Territorializing piquhiit in Uqsuqtuuq (Gjoa Haven, Nunavut, Canada): negotiating homeland through an Inuit normative system

Abstract

ABSTRACT While learning from Inuit knowledge of caribou in Uqsuqtuuq (Gjoa Haven, Nunavut), questions about legal norms led to larger conversations. Territoriality, or bordering, is comprised of material boundaries as well as cultural, remembered and imagined ones. Furthermore, most places, states and homelands emerge through the partitioning of localisms and outside influences. This negotiation may occur through discourses and practices at the border and beyond, and may be instigated formally by the state as well as by people in informal settings. To be sure, the law plays a role in the belonging and governing aspects of bordering. For legal geographers, the law is also understood to be partly generated in informal and everyday spaces. As Uqsuqtuurmiut (‘people of Uqsuqtuuq’) shared norms concerning the treatment of people, the land/sea/ice and non-humans, we learned of piquhiit (‘Inuit rules’). Piquhiit are part of everyday and informal norm- and territory-making. Associated cultural and regulatory activities contribute to the territorialization of Inuit territory or homeland, and these spatialities recursively buttress piquhiit. Partitioning is always informed by a local perspective, and here that means autonomy and relationality (Inuit governance). Place and identity are negotiated through varying degrees of adaptation to outside forces: fluidity, agreeableness, and dissidence.