scholarly journals Nunavut Urban Futures: Vernaculars, Informality and Tactics (Research Note)

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 323-347
Author(s):  
Lola Sheppard

The Canadian Arctic, and Nunavut in particular, is one of the fastest-growing regions per capita in the country, raising the question as to what might constitute an emerging Arctic Indigenous urbanism. One of the cultural challenges of urbanizing Canadian North is that for most Indigenous peoples, permanent settlement, and its imposed spatial, temporal, economic, and institutional structures, has been antithetical to traditional ways of life and culture, which are deeply tied to the land and to seasons. For the past seventy-five years, architecture, infrastructure, and settlement form have been imported models serving as spatial tools of cultural colonization that have intentionally erased local culture and ignored geographic specificities. As communities in Nunavut continue to grow at a rapid rate, new planning frameworks are urgently needed. This paper outlines three approaches that could constitute the beginning of more culturally reflexive planning practices for Nunavut: (1) redefining the northern urban vernacular and its role in design; (2) challenging the current top-down masterplan by embracing strategies of informal urbanism; and (3) encouraging planning approaches that embrace territorial strategies and are more responsive to geography, landscape, and seasonality.

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Peter Sellars ◽  
Maria Shevtsova

In this profoundly dialogical exchange, Peter Sellars, theatre director, researcher, and teacher, and Maria Shevtsova open out a whole array of questions on the integral relation between politics and the theatre in its multiple manifestations. These questions not only concern the damages inflicted by the present Covid-19 pandemic but also those developed by the neoliberal economics and politics of the past forty years and more. In Sellars’s view, neoliberalism has been the hotbed of social injustices, inequities, market and other forms of current enslavement, migrations, refugee and related precarities, and the havoc of the world climate in which the plight of humanity and that of the planet are indelibly interconnected. His and Shevtsova’s discussion links such vital concerns with his theatre practice, which ranges from his engagement with local communities and indigenous peoples – he details some of his work with the collective, community organization of two Los Angeles Festivals of the early 1990s – to the various forms of his music theatre in which he collaborates, in institutional structures, with highly proficient musicians, singers and dancers. The focus chosen here from his music theatre is The Indian Queen (2013), which Sellars dramaturgically invents using pieces by Henry Purcell combined with prose fragments by Nicaraguan novelist Rosario Aguilar. Peter Sellars is an internationally renowned theatre director among whose more recent productions is Mozart’s Idomeneo, premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 2019. Maria Shevtsova, Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, is editor of New Theatre Quarterly. This conversation took place on 16 August 2020, was transcribed from the recording by Kunsang Kelden, and was edited by Maria Shevtsova.


Author(s):  
Robert Klinck ◽  
Ben Bradshaw ◽  
Ruby Sandy ◽  
Silas Nabinacaboo ◽  
Mannie Mameanskum ◽  
...  

The Naskapi Nation of Kawawachikamach is an Aboriginal community located in northern Quebec near the Labrador Border. Given the region’s rich iron deposits, the Naskapi Nation has considerable experience with major mineral development, first in the 1950s to the 1980s, and again in the past decade as companies implement plans for further extraction. This has raised concerns regarding a range of environmental and socio-economic impacts that may be caused by renewed development. These concerns have led to an interest among the Naskapi to develop a means to track community well-being over time using indicators of their own design. Exemplifying community-engaged research, this paper describes the beginning development of such a tool in fall 2012—the creation of a baseline of community well-being against which mining-induced change can be identified. Its development owes much to the remarkable and sustained contribution of many key members of the Naskapi Nation. If on-going surveying is completed based on the chosen indicators, the Nation will be better positioned to recognize shifts in its well-being and to communicate these shifts to its partners. In addition, long-term monitoring will allow the Naskapi Nation to contribute to more universal understanding of the impacts of mining for Indigenous peoples.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136843102199664
Author(s):  
Chris Shilling

During the past two decades, there has been a significant growth of sociological studies into the ‘body pedagogics’ of cultural transmission, reproduction and change. Rejecting the tendency to over-valorise cognitive information, these investigations have explored the importance of corporeal capacities, habits and techniques in the processes associated with belonging to specific ‘ways of life’. Focused on practical issues associated with ‘knowing how’ to operate within specific cultures, however, body pedagogic analyses have been less effective at accounting for the incarnation of cultural values. Addressing this limitation, with reference to the radically diverse norms involved historically and contemporarily in ‘vélo worlds’, I develop Dewey’s pragmatist transactionalism by arguing that the social, material and intellectual processes involved in learning physical techniques inevitably entail a concurrent entanglement with, and development of, values.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-241
Author(s):  
Natan Elgabsi

Abstract Discussions on Marc Bloch usually focus on The Annales School, his comparative method, or his defence of a distinct historical science. In contrast, I emphasise his seldom-investigated ideas of what historical understanding should involve. I contend that Bloch distinguishes between three different ethical attitudes in studying people and ways of life from the past: scientific passivity; critical judgements; understanding. The task of the historian amounts to understanding other worlds in their own terms. This essay is an exploration of Bloch’s methodology and what historical understanding is needed to do justice to cultures that belong to the past, both conceptually and practically.


