distances. Animals, such as polar bears, hear and understand what people say, know what humans do and how they behave (Keith & Arqviq, 2009).“Large animals can hear you,” said Kapatoan. “Yeah,” her husband, Nigiyok, agreed, “you must not talk badly about them” (Nigiyok, 2006-004, #041-48). When hunters search for polar bear, the people waiting for their return must be careful in their speech. They must not say things like: “Maybe they caught a polar bear” (Taipana Oliktoak, 2005-007, Side A: #225). People must not compliment polar bears on how good they look or how good they taste. A person mustn’t brag about her ability to hunt a polar bear or patronize these animals by calling them “cute.” Smart people respect the sensitivity, intelligence, and power of other beings. There are many protocols for showing respect and gratitude for the animals who give up their lives so humans may eat and have clothing. In fall and early winter, for example, the people camped at various sites along the coastline fishing and hunting. Once the snow was the right depth and texture, they built iglus and worked on the caribou hides. Sometime after the sun had Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     25 set for the winter, they moved out onto the sea ice, where they set up camp to hunt seals and the occasional polar bear.23 But the group would not make the move out onto the sea ice until the women had finished sewing the winter clothes because, out of respect for the caribou, the people cannot “sew caribou hides…on the sea ice” (Taipana, 2007-002, Side B: #031); they cannot “work on them again until the sun returns…aqliktuuniqtu those were the beliefs they followed” (Okheena, 2004-010, Side A: # 860-873). Animals offer themselves up to humans for food and materials (Ingold, 2000), and in return the people are grateful and treat animals with the agreed upon respect. In nunakput, humans depend on each other as well as the animals and other beings for their survival. Smart people do not assume that their survival and successes are individual achievements; they recognize that in spite of their best efforts, life ultimately depends on the contribution of beings and forces other than human, animals as well as hila, the atmosphere, weather and celestial beings. For example, if it is well built, a snow house can remain warm with only a seal blubber lamp for warmth and light. To build a warm snow house, people must know how and where to find the right snow—not too old, too new, too hard, or too soft.24 Jimmy Kudlak (2005-014, Side B: #074) remembers the snow house at night: When it is nighttime, the snow houses would be warm. When people talked about the snow houses getting warm, they would say, “The ones below us have lit up their lamps.” …That is what I have heard. I have never forgotten it. I know of this from when I can remember. I know that from my parents. Both the sun and the moon provide light, and their conditions predict weather.25 Smart people know how to predict the movement and abundance of animals from the phase and direction of the moon (Nigiyok, 2006-003, Side B; 75-100). With few wristwatches or calendars, the ones from before …tell time only by the stars, Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     26 when night falls and when daybreak is near, when daylight will be getting longer. The significance of these celestial beings is memorialized in stories about their origins. The people acknowledge their dependence on these beings; they cannot take the sun’s return each year for granted. Egotak (2005-009, Side A: #013) recalls: When the moon shows up in the wintertime, the women who went to get meat, they would do this (hand gestures) to their pots because the moon is a man. When the sun shows up for the first time, they would run towards it and put out some meat for it, because the sun is a woman. They would also throw some blubber from their stone lamps. The life stories of the Elders of Ulukhaktok remind us that human weakness and folly can precipitate hardship at any time. At the heart the Elders’ wisdom is the knowledge that while smart individuals accomplish much, survival is a collective