Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the collaborative Inuit photo-based research program “Views from the North.” For this project, Inuit youths and elders are reusing governmental and anthropological photographs to build Inuit cultural awareness through intergenerational bonds and with use of the web.

Paper long abstract:

This proposed paper will discuss "Views from the North," a collaborative photo-based research program, developed by the Inuit post-secondary school Nunavut Sivuniksavut (NS), Library and Archives Canada (LAC) and Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada). For the project, NS students are hired as researchers to interview elders in their home communities in the territory of Nunavut about archival photographs, made by the Canadian government from the 1940s-1960s. Interviews and archival photographs as well as students' own photographs and follow up interviews with students are now available on a web-based cybercartographic atlas (http://viewsfromthenorth.ca/index.html), reflecting celebrated Inuk filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk's contention that the web is "the most important media tool of the twenty-first century to protect Inuit language and culture."

This project has multiple, transcultural aims: Within Inuit communities, it seeks to foster intergenerational bonds by using archival photographs to encourage discussions about Inuit culture and to facilitate on-going discussions through the website. Within non-Inuit or southern communities, this project seeks to enter Inuit narratives onto the southern, historic record while reversing the governmental and anthropological gaze.

If Inuit students and elders working in the project have reframed archival images with new meanings, they have also left an impression on how research is being conducted among us in the south/non-Inuit community. Collaborative, intergenerational, intercultural and interdisciplinary, this project is located at the intersections of Inuit culture, memory studies, Nunavummiut political strategies, visual anthropology, and the history of photography.