INDUS TRY P ROF IL E
Pam Gross documents Cambridge Bay elder Mary Avalak’s memories of her childhood home during a visit to the region of Iqaluktuuq
do not speak the same language as their
grandparents, and the traumatic impact
of residential schooling lives on through
generational gaps in cultural knowledge.
For many Inuit youth, the draw to navigate the world via the Internet is stronger
than the urge to explore their surrounding
physical landscape.
While the Government of Nunavut
has created multiple policies and resources
designed to bridge education, social
wellness, and IQ, many of these have
difficulty being translated from modern
bureaucratic and political structures to the
ground level realities of living and learning
in a small Arctic community. The IQ Principles, a list of 8 explicit Inuit values to
inform social policy—which include pijitsirniq, the serving and providing for family
and community, and aajiiqatigiinniq, the
making of decisions through consensus—
has been one of the Government’s most
widely-applied and controversial endeavours in this regard.
Forager 2 Fall 2015
Mary Avalak and Annie Anavilok prepare to burn whale fat in a soapstone lamp
during an iglu camp on the sea ice
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