Climate, Culture, Change: Inuit and Western Dialogues with a Warming North

Sila Wisdom for a Time of Change

19 Sila Wisdom for a Time of Change Under the leadership of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the Canadian government has expressed significant interest in the changes that are impacting the northern ecology of the polar bear and Inuit culture. In his first year of power, Harper held a news conference in Churchill, Manitoba, also on the west Hudson Bay coast, to announce that the melting of the Northwest Passage has highlighted the importance of enhancing “our knowledge of, and presence in, the region.”1 Here and in later announcements Prime Minister Harper stated that because “use it or lose it is the first principle of sovereignty,” his government would defend Canada’s claim by increasing “scientific inquiry and development” in the North. What is interesting about his concern is that the issue of climate change was never mentioned once, despite the rising interest in a Northwest Passage being related to its odd melting. This omission is consistent with the press release that came out of Minister of Environment Jim Prentice’s office following the Polar Bear Roundtable. Though it stated that the wealth of knowledge exchange will inform “decisions related to the conservation and management of the polar bear,” it did so in a way that neglected to once mention the word “climate.”2 In contrast to the Conservative government approach that will be further clarified in later chapters, many Inuit have been connecting their rising polar bear irksi and the melting Northwest Passage with the warming of northern weather, or Sila. Much of my early e-mail correspondence with Jaypeetee Arnakak centred on the relevance of Sila to northern warming . Trying to give me a broad sense of this term, he described Sila as an ever-moving and immanent force that surrounds and permeates Inuit life, with it most often being experienced in Climate Culture Change 20 the weather.3 Contrasting his Inuit Qaujimatuqangit (iq) view of Sila, I brought knowledge to our dialogues that was derived from two largely divided academic disciplines. At one end were Inuit ethnographies that began in the opening decades of the twentieth century with researchers like Knud Rasmussen meeting Inuit such as Najagneq. While journeying with the Danish Fifth Thule Expedition across the Canadian Arctic in search of Inuit worldviews, he heard of Sila described as “a strong spirit, the upholder of the universe, of the weather, in fact all life on earth.”4 Ethnographic sources like his have depicted Sila as the spirit of the air,5 a mystic power permeating all of existence and a god-like “Supreme Being.”6 Also informing my knowledge was the more recent climate research on iq and northern warming that consistently refers to Sila as a direct translation for weather.7 For example, the research by Natasha Thorpe found Kitikmeot elders to use Hila—a regional variation on Sila8—as a translation for weather.9 These diverging disciplinary interpretations of Sila reflect a significant issue that can block the kind of intercultural and interdisciplinary dialogue I propose in this book. In the words of Dyanna Riedlinger and Fikret Berkes, the central problem in conducting such research is that there is a lack of “conceptual frameworks on how to bridge the gap between Inuit knowledge and western science.”10 By the time I boarded a plane to Chesterfield Inlet, Nunavut, Arnakak’s correspondence on Sila had clarified the importance of attempting to traverse these interdisciplinary and intercultural gaps. Upon my arrival, the town’s office recommended Simionie Sammurtok as a workshop co-facilitator and translator because of his concern about the North’s changing Sila and his leadership as president of the local Hunter and Trapper Organization. As we met the afternoon before the workshop to talk about it and what it could look like, Sammurtok talked about the increasingly unpredictable Sila in relation to hunter uncertainty, shifting polar bears, and various stories. When the workshop began the next day, the two of us intro- Sila Wisdom for a Time of Change 21 duced our concerns about northern climate change and the kind of knowledge-sharing we were aiming for over the next two days. Sitting with us around the table were Andre Tautu, Eli Kimmaliardjuk, Louis Autut, Casemir Kriteedhuk, Elizabeth Tautu, Bernie Putulik, and Mark Amarok—a group of elders, hunters, and a Northern Ranger. They talked of many signs of climate change, including irregular polar bear behaviour, melting ice, and the...