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Discovered the first-ever linguistic link between Siberia and Canada

Published on April 4, 2008 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Arctic / Northern Regions, history, inuit, language, Native American

While studying an ancient language now spoken by only a few hundred people in a remote corner of Siberia, linguist Edward Vajda has found the first-ever linguistic link between the Old World and any First Nation in Canada, the Ottawa Citizen reports. “This is a big breakthrough to be able to link these”, anthropologist Jack Ives said on Wednesday.

Vajda found that the speakers of the Ket language in Russia’s Yenisei River region, and the Athapaskan-speaking native people in Canada and the U.S. (including the Dene, Gwich’in, Navaho and Apache) use almost identical words for canoe and such component parts as prow and cross-piece.

Mr. Vajda’s claim of a Dene-Yeniseic-connection was endorsed last month at an conference in Alaska attended by linguists and anthropologists. Vajdas discovery is being compared with the 18th-century “Indo-European” revolution that ultimately classified English, French and other modern languages with ancient Sanskrit.

>> read the whole story in The Ottawa Citizen

For more information see a posts on this issue over at anthropology.net: More on Vajda’s Siberian-Na-Dene Language Link where also points of controversy are discussed.

Book review: Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

Inuit language thrives in Greenland

Published on July 4, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Arctic / Northern Regions, inuit, language

In the 1960s and 1970s, elders in Greenland feared their language would be lost. Today, the vast majority of Greenlanders – 92 per cent – are fluent in their native tongue. Inuit language thrives in Greenland, Nunatsiaq News reports:

You can find a copy of Harry Potter, translated in Greenlandic, at the local library of Greenland’s capital. Also available are the translated works of William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Ernest Hemingway. Fifty Greenlandic publications are produced each year, says Carl Christian Olsen, head of Greenland’s language secretariat and chair of the languages commission.

(…)

On the streets of Nuuk, Greenlandic is often spoken by children, who all seem to carry cellphones. They send text messages to one another, in both abbreviated Danish and Greenlandic, shortening words like qujanaq, or thank you, to qujan.

(…)

Beyond books, Greenlandic is practiced in a lively music scene, ranging from soulful Greenlandic folk tunes to jazz to gangsta rap

In Canadian Nunavut on the other hand, the situation is quite different and according to Nunatsiaq News, some in Nunavut fear that Inuktitut, and related dialects like Inuinaqtun, are dying. Inuit language has been treated differently in Greenland and Canada:

While Inuit in Nunavut were punished for speaking Inuktitut in residential schools, Greenland has a long history of teaching Greenlandic in schools, since the early 20th century.

It’s also a consequence of having those missionaries decide that the language ought to be written with standard Roman orthography, rather than the more-difficult-to-reproduce syllabic system popularized by missionaries in Canada’s eastern Arctic.

Having money to translate and print such books helps, too. Olsen says he’s disappointed that Canada, a country of “enlightened people,” doesn’t give Inuktitut the same sort of language funding that French receives as an official language

>> read the whole story in Nunatsiaq News

Nunatsiaq News also writes about Qikiqtani Inuit Association (QIA) that wants the Government of Nunavut bring in new laws that would give the Inuit language the same status within Nunavut that the French language enjoys in Quebec, see QIA wants language laws dumped, re-written.

How filmmaking is reviving shamanism

How internet changes the life among the First Nations in Canada

In the 1960s and 1970s, elders in Greenland feared their language would be lost. Today, the vast majority of Greenlanders - 92 per cent - are fluent in their native tongue. Inuit language thrives in Greenland, Nunatsiaq News reports:

You can…

International Polar Year opened – Anthropologists involved

Published on February 28, 2007 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Arctic / Northern Regions, ecology nature, inuit

More than 50,000 scientists from 63 nations turned their attention to the world’s poles when the International Polar Year officially opened on Monday: It unifies 228 research projects about the impact of global warming in the Arctic the Washington Post reports.

Anthropologists are also part of it. “Anthropologists are also planning to study the culture and politics of some the Arctic’s 4 million inhabitants” according to the newspaper.

More information can be found on the website of the Polar Year where the participants already have started blogging. The website provides lots of RSS feeds.

One of the projects about people in the Arctic is:

NOMAD: Reindeer herding from a reindeer perspective:

The central idea of NOMAD is the establishment of a mobile observation platform. This is facilitated by a nomadic tent camp that houses an interdisciplinary group of researchers. They follow the annual migration of semi-domesticated reindeer in Kola Peninsula, Northwest Russia. This is a novel effort, putting social and other scientists on the reindeer trek on a long-term basis. By positioning themselves in close contact with migrating reindeer herds the researchers observe the delicate ecology and conditions of renewable resource use in the subarctic.
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The NOMAD Blog and Forum will start as soon as the first photographs and entries of the fieldwork diary will be sent over from the camp to the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle, Germany). We reckon this will happen in late April 2007.

