Résumés
Abstract
Scientists, resource managers and developers increasingly seek out Traditional or Indigenous Knowledge to deepen their understanding of the environment. Yet, even as the value of this knowledge is recognized, misperceptions remain; Traditional Knowledge is still often seen as something static, unchanged from one generation to the next rather than as something flexible and adaptive. Ethnographic research with the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation challenges these perceptions. Their observations of contemporary environmental change in the western Canadian Arctic are becoming part of their Traditional Knowledge, proving that this system of knowledge is resilient and will continue even as the environment becomes ever more unpredictable.
Keywords:
- climate change,
- extractive industry,
- Porcupine Caribou Herd,
- Traditional Knowledge,
- Vuntut Gwitchin,
- Yukon Territory
Résumé
Les scientifiques, les gestionnaires de ressources et les promoteurs recherchent de plus en plus les connaissances traditionnelles ou autochtones pour approfondir leur compréhension de l’environnement. Pourtant, des perceptions erronées subsistent bien que la valeur de ces connaissances soit reconnue : les connaissances traditionnelles sont encore souvent perçues comme statiques, immuables d’une génération à l’autre, plutôt que flexibles et adaptables. Les recherches ethnographiques menées auprès de la Première Nation Gwitchin Vuntut remettent en question ces perceptions. Les observations des changements environnementaux contemporains dans l’ouest de l’Arctique canadien font désormais partie de leurs savoirs traditionnels, prouvant ainsi que ce système de connaissances est résistant et qu’il se maintiendra même si l’environnement devient de plus en plus imprévisible.
Mots-clés :
- changement climatique,
- industrie minière,
- harde de caribous de la rivière Porcupine,
- savoirs traditionnels,
- Vuntut Gwitchin,
- Territoire du Yukon
Parties annexes
Bibliography
- Agrawal, Arun. 1995. “Dismantling the Divide between Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge.” Development and Change 26: 413–439. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.1995.tb00560.x.
- Anderson, David G. 2000. Identity and Ecology in Arctic Siberia: The Number One Reindeer Brigade. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Balikci, Asen. 1963. “Family Organization of the Vunta Kutchin.” Arctic Anthropology 1 (2): 62–69. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40315560.
- Bass, Rick. 2004. Caribou Rising: Defending the Porcupine Herd, Gwich-’in Culture, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.
- Basso, Keith H. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
- Berger, Thomas R. 1977. Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland: The Report of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry: Volume One. Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada.
- Bravo, Michael T. 2009. “Voices from the Sea Ice: The Reception of Climate Impact Narratives.” Journal of Historical Geography 35: 256–278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2008.09.007.
- Brightman, Robert. 1993. Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human-Animal Relationships. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Brown, Katrina. 2016. Resilience, Development and Global Change. London and New York: Routledge.
- Butler, Caroline. 2006. “Historicizing Indigenous Knowledge: Practical and Political Issues.” In Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management, edited by Charles R. Menzies, 107–126. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.
- Cameron, Emilie S. 2012. “Securing Indigenous Politics: A Critique of the Vulnerability and Adaptation Approach to the Human Dimensions of Climate Change in the Canadian Arctic.” Global Environmental Change 22: 103–114. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.11.004.
- Cameron, Raymond D., Walter T. Smith, Robert G. White and Brad Griffith. 2005. “Central Arctic Caribou and Petroleum Development: Distributional, Nutritional, and Reproductive Implications.” Arctic 58 (1): 1–9. https://doi.org/10.14430/arctic382.
- Carroll, Clint. 2015. Roots of Our Renewal: Ethnobotany and Cherokee Environmental Governance. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
- Collignon, Béatrice. 2006. “Inuit Place Names and Sense of Place.” In Critical Inuit Studies: An Anthology of Contemporary Arctic Ethnography, edited by Pamela Stern and Lisa Stevenson, 187–205. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.
- Cruikshank, Julie. 2005. Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. Vancouver: UBC Press.
- Fienup-Riordan, Ann. 1994. Boundaries and Passages: Rule and Ritual in Yup’ik Eskimo Oral Tradition. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
- Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London and New York: Routledge.
- Johnson, Leslie Main. 2010. Trail of Story, Traveller’s Path: Reflections on Ethnoecology and Landscape. Edmonton: AU Press.
- Joly, Tara. 2017. Making Productive Land: Utility, Encounter, and Oil Sands Reclamation in Northeastern Alberta, Canada. PhD Dissertation, University of Aberdeen.
- Katz, S., 2010. Traditional Knowledge on Caribou Ecology: Vegetation -> Caribou -> Wolf Food Chain Final Report. Inuvik, NT: Aurora Research Institute.
