Living on the land : change among the Inuit of Baffin Island

As recently as three decades ago most Inuit lived a lifestyle much like that of their forbearers: living on the land, with the men hunting according to time-honoured methods and the women performing the same round of daily tasks that their grandmothers and great grandmothers had done. Today these people typically live in settlements, some of them distinctly urban in character. Adults work for wages and use electric appliances, children listen to stereos and run about the settlement on motorbikes. As anthropologist John Matthiasson observes, the Inuit child of today may look back in fond nostalgia on the lifestyle of his parents when they lived on the land, but he cannot return to it. Matthiasson, who has remained in contact with the Tununermiut since the 1960s, offers both a vivid picture of Inuit society as it was and an illuminating look at the nature and the extent of the enormous changes of the past thirty years. As recently as three decades ago most Inuit lived a lifestyle much like that of their forbearers: "living on the land," with the men hunting according to time-honoured methods and the women performing the same round of daily tasks that their grandmothers and great grandmothers had done. Today these people typically live in settlements, some of them distinctly urban in character. Adults work for wages and use electric appliances, children listen to stereos and run about the settlement on motorbikes. As anthropologist John Matthiasson observes, "the Inuit child of today may look back in fond nostalgia on the lifestyle of his parents when they lived on the land, but he cannot return to it." Matthiasson, who has remained in contact with the Tununermiut since the 1960s, offers both a vivid picture of Inuit society as it was and an illuminating look at the nature and the extent of the enormous changes of the past thirty years. A personalized ethnography describing the Tununermiut, Inuit people from the Pond Inlet region of the northern tip of Baffin Island Northwest Territories from 1963 to the present. The description is of the hunting gathering (camp life) that existed a decade ago, changes as a result of outside influences, whalers, Canadian Government sponsored settlement and the response of the Tununermiut to the changes.