Socio-Environmental Impacts of Mobility on Inuit People and Its Consequences in the High Arctic Region of Canada

Abstract

This study examines the socio-environmental impacts of mobility on Inuit people and its consequences in the High Arctic region of Canada. Mobility is the part of Inuit culture, the Inuit people moved for hunting on familiar distances and sites that is the part of their life through generations. These patterns of mobility represent an admirable appreciation and familiar knowledge of the environment in the aboriginal people. The system of mobility as social change is related to the environmental stress, food shortage, fur-trade, construction of military bases, state policies, forced resettlement and non-renewable resources development projects in the Arctic region. Since 1950s, the Inuit of Canadian Arctic region have experience forcefully the mobilities in form of relocation, new-settlements, medical moves and residential schools as well as environmental mobility. The effects of relocation from their original lands have sustained through generations. There is another sad story of the DEW-line (Distance Early Warning) construction. The construction was started without any consent or notification to the local communities. Inuit people were displaced into other places with non-respectable way from their indigenous land. The residential school system was another a misfortune form of mobility which removed Aboriginal children from their parents and forcefully teach them ‘white manners’. This unfair treatment to the Inuit becomes big debate in the country from the several decades ago. Experience of mobility either it was due to relocation, displacement, individual or residential schools and mobility due to climate change are common story of Inuit people in the Arctic region of Canada. A number of families are still dealing with this intergenerational distresses.