endeavour that requires collective wisdom. As animals share their corporeal and spiritual being with humans, humans are called to share what they receive from the animals with their relations and neighbours. Taipana (2004- 003, Side A: #200) and Elsie Nilgak (2004-003, Side A: #204-) reminisce about their parents and the people of that generation: They were all related to each other. They were all happy with each other and would share everything… they would share their food Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     27 until the weather was good enough to go hunting. If one did not have enough material to make clothing they would get some from others. …But nowadays people cannot get anything for free. (Taipana)26 Family members would gather across town in a large family snowhouse, at Nipalakyok’s. They would gather food together and share with all and eat together. (Nilgak) Important as it is to be generous with food, materials and teachings, it is equally important to accept gracefully the generosity of others. Children are taught not refuse food or drink when it is offered. Olifie told the story of his first seal kill, and how his atiaquk (the person who gave him his Inuinnaqtun name) invited Olifie over to his place to eat and celebrate Olifie’s (2005-005, Side A: #159)first kill. [When] Kahak, my atiaqhik, found out [about my first seal kill] he asked me to come over. Because he was my atiaqhik, he would always feed me. He asked me to come over, really asking me to come over [insisting I come over]; Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     28 I went over to their tent. It was such a happy and shy time! He was really telling me to eat [insisting I eat]. Although I did not want to eat, I started to eat at their place. Food sharing is smart for many reasons. It renews relationships and it ensures that as many as possible survive. Stories remind the people that stinginess (or thoughtlessness) is potentially fatal. After the caribou were no longer scare, Morris Nigiyok became a successful hunter. Then he experienced hard times again. Upon reflection, Morris (2006-004, Side A: #329) remembered that he neglected to share food when he had it; and he neglected to share with two men, in particular, who had the power to teach him a lesson. …at the time, I caught lots of caribou. But I did not bring my two grandfathers any meat when they were camped out on the sea ice. I did not take any caribou meat to them and I had hardship after that. …Back then, when one does not get any meat (from a hunter) one will give hardship to the hunter. That was the way they were, hivuliit, our ancestors. 27 Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     29 All beings are flawed, and even smart people make mistakes so it is important to have compassion oneself and for others, particularly during times of difficulty. In the interviews, the Elders laughed and were often wistful for the good times of their childhood and life in nunakput, but they did not romanticize the past. Noah Akhiatak (2006-015, Side A: 037) remembers a time when the seals were scarce. It was always blowing snow and bad weather. We had no more food …my older sister made broth from an old sealskin bag that she stored food in. When we had broth we were very grateful because we were quite hungry… and [after the broth] our stomachs felt so good. During that period of starvation, someone killed a single seal and shared the meat with everyone in the camp. Akhiatak continues his story: I brought meat to Hologak and Akhok. When I went in [to their iglu], Akhok was very happy when she saw fresh blood from a seal. …She was very grateful. They had no more food …I have not forgotten that… Noah concluded his life story by saying: “Life is hard, life is on its own.” The Elders’ stories remind the present generation of the hardships that befall people when their food source disappears: life is much harder without the seals, without the polar bear and without the caribou. The Elders’ experiences warn us that such terrible events from the past can occur again. Elsie Nilgak (2004-002, Side B: #341-345) told the researchers: After