Plant-Based Knowledge: Landscape and memory
In the fall of 2017, Pamela Gross took four Inuit elders from the town of Cambridge Bay, in Nunavut, to Bathurst Inlet, a small Inuit community in southwestern Nunavut that had once been a Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) outpost. HBC left the area in 1964, and, over time, several of the Inuit people also left due to the community’s inaccessibility to the rest of the North. The area is now accessible only by plane and, thus, many Elders have been unable to return to the place where they grew up. Pamela Gross, the executive director of the Kitikmeot Heritage Society in Cambridge Bay, organized a trip by plane so that the Elders could finally have the opportunity to return to their homeland.
“The Elders were crying as soon as they stepped off the plane,” Gross recalls. “They were so thankful to be there, and many were unsure if they would ever be able to return.” Looking at the physical landscape they had once known so well triggered many reactions. Gross describes the area as “a beautiful place to be. The beauty of the landscape must have been heaven for the Inuit who lived there. It gets warm during the summer, and there is shelter from the wind. It has hills and lush greenery.”
The Elders acknowledged the changes in the landscape that had taken place since they had lived there. “The willows had grown taller and the shoreline came much closer to the community than they had remembered,” Gross recounts as she describes the Elders’ reactions to the changes at Bathurst Inlet.
They were in awe of the transformation and, while they admired the growth of the vegetation, they lamented the encroachment of the shoreline. The passage of time had brought a matured landscape but one that could not escape the impacts of climate change.
The Kitikmeot Heritage Society in Cambridge Bay, founded in 1996 by community members, aims to enhance cultural resources for the Inuit communities of the North. With a library, museum, archive, and research centre, the organization takes on various projects that, as Gross explains, “aim to pass knowledge and culture from one generation to the next.” The trip to Bathurst Inlet, for example, which connected community Elders to their past, through the experience of landscape, can be used to teach a new generation of youth about Inuit culture.
Plans for future trips to Bathurst Inlet include both Elders and youth from Cambridge Bay, and will involve digging into the landscape, as the youth participants will engage in archaeological study of Bathurst Inlet. “The youth will come out and work with us and gain hands-on knowledge as they dig into the past,” Gross says. ”It will be teaching participants about their culture through history”— and the rich landscape of Bathurst Inlet.
MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE KITIKMEOT HERITAGE SOCIETY CAN BE FOUND AT WWW.KITIKMEOTHERITAGE.CA.
TEXT BY LISA GREGORY, OALA, A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT AT DILLON CONSULTING, AND A MEMBER OF THE ARTIST COLLECTIVE 1:1 COLLABORATIVE.
