At the Heart of the Ikaahuk Archaeology Project

Summary

For several years, we have been working with Inuvialuit community members from Sachs Harbour in Canada’s Northwest Territories, developing a research partnership called the Ikaahuk Archaeology Project (IAP). Many Inuvialuit connect with the past through "doing"; engaging in a range of traditional and non-traditional activities. Through them, they come to know the past physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. While archaeologists primarily engage with the past intellectually, many of us also engage with the past in these other ways. Here, we outline how our own multi-faceted experiences over the course of the project, and within archaeology more broadly, inform our thinking about future research directions for the IAP. These experiences have led us to recognize our own limitations and fostered our desire to work towards social justice alongside our Inuvialuit partners. Beyond the IAP, we suggest that more explicitly framing archaeology as an act of the body, the heart, and the soul, as much as the mind, would help to move it beyond its colonial history. This reframing will mean building on existing trends in Indigenous archaeology, activist archaeology and co-creation to broaden the kinds of "doing" that constitute archaeology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Archaeologies of Heart: Exploring the Role of Emotion and Spirit in Archaeological Research and Practice

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15561