Significance The extreme cold comes as the province is still dealing with the damage caused by unprecedented levels of heat and wildfires last summer and then record levels of rainfall and flooding in November. Its experience has focused attention on Canada’s wider vulnerability to the impact of shifting weather patterns and climate change. Impacts The natural resource sectors that are vital to Canada’s economy face an increasingly difficult environment for extraction. Indigenous peoples across the country will see their traditional ways of life further disrupted by climate change. The increasingly evident impacts of climate change on day-to-day life will see voters demand greater action from government. Significant investment in green initiatives, clean energy and climate resiliency initiatives will boost green industries.


Author(s):  
Thomas Duve

Legal anthropology has to understand and deal with complex and often plural constellations of normative bodies, legal discourses, institutions, and practices. They shape the legal regimes people live in. These legal regimes as well as the ways in which societies operate with legal diversity have developed over time. History has done more than shape the vocabulary and the grammar of each community’s law. The narratives we produce about the past are also used to construct and express individual and social identities. Thus, history and its (re)construction by later generations can impose constraints and limit available options, but also open spaces of negotiation and provide for innovation. Legal regimes of the past are often called ‘legal traditions’. In the last decades, the idea of ‘legal traditions’ has gained considerable practical importance. Especially in former colonial countries, and due to the increasing recognition of the rights of Indigenous Peoples in international and national law, many actors are drawing on history to claim rights and obligations for the present and the future. In a similar manner, some historical legal regimes seem to embody injustice, leading to pleas for the recognition of their unjust character or even for material compensation. The aim of this chapter is to offer some reflections on the concept of ‘legal traditions’ and its role in constructing our identities and shaping our present legal regimes.


2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 339-359
Author(s):  
Richard W. Hill ◽  
Daniel Coleman

This co-authored article examines the oldest known treaty between incoming Europeans and Indigenous North Americans to derive five basic principles to guide healthy, productive relationships between Indigenous community-based researchers and university-based ones. Rick Hill, Tuscarora artist and knowledge keeper from the Six Nations of the Grand River, publishes for the first time here the most complete oral history that exists today of that ancient treaty, from the early seventeenth century, known as the Two Row Wampum or the Covenant Chain agreement. Interspersed with Dr. Hill’s reflections, Daniel Coleman, a settler professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, outlines five principles for research partnerships derived from the discussions of the Two Row Research Partnership seminars that Hill and Coleman have been hosting at Deyohahá:ge: Indigenous Knowledge Centre for the past four years. Formed between the Hodinöhsö:ni’ confederacy and Dutch merchants arriving near Albany, New York in 1609, the Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain treaty set the precedent for nation-to-nation treaties between European colonial powers and Indigenous peoples with two parallel rows representing the Hodinöhsö:ni’ canoe and the Dutch ship sailing down the shared river. Each party agreed to keep their beliefs and laws in their separate vessels, and on this basis of interdependent autonomy, they established a long-lasting friendship. This article suggests that by renewing our understanding of the Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain treaty, Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers alike can rebuild relationships of trust and cooperation that can decolonize Western presumptions and re-establish healthy and productive research partnerships.


2008 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 815-852 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID HENLEY ◽  
JAMIE S. DAVIDSON

AbstractThis article examines the revival ofadat(custom) in post-Suharto Indonesia, a movement which few Indonesia-watchers predicted. Four general reasons for the rise ofadatrevivalism are identified. The first is the support, both ideological and concrete, of international organizations and networks committed to the rights of indigenous peoples. The second is the uncertainty, together with the opportunities, attendant on the processes of democratization and decentralization which followed the end of Suharto's authoritarian rule. The third is the oppression of marginal population groups under the New Order. The fourth root is historical, having to do with the positive role whichadathas played in the country's political imagination since the beginning of Indonesian nationalism.Adatas a political cause involves a set of loosely related ideals which, rightly or wrongly, are associated with the past: authenticity, community, order, and justice. These ideals have been invoked in varying proportions to pursue a wide variety of political ends, including the control of resources and the exclusion of rivals as well as the protection, empowerment, and mobilization of underprivileged groups.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Dounald R ◽  
Rika Nugraha

Myth is a form of education about the essence of morality and ways of life in society. Myth is not just a fairy tale without the essence of the message / philosophy in it, but the myth is the most effective way of delivering teachings and guidance about the ultimate truth. With this research it can become a place for scientific studies in understanding philosophies for the user community or for readers of the research. In its development, the people of North Maluku saw the myth of Ake Santosa only as a story / saga of the past in the name of culture. But there are also those who instill the myth of Ake Santosa as a truth which in fact actually dominates the system of thinking and forming the characteristics of the user community, especially the indigenous people in Ternate. So that the formation of dualism of views, this is feared to change the values of the message / philosophy which is the teachings and guidance for the community. So we need a scientific study, which is able to become a form of method in seeing or dissecting the philosophical meaning of a myth that exists in society. The application of the theory of transfiguration began with literature and literature studies related to the myth of Ake Santosa in Ternate society in North Maluku and became primary data. Then developed through a visual study approach. Furthermore, this final data is then analyzed and transferred into the form of visual objects that give rise to other meanings of the myth itself.


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