the caribou came back, there was plenty of caribou; Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     30 then recently the caribou got scarce [again]. When the caribou came back, there were caribou, but now caribou are scarce again. Taryukutli ai. For Ulukhaktokmiut—like many people throughout the world—longevity is prized. Being smart can increase one’s chances of longevity. So can being kind and generous. Okheena (2005-011, Side B: #254) tells the story of how she earned her longevity, how her kindness, and that of her older brother, was rewarded. There was a noise from a nalaktaq (a springtime iglu) close by. A person was making a lot of noise, someone who was sick, making a lot of noise from pain. My brother and I heard that person. …When we went inside her place, it was Kitaaluk lying in her blankets in pain, making a lot of noise like she was going to die. …She must have had a very high fever …She said, “Give me water, I am very thirsty.” …She put out her arm and asked for water …that I have not forgotten. Elgayak, my older brother, … gave her the cup of water and she drank it all. After, she said, “Some more.” She drank all the water again. After she drank water, she was able to talk. She said this to us— Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     31 “Thank you very much to both of you for giving me water when I was very thirsty. May you live a long life.” That is why we got old. How smart are we, contemporary citizens of the falling Western empires and failing post capitalist economies? How smart are we, really? The Elders’ life stories tell us that the arctic has never been an easy ride for humans; Ulukhaktokmiut have always needed smarts to live in nunakput. The Elders of Ulukhaktok are in awe—not of GPS, the snowmobile, or stick-frame houses heated with an oil furnace; they are in awe of their parents and their ancestors. They punctuated their stories with: “The people back then, they were really smart.” “We can’t top them.”28 “Back then,” as the Ulukhaktok time marker goes, smart people followed the direction of drifting snow to reach their destination in an arctic storm. Finding their way, in a whiteout: now that’s smart. The stars guided their travel on clear nights, and told them the time of day when there was no day. They could read the sun and the moon to predict changes in the weather. Smart people paid attention to dreams, and the instructions they bring. Like the best namesake for a newborn. Like a song that will heal the singer. They showed animals the deepest respect. And their children intense affection. They cached tools and food. Built inukshuks to mark the spot. Waited for hours without moving at seal holes on the ice. Sang and danced through dark winter nights. Walked for endless days and through thick clouds of mosquitoes to the caribou calving grounds. They crafted elegant tools, used them dexterously and maintained them meticulously. With fine copper needles they sewed tiny stitches to keep out water and wind. Staying warm and dry is an art form and a necessity of life. Humans don’t have a corner on smarts, either. Parents attached amulets to a baby’s clothing. Hoping the animal would gift the child with its traits. A weasel so she may be light- footed; a loon’s throat so he may sing. There was a time when animals would “take their hoods off” and speak to humans and share their smarts. Polar bears still understand human speech. They can hear disrespect from great distances. Caribou, too. They want their bones and hides treated with respect. Wendell Berry (Cayley, 2008) says the primary responsibility of the human species is to adapt to the places where they dwell. Not to make the place, and the beings who already live there, adapt to humans. There are consequences when humans ignore their collective agreement with the animals and the other beings. One of them is withdrawal of services. So how smart are we, really? When we were very young, the Elders said, we remember a time when the caribou were “scarce.”29 The caribou disappeared when the rifle appeared. Others killed caribou taking only their hides, leaving the carcasses and bones to rot. Not