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92 6 A Negotiated Analysis of Inuvialuit Material History This chapter enfranchises Inuvialuit Elders into the process of interpreting their own social and material histories. Preceding case study chapters have suggested that, until recently, the Inuvialuit have had little opportunity to represent themselves and their (his)stories and (her)stories in print, let alone in specialized social sciences, such as archaeology. Inviting Elders into the interpretive process is a way to confront asymmetric power relations by incorporating alternate ways of knowing into the production of cultural knowledge about (by and for) the Inuvialuit. In a very real sense, these Elders are quliaq tohongniaq tuunga, an Uummarmuit phrase that translates to “making [Inuvialuit] histories” (Ida Inglangasuk, 2005). Through their words and stories, they have constructed narratives of memories and events that formed the fabric of their individual experiences. Their families were intertwined in complex webs of relations, and together their stories produce a mosaic of life in the Mackenzie region through the course of the twentieth century. These stories situate and embed the artifacts discussed in this chapter in a cultural context. These objects include a selection of artifacts excavated by Parks Canada archaeologists along the Yukon coastal plain in present-day Ivvavik National Park (figure 6.1). This is a stretch of coastline that forms a cultural byway between the Inuvialuit and Alaskan Inupiat. It is an area where many Elders from Aklavik and Inuvik were raised or spent considerable time as children and young people, some of them in-migrating from Alaska. The other collection is comprised of about 300 ethnographic artifacts purchased by Hudson’s Bay trader Roderick MacFarlane from Anderson River Inuvialuit during the short period he operated a trading post there (1861–1866) (figure 6.1). Anderson River Inuvialuit are related to contemporary families in both Tuktoyaktuk and Paulatuk. Both collections have a negotiated analysis of inuvialuit material history 93 been the subject of Elders’ interviews, as described in chapter 4; a small selection of the objects in these collections is the focus of a negotiated analysis in this chapter. The Elders made it very clear, as is discussed below, that these objects were in general use before their time. As Victor Allen (2005) asserts, “When we were growing up, these things were going out of style.” The Elders did, however, have direct knowledge of certain objects. For others, they drew from oral memories and knowledge of a time long ago transmitted to them from their parents and grandparents. A younger cohort of Elders at our workshop with the MacFarlane Collection, at the Smithsonian Institution in 2009, would later interview their Elders in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region to learn more about this assemblage of 150-year-old objects. Through the process of interviewing, it became clear that the Elders’ conceptions of the artifacts under discussion and of the past itself came from a culturally distinctive viewpoint. Their way of looking at their own history provided a subtle critique of archaeological epistemology and praxis and, in many cases, challenged my own assumptions about material culture classifications . Rather than treat artifacts as objects, Inuvialuit subjectified them by giving them cultural context and situating them within concrete historical circumstances (also see Loring 2001). While discussing an object called a net gauge, for instance, Winnie Cockney (2005) said simply, “My dad used to make that kind before they could [buy] those things.” She (and others) went on to talk about the changes witnessed in their hunting and trapping technologies through the course of her life (Lyons 2010a). The Elders also named the objects in their own language and categorized them from their cultural perspectives in ways that, at times, stood at odds with conventional archaeological doctrine (Lyons 2007). Many times, they drew linguistic connections between traditional and introduced items that would not be obvious to a cultural outsider. Frankie Stefansson noted that, in the Siglitun dialect, the bow and arrow was called pihiksi vialuq, or sometimes just pihiksi (also Billy Archie, 2005); this technology fell out of use early after contact, but its replacement , the rifle, which was used for much the same activity, was called pidiksi. I see the renaming, recontextualizing, and recategorizing of anthropological and archaeological nomenclature and classification by Inuvialuit Elders as a way of reasserting or imprinting Inuvialuit identity onto their history . However, while Elders and other Inuvialuit have exerted considerable expertise and agency throughout the course of interviews, and the Inuvialuit Archaeology Partnership more generally, and have profoundly influenced the trajectories of inquiry and analysis...

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