Veni grant for Sean Desjardins

Arctic Centre post doc Sean Desjardins received a veni grant to study the resilience of Inuit traditional life in Arctic Canada.

Over the past several hundred years, traditional practices of Indigenous peoples across the circumpolar Arctic have been impacted significantly by environmental and social stresses, including natural and anthropogenic climate change, and colonialist policies restricting residential mobility and encouraging cultural assimilation. The aim of this research is to determine how and why some culture-defining Indigenous practices, such as subsistence hunting, were successfully adapted to changing conditions, while others faded away. An ideal case study through which to examine this problem is the Inuit occupation of Foxe Basin, Arctic Canada, where many important cultural features, such as traditional cold-season architecture and shamanic-influenced belief systems, have been lost, while a complex and vibrant hunting tradition has survived to the present day.