smart. Not part of the agreement. “Caribou wish their bones respected,” Kapatoan told us. Back then, no caribou meant no sinew for sewing or making bows; no fur for winter parkas and pants, for dance clothing; no hides for bedding and packing heavy loads; no legs to Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     32 make shoes, winter mitts and tool cases; no antlers to make hide scrapers and adzes, or sled runners and snow knives; no knee joints for the mouthpiece on a bow drill; no calf skins for children’s clothing; no skins for the drum; no skins to paint with ochre; no rumen, no liver, no nutrients; no fat; no fresh blood soaked in snow to quench thirst and hunger, to energize. No caribou meant no meat—no food.30 Now the caribou are disappearing again. Mary Akoakion (2006-002, Side A: #275-293) told us: The ocean does not freeze too much any more. During this winter, it is not very cold. And last winter was not cold at all. …Seems like the earth is tipping over to one side… Our earth is getting old, too and the weather is getting bad very quickly. Seems like our earth is getting tired. Listening carefully to the Elders’ life histories contemporary audiences learn that people “back then” studied the world carefully. And they shared what they learned through stories. And those stories were “smart, too,” said Andy Akoakhion. But, these “smart stories” are “disappearing,” along with the sea ice and the caribou. Smart people pay attention to what is around them. Learn to watch and listen. They remember what they see and hear. Paying attention, listening to these Elders, remembering their stories, that would be really smart. Because their stories tell us about the kind of smart that the tired, old earth needs. I’m 99% sure that I haven’t got those kind of smarts. Yet. Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     33 Bluffs of Ulukhaktok References Aporta, Claudio. (2003). New ways of mapping: GPS mapping software to plot place names and trail in Igloolik (Nunavut). Arctic, 56(4), 321-327. Atwood, Margaret. (2008). Payback: Debt as metaphor and the shadow side of wealth. Toronto: House of Anansi Press. Badiou, Alain. (2007). The century. Cambridge: Polity Press. Briggs, Jean. (1970). Never in anger: Portrait of an Eskimo family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cayley, David. (Producer). (2008, January 16th). How to think about science: Part 8, Wendell Berry. [Radio Broadcast and Podcast]. In Bernie. Lucht (Executive Producer), Ideas. Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     34 Toronto, ON, Canada: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Podcast retrievable from http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/science/index.html#episode8 Chambers, Cynthia M., & Balanoff, Helen. (2009). Translating “participation” from North to South: A case against intellectual imperialism in social science research. In Dip Kapoor & Steven Jordan (Eds.), Education, participatory action research and social change: International perspectives (pp. 73-88). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Collignon B. & Therrien M. (Eds). 2009. Orality in the 21st century: Inuit discourse and practices. Proceedings of the 15th Inuit Studies Conference. Paris: Inalco. Available at Davis, Wade. (2009). The wayfinders: Why ancient wisdom matters in the modern world. Toronto: House of Anansi Press. Edwards, J. Vincent, & Tubbs, Pierre. (Songwriters). (1975). Right back where we started from [Single song recording]. United Kingdom: United Artists. Gardner, Howard. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books. Keith, Darren, & Arqvik, Jerry. (2009). Taima’na uqamaqattangitlutit: The polar bears can hear: Consequences of words and actions in the Central Arctic. In Collignon B. & Therrien M. (Eds). 