Settlement, Subsistence, and Change Among the Labrador Inuit by David C. Natcher & Lawrence Felt & and Andrea Procter

Author:David C. Natcher & Lawrence Felt & and Andrea Procter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-88755-425-4
Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
Published: 2012-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

The More Things Change: Patterns of Country Food Harvesting by the Labrador Inuit on the North Labrador Coast

Lawrence Felt, David C. Natcher, Andrea Procter, Nancy Sillitt, Katie Winters, Tristan Gear, Darren Winters, Susan Nochasak, Sheldon Andersen, Rose Ford, Holly Flowers, Susan Rich, and Roland Kemuksigak

This chapter reports on a recent collaborative participatory action study (Kemmis and McTaggart 2000; Reason and Bradbury 2001; Couglan and Brannick 2007) on country or wildfood harvesting in the five north central Labrador communities of Nain, Hopedale, Postville, Makkovik, and Rigolet. It is best understood as an Inuit-initiated and -directed attempt to provide a more quantitative Inuit voice to the level and relevance of country food utilization in response to Section 12.4.6 of the Labrador Inuit Land Claims Agreement, which seeks to establish an Inuit Harvest Level that “Shall be as accurate a quantification as possible of the amount of a species or population of wildlife or plant required by Inuit for the Inuit Domestic Harvest” (210).

While information sources such as Inuit knowledge and historical information are also encouraged in the agreement, the new government of Nunatsiavut was interested in developing a capacity to carry out research based on “Western” science to supplement the more traditional Inuit voice grounded in Inuit cosmology and ontology. The reasoning for such a strategy was simply that, since the co-management boards mandated by the agreement were heavily premised on Western science, in order to protect Inuit subsistence interests, their leadership would need to understand Western science and develop the capacity to express it as something of a second voice of their own. Rather than denigrating or devaluing more traditional knowledge, development of this additional voice was believed to strengthen the relevance of traditional knowledge and therefore build Inuit-made management solutions derived from both voices. Given the very high priority Inuit negotiators placed upon protecting and preserving wildfood harvesting activities for its citizens (See Procter this volume; Brice-Bennett 1997), it was felt such an approach was essential.

Change and Continuity in Subsistence Inuit Harvesting

The last fifty years have brought profound political, socio-economic, demographic, and cultural changes to the Inuit and Kablunangajuit (settlers living on the Labrador coast, many of whom have intermarried with their Inuit neighbours, see Ben-Dor 1966; Kennedy 1977, 1982, 2009) who form the beneficiaries of Nunatsiavut. Settlement is now more geographically compressed to five communities, located in what is best considered the central Labrador coast, as a result of largely coerced resettlement from more northerly settlements of Nutak, Hebron, Ramah, and other settlements (Evans this volume; Brice-Bennett 1994; Royal Commission on Labrador 1974; Kennedy 1985). Outmigration from the coast has resulted in a large proportion of Nunatsiavut citizens now residing completely outside the land claims settlement and Inuit lands areas (Community Accounts 2006; Government of Nunatsiavut 2008). As of 2008, approximately 40 percent of beneficiaries under the agreement resided in the Upper Lake Melville area, including the towns of Happy Valley–Goose Bay, North West River, and Mud Lake.

While these communities are still geographically remote in the sense that

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