For several years preceding the workshop in Cambridge Bay I'd had the opportunity to become acquainted with IQ. I'd spent a great deal of time working with Community Justice Committees³ in Nunavut, trying to assist them to find a way of restoring their traditional ways of resolving conflicts and maintaining them as a parallel Community Justice System to the Criminal Justice System. More recently I had been invited to work with members of an Inuit IQ Task Force. It had a mandate to help the Nunavut government incorporate IQ into its day to day operations. Both of these projects had a similar purpose: to bring the past forward into the modern age as a context for learning and problem solving. This seemed to be precisely the same challenge now facing the Nunavut Literacy Council.

My purpose in this paper is to explore ways and means by which the basic values and principles of IQ can be brought forward to serve as a useful learning context for the development of modern literacy. But before proceeding, a brief comment about myself and my purpose.

I am not an expert in literacy, nor an expert in either the Inuit Culture or its traditional knowledge. The observations I pass on have come from my limited experience with traditional elders who lived on the land and with the “younger Inuit elders”—those with both a knowledge of the wisdom of their elders and a knowledge of modern organizations, systems and governance structures. It is this latter group, often unrecognized, who have a passion for their culture and are working to bring the best of the past into the present in an effort to create a modern Inuit society.

My effort in this paper is not to create a new learning approach but, simply, to create some linkages—to provide some ideas on how traditional knowledge might serve as a foundation and learning context for teaching literacy skills in Nunavut.

This paper takes the form of a discussion paper in the hope that those who are much more knowledgeable than I am will take the discussion further.

THE FALL AND RISE OF INUIT QAUJIMAJATUQANGINNUT (IQ)

Though it has become commonplace to translate the Inuktitut term "Inuit Qaujimajatuqanginnut" as "traditional knowledge" the term does not simply refer to past knowledge." More properly the term is defined as The Inuit way of doing things: the past, present, and future knowledge of Inuit Society.

Thus the concept is dynamic. IQ is not a collection of rules or precepts set in stone. It is a set of values passed from generation to generation through oral tradition and found in the hearts and minds of a people. What is happening today—the way families, communities, Inuit organization and the Nunavut government define what it means to be Inuit—becomes the "traditional" knowledge of the future.

Because many people tend to see IQ as a thing of the past—something residing exclusively in the minds and hearts of the elders-- it is having difficulty finding its place and role in modern Inuit society. We can understand why by retracing the fall and rise of IQ over the past sixty years. The following illustration illustrates what happened to IQ in terms of learning.