2009. Orality in the 21st century: Inuit discourse and practices. Proceedings of the 15th Inuit Studies Conference. Paris: Inalco. Available at . Ulukhaktok Literacies Research Project. (2009). Pihuaqtiuyugut: We are the long distance walkers. Yellowknife, NWT: NWT Literacy Council/Inkit Publishing. Noble, Charles. (2009). Sally O: Selected poems and manifesto. Saskatoon, SK: Thistledown Press. Stern, Pamela. (1999). Learning to be smart: An exploration of the culture of intelligence in a Canadian Inuit community. American Anthropologist, 10(3), 502-514. Sternberg, Robert J. (1985). Beyond IQ: A triarchic theory of human intelligence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.                                                                                                                 1  In  northern  indigenous  communities,  people  expect  that  as  children  mature  into  adults,   they  will  “learn  to  be  smart,”  that  is  to  be  competent  and  creative,  to  have  bodily-­‐ kinesthetic  and  spatial  intelligence,  as  well  as  personal  or  social  intelligence.  People  who   grow  older  but  do  not  mature—that  is,  do  not  learn  these  complex  and  interrelated   intelligences—need  to  “smarten  up.”  Sometimes  people  in  communities  take  it  upon   themselves  to  educate  outsiders,  like  me,  who  do  not  know  how  to  behave  and  participate   Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     35                                                                                                                 in  locally  appropriate  ways.  In  the  north,  humor,  including  teasing,  is  an  appropriate  way  of   helping  someone  to  “smarten  up.”  See  Stern  (1999)  for  more  about  what  intelligence   means  in  Ulukhaktok  using  two  theories  of  implicit  intelligence:  Gardiner’s  (1983/1993)   multiple  intelligences  (linguistic,  logical-­‐mathematical,  spatial,  musical,  bodily-­‐kinesthetic,   interpersonal  and  intrapersonal)  and  Sternberg’s  (1985)  triarchic  model  of  intelligence   where  competences  is  a  product  of  innate  ability,  social  and  physical  environment,  and   experience.   2  Most  if  not  all  these  Elders  had  been  interviewed  before  as  “research”  is  part  of  the  local   economy,  with  as  many  as  six  southern  researchers  in  the  village  in  the  summer  of  2007.   The  point  to  the  Elders’  questions  and  implied  critique  was  that  while  southern  researchers   did  not  know  better,  Emily  and  Alice  should.  What  can  be  asked  and  how  in  an  “interview”   or  “conversation”  is  dictated  as  much  by  the  relationship  between  the  conversational   partners  as  by  the  topic.       3  Rene  Oliktoak  (2005-­‐010  #086).   4  Jean  Taipana  tells  the  story  of  how  Manoyok  always  wanted  his  aunt,  Jean’s  mother,  to   sew  his  clothing  because  her  stitches  were  small  keeping  the  clothes  windproof  and   waterproof  (2006-­‐006,  Side  B:  #280).       5  The  idea  of  the  triumph  of  mediocrity  arriving  in  the  west  during  the  last  century  is  from   Alain  Badiou’s  The  Century  (Cambridge:  Polity  Press,  2007).  I  first  came  across  reference  to   this  in  Charles  Noble’s  Sally  O:  Selected  Poems  and  Manifesto  (Thistle  down  Press,  2009).     6  Andy  Akoakhion  (2005-­‐003,  #393).   7  See  the  interviews  with  Elsie  Nilgak  (2004-­‐018,  #440)  and  Jimmy  Kudlak  (2005-­‐014,  Side   B:  #  065-­‐071).   8  Morris  Nigiyok,  (2006-­‐003,  Side  B,  #143).   9  Noah  Akhiatak,  (Life  History,  2005-­‐015,  #300-­‐360).   10  “Some  people  that  have  relatives,  they  know  the  lifestyle  of  the  deceased  person,  the  way   he/she  hunted  and  their  traits  to  the  people  .  .  .”  (Elsie  Nilgak)…”If  it  was  a  female   (deceased  person)  they  would  remember  the  way  that  person’s  traits  such  as,  if  she  was  a   good  worker  or  a  good  seamstress.  They  would  tell  stories  amongst  themselves  about  her   traits”  (Rene  Taipana).  (Interview  with  Rene  Taipana  &  Elsie  Nilgak,  2004-­‐001,  #148).   11  “Back  then,  the  people  knew  a  lot  about  the  animals.  They  have  talked  about  them  from   the  time  I  can  remember”  (Jimmy  Kudlak,  2005-­‐013,  Side  A:  #430).   12  Jean  Okheena  Kagyut  tells  the  stories  of  humans  that  turn  themselves  into  foxes   (Storytelling,  2006-­‐006,  Side  B:  #034).   