The place where Arctic char runs
Video initiative captures youth and elder knowledge exchange
Beth Brown
Northern News Services
Monday, October 3, 2016
IKALUKTUTIAK/CAMBRIDGE BAY
Cambridge Bay elder Richard Ekpakohak calls his childhood home at Ikaluktuuq on Victoria Island "the place where the char runs."
Mary Avalak holds up a carry bag made from the skin of an Arctic char. The Cambridge Bay elder participated in an elder youth initiative in August, developed to share traditional knowledge. - photo courtesy of Natasha Thorpe |
The site, which has been in use for more than 4,000 years, is a primary place for a commercial Arctic char harvest.
This past summer Ekpakohak went back to Ikaluktuuq with other community members from Cambridge Bay to catch more than char - they went to capture heritage.
By Christmas, the community will release a documentary and written report about a five-day elder youth exchange camp organized through the Hunters and Trappers Organization in collaboration with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
The camp, which ran from Aug. 25 to 29, was an effort to merge Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (Inuit traditional knowledge) with modern science.
Around 30 participants worked to learn and share traditional ways of catching and caring for Arctic char, as well as the process of tagging and tracking the fish today.
"People from the south and even our children here don't know how to survive on the land," said Ekpakohak. "People think that there is no food out there, but I showed the students what kind of plants they could take and eat, and how they store fish and meat out on the land."
The documentary and knowledge sharing initiative is part of a larger and ongoing Arctic char tagging project run though the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the University of Laval.
To make the film, community members learned the basics of videography through mentorship with Pablo Saravanja of aRTLeSS Collective, a Yellowknife film studio and production company. Saravanja called the project a kind of community-based participatory film-making experience.
"It's important to teach people to represent themselves on camera and to be able to tell their own stories," he said. "It's not up to reporters or storytellers from the south to try to translate what it is to be a Northerner."
Community members were trained to conduct interviews with fisheries officers and set up their recordings, photos, video and text on a database called Trailmark Systems.
Natasha Thorpe of Trailmark Systems said they work with Northern communities to enable them to archive their own traditional knowledge, "so it is in their hands."
Thorpe said the knowledge exchange camp "was everything and anything to do with fish."
Researchers gave presentations for both the children and the elders, teaching them to weigh and measure the fish. Students also learned to remove the otolith, or ear bone, from an Arctic char. The bone has rings around it and can be used to identify the age of the fish, like the rings of a tree.
Men taught the children to set nets and bring the fish in, and women taught them how to cut the fish traditionally using ulus, and to make dried Arctic char called piffi.
Thorpe said one highlight was when elder Mary Avalak demonstrated how to make a bag out of fish skin. She left the Arctic char out for a few days to soften it, and then cut a line under the gills to peel back the skin until it was inside out, and filled the skin with moss. When it was finished the bag could be used to carry things like water or seal oil.
Mary Avalak is Richard Ekpakohak's sister and this was the first time they had returned to the site together since moving away after the death of their mother in 1967. Their brother Jack was also working nearby at a fishing camp up the river.
"There was a lot of emotions but after all the emotions came out there was peace and healing, knowing that we have moved on," said Ekpakohak.
He remembers playing with his siblings and the other children among the many fishing camps set up along the river. "In the summer time that was the only place that there was commercial fishing," he said. "Every summer was just like a tent city."
All these years later, Ekpakohak said it was good to see children playing there again.
"They were right into it. All the students were down at the water with their life jackets, even before the guys were ready to go check the nets," he said. "They were so eager to check the nets and work on fish."
