AKLAVIK
With the help of elders and those who spend time on the land, the Gwich'in Social and Cultural Institute has spent decades collecting information to produce topographic maps using traditional names.
And now, it's finally finished.
On Sept. 15 they unveiled their work at the Gwich'in Tribal Council Annual General Assembly in Aklavik.
"They were very pleased with the compilation of work over 22 years, working with our elders on our Gwich'in place names," said Alestine Andre, heritage researcher for the institute.
"There are very few people that go out on the land these days and over the years and also because people are not on the land the names as well as the information and stories alongside the place names are not being passed on from parents and land-users to young people. It's very important and the elders that we worked with at the time realized and recognized that."
The project was started in 1992, with the institute being established in 1993. Prior to that, work had been done around identifying traditional place names in the Gwich'in Settlement Region.
"We used the information John Ritter had collected during the Berger Inquiry, around that time, used it as a base and added more information as we interviewed elders," said Andre.
Now with the Yukon Native Language Centre, Ritter is overjoyed to see this work advance as it has and become public, rather than hidden away in archives.
"They've got tools now that were unimaginable in my day, but I was in Fort McPherson in the early to mid-70s when I was beginning my work on the Gwich'in language and just had the good fortune to work with this remarkable group of elders in those days," said Ritter.
"People like William Nersyoo Sr., Andrew Kunnizzi and others. Then in Inuvik I met people like Pascale Baptiste and so on. I had some very, very knowledgeable and very interesting teachers in those days. I was doing primarily language documentation but they reminded me that that also included coming to some understanding of their land-base and the places that they had travelled."
Ritter also noted the help of Traditional Chief Johnny Kay, as well as Andre's father, Hyacinthe Andre.
"The amazing thing to my young ears at the time was people talking about at one time routinely making trips by dog team in winter and dog packs in summer to places that otherwise seemed inaccessible," recalled Ritter.
"But the trail from Fort McPherson to Dawson City, they described it as you would on a highway map today and it was all tied in with these traditional names."
The collection includes 22 maps of the Gwich'in Settlement Region that spans the Northwest Territories and Yukon. An interactive atlas offers the oral history and proper pronunciation of those locations - which Andre said they hope to continue adding to.
"You press a button and you can hear the sounding or the pronunciation of the place name. In some cases there is a little video story about the place and some photos," she said.
"Over time we hope to add more photographs as well as other things like videos and other information."
Elders from Inuvik, Tsiigehtchic, Aklavik and Fort McPherson contributed to the project, pinpointing more than 900 traditional locations.
From the information, the institute, with help from Carleton University's Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre, created a large wall-map version that is currently being distributed to schools and public offices in all four communities.
"In Tsiigehtchic, several elders who I know have gone by the band office where the wall map is posted and have said that they were very impressed with the amount of names on the large five-by-seven-foot wall map," said Andre.
The elders role in the project was essential, both in providing information and direction.
"It was actually the elders themselves who selected which other elders we needed to talk to because one particular elder might be only knowledgeable about the area down in the delta, but if we're interviewing other elders up the Arctic Red River, they'd say, 'Go speak to so and so,'" said Andre.
Seeing this project come to fruition is also something Ritter said the elders had asked for.
"People that were sharing the language made it clear that that particular part of the language, the names of the geographic places, the stories associated with them, were very important for young people to learn," said Ritter.