13  See  interview  with  Mabel  Nigiyok,  Jean  (Ohkeena/Okhealuk)  Kagyut.  Tools  and  Shelters,   2004-­‐007,  #205).   14  “You  know  it  is  just  like  the  generation  today,  when  one  of  your  relatives  names  their   child  after  one  of  your  immediate  family  members,  you  would  buy  them  clothing,  pampers   or  a  small  gift,  but  in  our  ancestors’  time,  before  we  were  born,  there  was  no  material   clothing  that  was  ready  to  use,  (so)  when  a  child  was  already  named,  the  relative  of  that   namesake  would  then  get  them  something”  (Rene  Taipana).  “A  way  of  saying  ‘Thank  you’”   Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     36                                                                                                                 (Elsie  Nilgak).  “To  use  as  pampers  or  something  to  cover  up  their  body”  (Rene  Taipana).   “Because  they  are  thankful  that  their  family  member  has  been  named  through  a  child”   (Elsie  Nilgak).  “Same  tradition  as  today”  (Rene  Taipana).  (Interview  with  Rene  Taipana  &   Elsie  Nilgak,  2004-­‐001,  075-­‐079).   15  The  interview  is  not  clear  about  whether  amaaqtuq  was  with  new-­‐borns  only  or  goes  on   during  the  pregnancy.  Mabel  Nigiyok  (2004-­‐015,  #427)  said:  “Parents  would  teach  their   children  the  beliefs  and  traditions  that  they  followed  once  they  found  out  their   offspring/child  was  expecting.”  This  suggests  that  the  practice  began  before  the  birth.   16  For  more  information  on  atatat  (amulets)  see  the  interview  with  Ohkeena  (2006-­‐006,   Side  B:  301),  with  Taipana  (2005-­‐010,  Side  A:  125)  and  with  Nilgak  (2006-­‐006,  Side  B:   301).   17  Gender  was  not  an  absolute  categorical  difference;  nor  was  it  used  as  a  hard-­‐and-­‐fast   criterion  for  determining  which  life-­‐skills  a  child  would  learn  or  master.  Women  often   hunted  and  men  learned  to  cook  and  sew.  Ida  Kuneyuna  (2005-­‐005,  Side  A:  #36)0,  in  her   life  history  explains,  she  learned  to  hunt  not  sew:   When  the  ducks  and  other  animals  started  to  arrive,  my  adoptive  parent  would  not  let   me  sleep  in  as  much.  He  sure  taught  me  a  lot  about  hunting.  That  was  the  first  skill   that  I  learnt  without  learning  how  to  sew  or  other  skills.  I  was  not  taught  how  to  sew.     18  In  an  interview  with  Rene  Taipana  Oliktoak  (2005-­‐010,  Side  A:  #186)  about  traditional   clothing,  she  described  this  gradual,  way  of  teaching.     The  father  would  try  to  let  him  hit  the  small  game  and  kill  it,  to  see  if  he  can  kill  it.   Back  then  the  word  was  tuqutikahiniariaha.  And  then  they  would  let  them  try  to  kill   bigger  game  later  on.  They  do  not  teach  them  everyday,  but  would  teach  them  every   other  day.     19  “But  some  ladies  deliver  babies  with  no  helpers.  They  are  smart,  and  tough,”  said  Mabel   Nigiyok.   20  Jean  Okheena  Kagyut  (Life  History,  #1,  2004-­‐010,  Side  A:  #044)  remembered:   Long  ago  they  gave  birth  to  children  even  when  they  were  busy  doing  things.  My   mother  was  herding  caribou  with  Napayualuk,  my  father’s  younger  sister,  when  she   gave  birth  just  out  there.  She  went  into  labour  out  there.  They  were  going  to  herd   caribou  to  the  blinds.  She  went  into  labour  so  they  delivered  the  child.  Must  have   been  my  older  sibling.  But  when  my  mother  and  Napayualuk  were  leaving  the  baby,   she  cried  like  an  older  baby  and  not  like  a  new  born,  left  in  a  crevice.  She  must  have   wanted  the  name  Okhealuk.  They  have  told  of  that  story.   In  a  future  interview  on  storytelling,  Okheena  said:     They  had  ways  like  that  all  right:  throwing  away  their  children.  Throwing  them  away,   because  they  travelled  all  the  time,  always  walking  on  the  land  and  never  staying  in   one  place.  They  (the  babies)  were  on  the  way.  