Aporta receives Research Achievement Award for trailblazing fieldwork
Aporta receives Research Achievement Award for trailblazing fieldwork
Claudio Aporta is on the trail of Inuit pathways in Canada’s North and how these created a sense of connection and identity among Inuit groups.
Claudio Aporta
He has just been awarded a Carleton University 2011 Research Achievement Award.
For the past 11 years, as he researched Inuit land and sea ice use, Aporta amassed evidence that a vast network of trails linked Inuit communities across the whole Arctic. “This network certainly pre-existed the European explorers,” he points out. “Trails were much more than just a means of getting from point A to point B. They represented a complex social network right across the North that helped create part of the Inuit people’s cultural identity.”
“What’s even more amazing is that, although the trails weren’t permanent features on the landscape nor documented on actual maps, people could remember where they were and pass that information by word of mouth from generation to generation.”
Aporta will use his $15,000 honorarium to examine how far Inuit use and exploration of the Arctic Archipelago.
“This will help us better understand to what extent Inuit identity went beyond links to specific birthplaces and the locations where people lived to encompass a much broader pan-Arctic sense of identity and community,” he says.
“As debates over sovereignty and economic development of the Northwest Passage are rekindled, the fact that Inuit possessed a pan-Arctic identity before the Europeans arrived should certainly be taken into account.”
Aporta has been the principal researcher of an International Polar Year project that has investigated and mapped sea ice in collaboration with several Inuit communities in order to understand the local and regional importance of this environment, the hazards associated with travel and the nature of sea ice changes as they affect community life. He has looked at the use of multimedia and new cartographic technologies to represent Inuit navigation techniques. He is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University.
To watch an interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdIWOXC0lng