- Loovers, Jan Peter Laurens. 2010. ‘You Have to Live It’: Pedagogy and Literacy with Teetł’it Gwich’in. PhD Dissertation, University of Aberdeen.
- McGregor, Deborah, Steven Whitaker and Mahisha Sritharan. 2020. “Indigenous Environmental Justice and Sustainability.” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 43: 35–40. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2020.01.007.
- Nadasdy, Paul. 1999. “The Politics of TEK: Power and the ‘Integration’ of Knowledge.” Arctic Anthropology 36 (1/2): 1–18. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40316502.
- Nadasdy, Paul. 2007. “The Gift in the Animal: The Ontology of Hunting and Human-Animal Sociality.” American Ethnologist 34 (1): 25–43. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2007.34.1.25.
- Nelson, Richard K. 1983. Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
- Nuttall, Mark. 1992. Arctic Homeland: Kinship, Community and Development in Northwest Greenland. London: Belhaven Press.
- Porcupine Caribou Management Board, No title. http://www.pcmb.ca/ (Accessed 17 September 2018).
- Ridington, Robin. 1990. Little Bit Know Something: Stories in a Language of Anthropology. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
- Sandlos, John. 2007. Hunters at the Margin: Native People and Wildlife Conservation in the Northwest Territories. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press.
- Scott, Colin. 1996. “Science for the West, Myth for the Rest? The Case of James Bay Cree Knowledge Production.” In Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge, edited by Laura Nader, chapter 3. New York: Routledge.
- Sherry, Erin and Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation. 1999. The Land Still Speaks: Gwitchin Words about Life in Dempster Country. Whitehorse: Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation and Erin Sherry.
- Strong, Walter, 2017. “Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Project Officially one for the History Books.”, December 28. CBC https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/mackenzie-valley-gas-project-no-more-1.4465997 (Accessed 18 July 2022).
- Tanner, Adrian. 1979. Bringing Home Animals: Religious Ideology and the Mode of Production of the Mistassini Cree Hunters. London: C. Hurst and Company.
- Tejsner, Pelle. 2013. “Living with Uncertainties: Qeqertarsuarmiut Perceptions of Changing Sea Ice.” Polar Geography 36 (1-2): 47–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/1088937X.2013.769282.
- Tejsner, Pelle and Djuke Veldhuis. 2018. “Climate Change as (Dis)Equilibrium: Behavioral Resilience in the Greenlandic Arctic.” Human Ecology 46: 701–715. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-018-0026-7.
- Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
- Turnbull, David. 2007. “Maps, Narratives and Trails: Performativity, Hodology and Distributed Knowledges in Complex Adaptive Systems - An Approach to Emergent Mapping.” Geographical Research 45 (2): 140-149. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-5871.2007.00447.x.
- Usher, Peter J. 2004. “Caribou Crisis or Administrative Crisis? Wildlife and Aboriginal Policies on the Barren Grounds of Canada, 1947–60.” In Cultivating Arctic Landscapes: Knowing and Managing Animals in the Circumpolar North, edited by David G. Anderson and Mark Nuttall, 79-92. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
- Vergunst, Jo and Arnar Árnason. 2012. “Introduction: Routing Landscape: Ethnographic Studies of Movement and Journeying.” Landscape Research 37 (2): 147–154. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2012.669955.
- Wenzel, George W. 2009. “Canadian Inuit Subsistence and Ecological Instability – If the Climate Changes, Must the Inuit?” Polar Research 28 (1): 89–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-8369.2009.00098.x.
- Westman, Clinton N., Tara L. Joly, H. Max Pospisil and Katherine Wheatley. 2020. “Encountering Moose in a Changing Landscape: Sociality, Intentionality, and Emplaced Relationships.” Ethnos, 87 (5), 932–962. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2020.1841262.
- Whyte, Kyle. 2017. “Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” English Language Notes 55 (1-2): 153–162. https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-55.1-2.153.
- Wilson, Shawn, Andrea V. Breen and Lindsay DuPré. 2022. “Mining for Culture or Researching for Justice? Unsettling Psychology through Indigenist Conversation.” In Cultural Methods in Psychology: Describing and Transforming Cultures, edited by Kate C. McLean, 410–426. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Wray, Kristine and Brenda Parlee. 2013. “Ways We Respect Caribou: Teetł’it Gwich’in Rules.” Arctic 66 (1): 68–78. https://doi.org/10.14430/arctic4267.
- Zentner, Emilie, Maik Kecinski, Angeline Letourneau and Debra Davidson. 2019. “Ignoring Indigenous Peoples - Climate Change, Oil Development, and Indigenous Rights Clash in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.” Climatic Change 155: 533–544. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02489-4.