IND U S T RY P ROF ILE
Cambridge Bay elder Paul Omilgoetok provides an interview about the landscape
surrounding Iqaluktuuq River
Annie Atighioyak documenting plant knowledge of an area known as Akilliit
Heritage Society (KHS) has been working
to map and document the Kitikmeot
region’s traditional place names and
preserve them through digital means.
In partnership with the Geomatics and
Cartographic Research Centre (GCRC) at
Carleton University, they have developed
an innovative web-based application to
ensure that this place name knowledge
remains available to Inuit. The resulting
digital database, known as the Kitikmeot
Place Name Atlas, provides an opportunity for Inuit to virtually visit their historical territory and to access oral traditions
related to distant named sites.
The KHS is an organization dedicated
to preserving and promoting the history,
culture, and language of Inuinnait. To
meet this mandate, they run a variety of
workshop-based programs designed to
bring local elders and youth together on
the land to teach and learn traditional
stories and activities associated with a
given area. In the year 2000, the KHS
began systematically collecting Inuktitut
place names through such workshops,
as well as at elders meetings designed to
review and identify Inuktitut place names
on topographic maps. As these mapping
initiatives became more widely known,
individuals from adjacent communities
expressed interest, and the recording of
traditional place names extended to other
communities in the Kitikmeot region. By
2005, the project had sufficient momentum
as to require the use of a more comprehensive digital database to manage the large
amount of information.
Challenges of the Project
The challenges of translating long-standing
Inuit traditions of toponymy into digital
format are multitude. One of the primary
issues has been language. When the KHS
first approached the GCRC in 2006, it was
with a concern that the oral tradition of
place names might become “corrupted”
by their transfer to a text-centric database.
Inuit culture is traditionally one of spoken
words and stories; its ideas are sometimes
altered by translation into script.
While Inuktitut writing systems have
existed since the mid-eighteenth century,
the various dialects and orthographies
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