Knowing Places: The Inuinnait, Landscapes, and the Environment

This volume deals with the Inuit geographic knowledge, and explores the importance of the land in the construction of identity. Inuinnait geographic knowledge is organized around three central concepts: relativity, connectivity, and subjectivity, that also organize the social structure, and the Inuinnaqtun language. It is a knowledge in action, and involves a mix of practical skills such as orientation and meteorology, and of oral tradition: stories and place names told and remembered. Place names describe features as seen and understood by specific people, in specific contexts and experiences related to life and travels on the land. Along with the stories of Inuit epics and family tales, they transform the wide expanses of the physical landscapes into ‘memoryscapes,’ inhabited by human beings, animals, and spirits of all kinds.