Opportunity for Collaboration in IPY - "Northern Material Culture through IPY Collections"

Date

4 March 2005

Opportunity for Collaboration in IPY
"Northern Material Culture through International Polar Year
Collections, Then and Now: In the Footsteps of Murdoch and Turner"

For further information, please contact:
Anne Jensen
Ukpeagvik Inupiat Corporation, Science Division
North Slope Borough Commission on Inupiat History, Language, and Culture
E-mail: anne.jensen [at] uicscience.org

Anne Jensen, with the Ukpeagvik Inupiat Corporation and the North Slope
Borough Commission on Inupiat History, Language, and Culture, would like
to hear from anyone who is interested in pursuing the following project
as part of IPY:

"Northern Material Culture through International Polar Year Collections,
Then and Now: In the Footsteps of Murdoch and Turner"

Project Description:
Perhaps the most lasting products of the scientific output from the
first International Polar Year (IPY) are the encyclopedic ethnological
reports resulting from expeditions to Pt. Barrow, Alaska and Fort Chimo
in the Ungava District (now northern Quebec). Together, John Murdoch's
Ethnological Results of the Point Barrow Expedition (1892) and Turner's
Ethnology of the Ungava District (1894) form the intellectual bedrock of
northern native studies in their respected regions. The volumes have
limitations as ethnological studies, they provide a comprehensive and
valuable review of the material culture of Barrow's Inupiat residents
and the Inuit and Innu of the Quebec-Labrador peninsula at the time of
the first IPY. Both books are highly regarded by contemporary northern
native community members across Alaska's North Slope and throughout the
eastern Canadian Arctic.

This project proposes a modern version of these ethnological collecting
projects. Using the categories developed by Murdoch and Turner, with a
few additions (e.g. communications equipment, navigation devices), the
project will document modern equivalents of the items Murdoch collected
and their uses. Photographic (digital) and written documentation will
require modest expenditures. It is possible that much of the
documentation can be accomplished as part of the school curriculum,
involving students with Elders, or as part of a summer/after school
program. It could also provide excellent material for science fair
projects. If there is interest on the part of a museum (e.g. the Inupiat
Heritage Center in Barrow or the Smithsonian Institution where the
original IPY collections are held) and funding is obtained for
conservation and curation costs, then in addition to documentation, the
new project could collect examples of reasonably sized items (i.e. no
airplanes or front-end loaders).

or go to the IASSA website:
http://www.iassa.gl/index.htm