The Inuvialuit Living History Project

The Inuvialuit Living History (ILH) project is a community-based digital heritage project that celebrates and presents Inuvialuit heritage and culture, past and present, to connect Inuvialuit with ancestral artifacts that are curated and housed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, as well as to educate the general public and to create awareness of Inuvialuit ways of life in the Arctic. . The ILH is a longstanding partnership between the Inuvialuit Cultural Resource Centre, Inuvialuit Communications Society, Parks Canada, Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre, Ursus Heritage Consulting, the University of Western Ontario, and Simon Fraser University. Our project is guided by the knowledge and direction of Inuvialuit Elders, language experts, knowledge holders and community members. 

The project began in 2009 with the goal of connecting Inuvialuit community members with the MacFarlane Collection. Representing over 5000 natural history specimens and 300 cultural objects assembled and purchased by the Hudson Bay trader Roderick MacFarlane in the 1860s from Anderson River Inuvialuit, it would become a founding collection of the Smithsonian InstitutionA team of Elders, knowledge holders, seamstresses, and educators attended a week-long workshop to reconnect with and learn about the collection and to bring that knowledge back to their home communities in the ISR. The trip, documented and was shared through our first project website and launched in 2011, included high-quality photos of each object and documentary style videos where Inuvialuit shared their experiences with the collection, in person in Washington and during later outreach activities in Inuvialuit communities.

The second phase of our project has focused on hosting multi-generational events in the community and on the land,celebrating living Inuvialuit traditions. As part of this process, participants have created digital content about Inuvialuit lifestyles, knowledge, language, heritage places and cultural practices. These are brought together and presented in this website as photo galleries, video and audio clips, an interactive map of important places, and ‘trading cards’ showcasing Inuvialuit from across the territory and beyond. Educational and language resources are provided to help pass along cultural knowledge to younger generations. Our first website has become incorporated into this one as an archive where people can explore several digital Inuvialuit museum collections, including archaeological, historical and natural history objects and belongings of Inuvialuit ancestors. 

Inuvialuit have survived and thrived in Arctic conditions since time immemorial. Our people persevered social and cultural impacts, adapting to changing environments and the encroachment of waves of different groups of people that brought diseases, foreign implements, ways and ideas. Our Inuvialuit values and resilience have carried us forward over the years. As Inuvialuit, we continue to live in harmony with the lands and waters, ensuring that the resources that sustain us are respected and cared for.

The arrival of Europeans caused our ancestors to confront rapid economic and social change. Our Elders experienced great trauma through disease brought by explorers, traders and whalers, as well as intergenerational trauma due to the residential school system; these are social and cultural impacts at the hands of colonialism that continue to this day. Inuvialuit resilience and determination have been instrumental in countering these forces, particularly during those times of hardship and overcoming industrial encroachment and government subjugation. We are grateful for our Elders who worked tirelessly for Inuvialuit rights and freedoms, especially the Committee for Original People’s Entitlement (COPE) members, negotiators and signatories of the Inuvialuit Final Agreement (IFA). Inuvialuit cultural practices of kinship, unity and sharing have allowed our people to survive extreme hardship, and to adapt and thrive in the world today.

The Inuvialuit Settlement Region was formally recognized by the federal government on June 5, 1984 when the Inuvialuit Final Agreement (IFA) was signed, a formal land claim agreement between the Inuvialuit and the State.  In the 1970s, Inuvialuit trappers, harvesters and Elders began the important work toward establishing a comprehensive land claim agreement with the Canadian Government to ensure preservation of our culture and to have control over the management and use of our lands and wildlife.  We celebrate Inuvialuit Day on June 5 each year, as we have legal control and sovereignty over our traditional lands and wildlife, and are active participants in the national and international policy development and economy.  The IFA exemplifies and honours Inuvialuit land use and occupancy of our homelands, as well as the rootedness and connectedness that Inuvialuit have to the Western Canadian Arctic that we call home.  There are many significant placenames that portray Inuvialuit land use and occupancy of the ISR, many that continue to be used today.

Today we use the term Inuvialuit, which means ‘the real people’, to describe ourselves as the original peoples of the Western Canadian Arctic region.  Sivullirmiut is another term used by Inuvialuit and other Inuit groups, which translates to ‘First People’.  We see reminders of our Inuvialuit ancestral groups out on the land, through traces of their tent rings, sod houses, tools, and other implements and objects they made when travelling and subsisting on the land. 

Inuvialuktun belongs to the language family, Inuktut, that connects all Inuit groups across Arctic North America and Greenland. Inuvialuktun is the overarching term to describe the three dialects Inuvialuit speak. These dialects evolved in communities across our region and, while mutually intelligible, are as distinct as the people that speak them. Uummarmiutun, meaning “people of the willows and evergreens” refers to the dialect spoken mostly by people living in the Mackenzie Delta region, including Aklavik and Inuvik. This dialect developed out of the Alaskan Iñupiat language. Sallirmiutun (previously referred to as Siglitun), meaning “People located close to the shore”, is typically spoken by people in Ikaahuk (Sachs Harbour), Paulatuuq (Paulatuk), and Tuktuuyaqtuuq (Tuktoyaktuk). Kangiryuarmiutun, meaning “people of the large bay”, is the dialect spoken by people in Ulukhaktok. This dialect developed from the Inuit languages of the central arctic and is considered a dialect of Inuinnaqtun which is spoken in communities like Cambridge Bay, Kugluktuk. The language structure closely resembles Inuktitut spoken in Nunavut. 

The influences from other Inuit languages on Inuvialuktun dialects reflects the rich past of our people who came from different regions all over the North and eventually settled in what we now called Nunaqput or the Inuvialuit Settlement Region. It shows our strong historical bonds with our Inuit neighbours to the West and East, where many of our ancestors travelled to or originated from. As our people move more freely between communities and outside of Nunaqput, we see all three dialects being spoken by Elders and language learners in all the communities. 

Inuvialuktun dialects were still the dominant languages spoken amongst Inuvialuit during the whaling and European fur trading era despite the introduction of English. During the bowhead whaling era at Herschel Island (ca. 1890-1910), Inuit working in the region spoke a pidgin of Iñupiaq and Siglitun to communicate. In the 1920s, Inuvialuktun dialects were still the main language amongst Inuvialuit families. By the 1940s, as Inuvialuit increasingly moved into settled communities, speaking English for business and trade purposes was considered an asset. Inuvialuit valued English as a second language as it provided the opportunity to fully engage in economics, politics, and social life with settlers.  

A dramatic shift occurred after the second World War and with the greater entrenchment of the residential school system. English only instruction in schools, separation from family, and pressures to assimilate in the 1950s caused a whole generation to lose their traditional language. As a result, certain family members were estranged from one another and were not able to communicate. The negative impacts of the loss of Inuvialuktun were felt deeply by Inuvialuit everywhere. As a response, the Committee for Original People’s Entitlement (COPE) created the Inuvialuktun Language Commission in 1981, who in turn formed the Inuvialuktun Language Program. The goal of this program was to record and analyse Inuvialuktun, integrate Inuvialuktun into the school program, create teaching materials, and promote the preservation and revitalization of Inuvialuktun dialects for the future.