Kiumajut (Talking Back) (review)

Reviewed by: Kiumajut (Talking Back) Nancy Wachowich Kiumajut (Talking Back). Peter Kulchyski and Frank James Tester Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008. Pp. 336, $85.00 cloth, $32.95 paper The twentieth century was a time of social upheaval for the Inuit of what is today Nunavut. Grappling with modern dominion over its arctic territories, the Canadian government ushered in an era of scientific wildlife management shaped around regimes to protect species deemed 'at risk' from over-hunting by Inuit. Kiumajut (Talking Back) by Peter Kulchyski and Frank James Tester offers rich insights into this episode in Canadian and Inuit history. Through detailed archival and oral history research, the authors explore how harvesting arctic game, such as muskox, caribou, polar bear, walrus, and species of migratory birds, became thoroughly regulated and restricted by federal officialdom. Inuit hunting families, historically dependent on those animal populations for survival, were faced with a stark choice: break the law or go hungry. This is the authors' second book setting out to analyze the application of Western governmental, administrative, scientific, and legal systems in the Canadian Arctic, and expose their incongruities. The earlier work, Tammarniit (Mistakes) Inuit Relocation in the Eastern Arctic, 1939–63 (1994), explains the growth of a state apparatus and the expansion of social welfarism in the Arctic. Kiumajut (Talking Back) – considered an accompaniment rather than a sequel to their previous account – relates in poignant detail a series of incidents where arctic administrators failed to take Inuit environmental relationships into [End Page 151] consideration when developing new game laws and ordinances. For Inuit, bureaucratic and managerial practices were often difficult to digest and even tragic in consequence. Denied independent economic livelihoods, and yet embedded within modernist wildlife-management regimes, many had to rely on patronage from the state. Kiumajut (Talking Back) dissects this modernization and asks how it was that the Canadian government, save for a powerful paternalistic rhetoric, failed to develop a policy to support an Inuit hunting economy. The disregard shown to Inuit traditional environmental knowledge in the development of arctic wildlife-management regimes remains a key problematic for contemporary arctic scholars and Inuit alike. Kulchyski and Tester draw upon combinations of neo-Marxist and post-structuralist critical theory to interpret this shortcoming. The first part of the book tells of the growth of a modernist regime in the Canadian Arctic in the early to mid-twentieth century. Discourses of modernity, found in detailed government reports, working papers, committee minutes, memos, and correspondences are deployed to show how a 'totalizing state structure' engaged in an 'ethnocentric science game,' employed (often inaccurate) surveys of animal populations and (disputed) reports of 'wanton slaughters' by Inuit to rationalize its regulation of indigenous subsistence practices. Alongside their discussion of institutionalized discourses of hegemony, case studies and oral and written testimonies from individual Inuit are also used to reveal instances of what the authors describe as praxis, counter-hegemony, or the logic of resistance. Official documentation reveals how certain government agents supported and enforced strict game restrictions, while others did not. The reaction of Inuit subjects was similarly equivocal. Some hunters succumbed. Others, forced to feed their families, chose to ignore, overlook, or openly defy ordinances, despite threats, fines, and jail sentences. In the second part of the book, Kulchyski and Tester describe the emergence of a political consciousness movement in the Arctic as hunters, eager to voice discontent with game laws and protect themselves from penalties, learned to navigate new governmental, bureaucratic terrains. The chapters detail how, in an effort to develop and manage their own communities, Inuit experimented with and eventually appropriated Western democratic forms and a discourse of indigenous rights in order to engage in dialectical relationships with a state apparatus that variously denied their existence or outlawed their way of life. [End Page 152] The book has a number of real strengths. Kulchyski and Tester review a wealth of the grey literature covering a lengthy period in Canadian Arctic history. For readers who have found themselves trawling reports, letters, policy papers, and memos in national and local archives, this account in invaluable. The authors offer routes through a network of paper trails left by Arctic colonial administrators. Notably, quotations and vignettes drawn from...

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