That  is  why  some  people  had  very  few   children.  (2006-­‐006;  Side  A:  ##170).     In  this  interview  she  explains  how  she  was  “picked”  to  survive  and  be  raised  while  others   of  her  siblings  were  not.     Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     37                                                                                                                 21  Interview  with  Elsie  Nilgak  and  Kapotoan  (Mabel  Nigiyok)  on  astronomy  (2004-­‐018,  Side   B:  #648-­‐707).     22  Annie,  Emily  Kudluk’s  aunt,  described  a  time  from  her  childhood  when  they  lived  on   rabbits  for  an  entire  winter,  it  was  a  time  “when  the  land  ran  out  of  food”  she  said.  She  told   this  story  to  Helen  Balanoff  and  myself  while  we  were  eating  at  the  Coop  hotel  in   Ulukhaktok.   23  In  the  interview  with  Elsie  Nilgak  and  Kapotoan  (Mabel  Nigiyok)  on  25  November  2004,   Emily  began  the  interview  by  commenting  that  sun  was  “already  disappearing.”  In  his  life   history,  Andy  Akoakhion  (2005-­‐002,  Side  A:  #005)  noted  that  people  “They  must  have   started  to  travel  (onto  the  ice)  by  the  end  of  January,  beginning  of  February.”  Other  elders   reported  the  move  would  take  place  around  the  winter  solstice  or  Christmas.     24    Morris  Nigiyok  identified  six  different  types  of  snow:   The  snow  all  had  separate  names.  Some  for  snow  houses,  for  tea,  qiquktutikhamutlu.   They  were  not  the  same.  They  did  not  make  snow  houses  with  any  type  of  snow  long   ago.  They  would  go  looking  at  the  snow  and  go  through  it  with  a  harpoon.  They  could   tell  what  type  of  snow  it  was.  When  they  find  the  right  type  of  snow,  then  they  would   build  a  snow  house.  And  then  down  there  on  the  ice,  they  would  have  different  types   of  snow  for  tea.  Then  they  had  a  different  type  of  snow  for  umiktuut.  It  was  a  different   type  of  snow.  Also  the  houses  used  to  drip  back  then.  They  would  make  the  snow  stick   to  the  snow  house  to  make  the  dripping  stop.  That  type  of  snow  is  also  different  from   the  other  snow.  It  is  called  nipitaaq  (base  word  nipi,  to  stick  and  also  voice).  It’s  got  to   be  really  hard  snow,  right?  It  is  called  qiqumaniq  (base  word  qiqu,  cold  or  frozen).  The   one  that  is  nipitaaq,  and  aqiluqaq  (base  word  aqit,  soft)  is  used  to  block  cracks  on  the   snow  house.  And  pukaq  is  used  for  tea  water.  And  the  one  that  is  not  pukaq  is  used  to   build  snow  houses.  All  different  names.  They  are  not  the  same.  Also,  the  snow  used   for  traps  is  different  than  the  one  they  use  to  build  snow  houses.  They  would  find  the   snow  for  the  traps  by  poking  the  snow  with  a  knife,  poking  around  the  snow  near  the   trap.  That  is  what  they  used  to  cover  up  the  traps.  That  snow  outside  is  not  all  the   same,  the  snow  that  people  need  to  use  outside  around  here.  Qaffiuyungaqhivuqli,  I   wonder  how  many  there  are?  Paqaqpalluktuq,  pukaq,  iglukhaut  nakuyuq,  aqilluqaqlu,   qiqumanaklu,  naniriangmutlu  atuqtukhauyuq.  Six  different  snows.   25  Mary  Akoakhion  described  how  people  forecast  weather  from  changes  in  the  sun,  moon,   clouds  and  wind  (2006-­‐002,  Side  A:  #001-­‐033).           26  The  importance  of  sharing  was  repeated  in  the  interviews  with  many  of  the  elders.   However,  in  her  interview  about  the  “long  walk”  inland  during  the  summer  to  hunt  caribou   for  winter  clothing,  Taipana  (2007-­‐001,  Side  A:  #137)  reiterated  what  she  had  said  three   years  earlier:   They  don’t  think  of  it  [what  has  been  hunted]  as  being  [only  for]  them.  They  would   always  share  with  relatives  and  neighbours.  …Also  when  their  relatives  don’t  have   enough  for  clothing,  the  caribou  hides,  which  they  have,  they  would  give  the  hides,   and  also,  meat.   