#inuvialuit

I wondering about:

1. Where is a good source for traditional Inuvialuit names? And any information on how naming traditions work.

2. What would it be like to live in Inuvik? I know that it would be very cold in the winter and isolated. What would life be like as a teen girl specifically? And what is the terrain like, specifically trees and bodies of water?

3. What are the differences between different subgroups of the Inuvialuit group? Ex: The Sallirmuit people

4. What is fishing and hunting like up there?

5. Are there any rituals or traditions that would be good to include?

6. How do cultural traditions blend with modern technology?

The Inuvialuit and the federal and Yukon governments signed a new conservation agreement to ensure greater protections for almost 850,000 hectares of the territory’s northeast coast.

The new agreement – which also includes the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, Inuvialuit Game Council, Aklavik Hunters and Trappers Committee and Aklavik Community Corporation – focuses on the northeastern slope of the territory in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region.

If there are native characters in media (ESPECIALLY INUK) usually they’re marked as token characters and not given a whole lot of depth, much less made a main character

A new agreement assures shared decision-making concerning oil and gas rights in Canada’s Western Arctic – Tariuq (Offshore).

It’s the first of its kind with an Indigenous government as a full party.

It was signed last Thursday in Inuvik.

The signatories are Duane Ningaqsiq Smith, the Inuvialuit Regional Corp. chair and chief executive officer; Dan Vandal, the minister of Northern Affairs and Minister responsible for PrairiesCan and CanNor; Northwest Territories Premier Caroline Cochrane; and Yukon Premier Ranj Pillai.

The signing event was cut short due to heavy smoke in Inuvik, which caused poor air quality and concerns of reduced visibility for flights. [...]

Continue Reading.

Yes, I've studied Siglitun and Uummarmiutun, which are from the same dialect continuum. The reason I studied these two languages in particular is because there were a series of grammars and dictionaries produced on these two languages plus one other written by Ronald Lowe. They were funded by C.O.P.E. (the Committee for Original Peoples Entitlement). I've got a link to one of them right here on Amazon, and if you can pick up even one of the six in this series, I highly, highly recommend it. The grammar is a bit dense, and it's written in a way that won't be super familiar to linguistics students (it's a little antiquated, published in 1984, and from Canada), but it's presented very thoroughly, and very well, with lots of example sentences—and, really, with these languages the examples are utterly vital. These are agglutinative and highly synthetic languages, but like all languages, there's more to the meaning than adding up the meanings of the parts.

I ran across two of these books at the UCSD library when I was a grad. student, and I checked them out continuously for something like six years (lol—as a grad. student, you can check a book out for a year, unless someone asks for it back). They made quite an impression on me. I was very fortunate to find a couple of them on Amazon, and have received some others as gifts (a couple from my brother-in-law Will, and a couple from @quothalinguist). If you read The Art of Language Invention, you will have seen an example from Siglitun that I produced using the information in the corresponding book in the series, and @quothalinguist and I made good use of the books when we produced our polysynthetic mouse language Wokuthízhű in season 3 of LangTime Studio.

I'm a big fan of these languages, but of the three, my favorite is Siglitun, due to the phonology.

Maureen Gruben | top: Aidainnaqduanni, Aurora. 2020; bottom: Aidainnaqduanni, Morning. 2020