Jonathan Spellerberg | Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit and Digital Media: From knowledge preservation to postdigital Indigenous knowledge futures

For Inuit in Nunavut (today part of Canada), it is clear that learning about and engaging with Inuit knowledge (Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit; IQ) has tremendous positive effects for wellbeing, economic resilience, and relationships within the community. For this reason, in the last decades, many digitization initiatives focusing on material culture, place names, and recordings of stories and oral histories have worked successfully to make Inuit knowledge more accessible to communities. However, scholars have noted the limited ability of digital media to respond to emplaced, relational, and practice-oriented ways of knowing such as IQ (Griebel and Keith 2021). Unlike in other Indigenous contexts (Christen 2018; Wemigwans 2018), there has not been enough attention paid to how Inuit knowledge practices intersect with digital media use and creation. Moreover, there is only scarce discussion about desirable digital Inuit knowledge futures (cf. Lewis 2024). This is all the more important as the use of digital technologies increases and IQ continues to be under pressure.

Situated within the ERC-supported project TRACES, my PhD research seeks to better understand how digital media are used and created by Inuit as they engage with IQ, as well as what desirable futures of postdigital IQ would look like for Inuit. To this end, I intend to forge collaborations with Inuit knowledge holders, learners, media practitioners, and other cultural experts in Nunavut to engage in ethnographic and creative research. These collaborations will be designed so as to respond to local priorities and to create tangible benefits for the participants.

References:

• Christen, Kimberly. 2018. “Relationships, Not Records: Digital Heritage and the Ethics of Sharing Indigenous Knowledge Online.” In The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities. Routledge.
• Griebel, Brendan, and Darren Keith. 2021. “Mapping Inuinnaqtun: The Role of Digital Technology in the Revival of Traditional Inuit Knowledge Ecosystems.” ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information 10 (11): 749.
• Lewis, Jason Edward. 2024. “The Future Imaginary.” In The Routledge Handbook of Cofuturisms, edited by Taryne Jade Taylor, Isaiah Lavender, Grace L. Dillon, and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay. New York: Routledge.
• Wemigwans, Jennifer. 2018. A Digital Bundle: Protecting and Promoting Indigenous Knowledge Online. Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada: University of Regina Press.