Chambers: “I Was Grown up Before I Was Born”     Transnational  Curriculum  Inquiry  7(2)  2010  http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci     38                                                                                                                 See  Pihuaqtiuyugut:  We  Are  the  Long  Distance  Walkers.  Yellowknife,  NWT:  NWT   Literacy  Council/Inkit  Publishing,  2010  for  more  information  on  the  long  walk  and  on   the  literacies  of  the  Kangiryuarmiut.     27  I  have  edited  the  English  translations  of  the  quotations  to  assist  the  readers  ease  in   understanding  the  elders.  I  apologize  for  any  errors  I  have  made.  I  hope  I  am  not  one  of  the   people  that  Rene  Oliktoak  (Taipana)  referred  to  when  she  said:  “You  know,  these  white   men,  they  just  guess  at  times  and  they  are  never  true  at  times”  (2005-­‐010,  Side  B:  #704)  in   reference  to  a  loon-­‐skin  parka  mislabeled  in  the  museum.   28  See  Jean  Ohkeena  Kagyut  (2007-­‐003  #079)  and  Rene  Taipana  Oliktoak  (2007-­‐001,   #353).   29  References  to  the  “first”  time  in  living  memory  when  there  were  few,  if  any,  caribou  are   found  throughout  the  interviews.     30    The  late  William  Kagyut  (2004-­‐004,  Side  A:  #507;  Side  B:  #002;  007)  speaks  about   caribou  antler  being  used  for  adze,  drills  and  sled  runner.  Rene  Taipana  Oliktoak  in  her  life   history  (2005-­‐007,  Side  A:  #320)  describes  how  caribou  antler  was  used  for  snow  knives   when  there  was  no  copper.  In  the  same  interview,  she  also  describes  how  they  stretched   bull  caribou  hides  on  a  frame  to  make  a  travois  or  gurney  to  carry  her  father  on  the  long   walk  (#354).  When  interviewed  about  tools  and  shelters,  Kapotoan  and  (Jean)  Okheena   (2004-­‐006)  described  the  use  of  caribou  knee  joint  for  making  the  bow  drill  (Side  A:  #036);   caribou  legs  for  tool  cases  (ikhirvik)  (Side  A:  #246);  hollowed  out  caribou  antler  for  needle   cases  (Side  A:  #250);  caribou  antler  above  the  forehead  (qingautaa)  drilled  to  make  a   “straightener”  —a  tool  used  to  straighten  curved  objects  such  as  arrow  shafts;  braided   sinew  from  the  hind  leg  of  a  caribou  (nuilinnganik)  used  to  reinforce  the  curved  part  of  a   bow  (Side  A:  #397)  and  at  the  tips  of  either  end  of  the  bow  (Ihua)  (Side  A:  #380-­‐436);   pounded  caribou  leg  bones  for  pegs  or  spikes  (qapurat)  to  hold  down  the  tent  or  tipi  (Side   A:  #757-­‐760);  skins  for  the  tents  or  tipis  (Side  A:  #775-­‐813);  caribou  hide  with  fur  on  as   mats,  for  example  to  muffle  the  crunching  of  the  snow  at  a  breathing  hole,  so  as  not  to  alert   the  seals  to  the  presence  of  humans    (2004-­‐007;  Side  A:  #269,  Jean).  In  their  interview  on   seasons  and  places  names,  Elsie  Nilgak,  Rene  Okheena,  Taipana  and  Kapotoan  (2004-­‐014,   Side  A:  #114-­‐125)  describe  those  sites  where  people  camped  on  the  coastline  of  Prince   Albert  Sound  to  inakhaktun,  that  is,  make  winter  clothing  with  caribou  skins.  In  the   interview  on  dance  clothing,  Taipana  and  Okheena  (2005-­‐011)  describe  how  this  special   and  decorative  clothing  was  made  from  caribou  hide.  Okheena  explains  that  drums  were   made  from  caribou  skin  (Drum  Dancing,  2005-­‐011,  Side  B:  #810).  Jimmy  Kudlak  explains   the  value  of  caribou  blood:     …when  a  person  has  caught  a  caribou  and  it  went  down  on  the  snow  and  bled  on  the   snow  and  the  snow  is  soaked  with  blood,  they  would  eat  that  snow  which  is  soaked   with  blood,  so  one  cannot  feel  tired  anymore  …  One  does  not  feel  any  tiredness  or   does  not  think  of  hunger  and  will  not  be  thirsty  (2005-­‐014,  Life  History,  #2,  Side  A:   #015).  Jean  Okheena  explains  how  caribou  calf  skins  are  used  for  young  children’s   clothing  (2006-­‐006,  Side  B:  #142).