On the website of the Indigenous People International Polar Year, we can see presentations from a workshop and videos. Among others, you can watch the whole Opening of the Indigenous Peoples International Polar Year, in Guovdageaidnu, Norway online – a three-day’s conference! Unfortunately there are no subtitles (presentations in both Norwegian, English, Saami).

Recent news coverage about the Polar Year

Greenland meltdown could change the world: If ice covering the island melts, rising sea levels could displace millions from Florida to Bangladesh (The Vancouver Sun, 28.2.07)

More than 50,000 scientists from 63 nations turned their attention to the world's poles when the International Polar Year officially opened on Monday: It unifies 228 research projects about the impact of global warming in the Arctic the Washington Post…

Rethinking Nordic Colonialism – Website Sheds Light Over Forgotten Past

Published on December 4, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Arctic / Northern Regions, history, indigenous people / minorities, inuit, Saami, Us and Them, websites

56 artists, theorists, politicians, and grassroots activists from all over the world participated in the project that took place in Iceland, The Faroe Islands, Sapmi, Norway, Sweden and Finland. They exchanged colonial and postcolonial experiences and strategies, examined why this past has been forgotten and how it continues to reproduce itself as waves of intolerance, xenophobia, and nationalism.

A week ago the (impressive!) website of this project (which has also been published on DVD) has been launched in Oslo. You can spend hours and days, reading the papers, watching videos and movies, looking at exhibitions, listening to presentations.

In the introduction Frederikke Hansen and Tone Olaf Nielsen explain:

The colonial history of the Nordic region is a dark chapter that seems to have slipped the memory of many of the Nordic populations. Although it continues to make itself very much felt in the region’s former colonies, this history is alarmingly absent in the collective memory of the once-colonizing Nordic countries.

With Rethinking Nordic Colonialism: A Postcolonial Exhibition Project in Five Acts, we aim to shed light over this history. Not only do we hope to explain why this past has been forgotten in some parts of the region. We also want to show how this history continues to structure the Nordic societies today, and how our contemporary problems of intolerance, xenophobia, and nationalism have their roots in this past.

I’ll come back with more blog posts about this website

>> visit Rethinking Nordic Colonialism

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How filmmaking is reviving shamanism

Published on October 3, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Arctic / Northern Regions, culture traditions, inuit, religion cosmology, Visual Anthropology

As noted earlier, Inuit film maker Zacharias Kunuk explores in his film The Journals of Knud Rasmussen how missionaries force-fed Christianity to the Inuit in the 1920s.

Now the film has made its way to the International Film Festival in Toronto and to movies across Canada. In an interview with the Edmonton Journal, Kunuk tells about how film making has contributed to a revival of Inuit shamanism:

“For our Inuit audience and for our young people, we’re showing that we survived 4,000 years under shamanism: Be kind to animals, use only what you need. We had everything — food, clothes. You had to be a good hunter to be rich. Christianity came, all that was put aside. Growing up, the minister was telling us don’t do drum dances, don’t tell legends because they’re the work of the devil. It’s brainwashing. It happened in New Zealand, Australia, Africa. It probably all happened the same.

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“I wanted to put it down on record. For 4,000 years of our history, it is only the last 85 years that Christianity came. It doesn’t balance. We traded 100 taboos — laws of nature — for Ten Commandments, which now I don’t have any trust for after looking at where they came from. Love thy neighbour? They’re bombing the hell out of each other! But we had to throw away all these rules of the land, taboos we just dumped so we could go to heaven.”

(…)

“Shamanism was here, and it’s going to be here, that’s what my elders tell me. After Atanarjuat [an earlier film], the elders started to talk about shamanism more. With this film, because their families are in this community, people learned about their namesakes. We live by namesakes. When I was born, I was given five names, but the government couldn’t pronounce them so we were given tags and family names.”

>> read the whole interview

Read also film reviews in the Edmonton Journal, in the Toronto Sun, and on Cinematical.com.

EARLIER COVERAGE:

The Journals of Knud Rasmussen: The impact of Christianity among the Inuit

As noted earlier, Inuit film maker Zacharias Kunuk explores in his film The Journals of Knud Rasmussen how missionaries force-fed Christianity to the Inuit in the 1920s.

Now the film has made its way to the International Film Festival in…