- Roy Vontobel of the Caribou News
People of different cultures tend to acquire knowledge about the world in which they live in different ways. The reason is that their purpose for acquiring such knowledge is very different. This fact, which may seem obvious, helps explain why two persons - an Inuit hunter born and raised in Eskimo Point and a biologist born and raised in Toronto, say - can look at the same thing and not see it the same way at all.
For example, both the hunter and the biologist may know a great deal about caribou. But what they know may appear contradictory (and sometimes is) because what the hunter and the scientist want or need to learn about caribou are not the same. So, in many cases, one kind of knowledge is not simply better or worse than another - it is different. More than that, the hunter and the scientist do not "learn" in the same way. A little more background will help make this point clear.
Over countless generations, what people such as Inuit, Chipewyans, Crees or Europeans (who became the main non-natives in North America) learned about their part of the world enabled them to survive there. In this way, the many different people in the world have come to know their own regions intimately. This collective knowledge, derived from their own living experiences, affects how they see and interpret their surroundings.
The scientists who explain the "cultural" differences among people in this way (as well as those who study animals) see and interpret their surroundings according to European-derived traditions of learning. Their "way of knowing" is based on science. This scientific approach is so alien to traditional Inuit and Indian attitudes that it is little wonder that biologists and native people often have difficulty understanding one another when they are discussing caribou.
To a native hunter, who has to learn about caribou in order to hunt them, the biologist's methods often seem ineffective or aimed at acquiring useless information. The hunter needs to know, for example, how to hunt caribou at different seasons of the year, how hunting on cold clear days is different from hunting when a light storm masks the sounds of walking or the smell of the hunter, how to tell the sex and health of individual animals from great distances. He must be able to predict where the caribou are likely to be days in advance, whether they are migrating or not. The hunter has not taken a course at a university to learn such things. And, while he does learn by practice, he doesn't learn by experimenting in the way a scientist does.
The native hunter, taught such things by his elders since he was a boy accepts them as facts. He does not question this basic knowledge. In the past, his survival and that of his family depended on his learning and performing his tasks well. Thus the native hunter has grown up learning about caribou by participating in the use of that knowledge, and he is expected to pass on that knowledge to his children.
The biologist, on the other hand was raised in a culture where students are taught to question knowledge. In this culture, he is taught basic principles or rules about the relationships of various things and is expected to take those and use them to learn more. Yet even the basic principles are not utterly beyond questioning. In this system, it makes sense to ask a question and suggest ways to answer it if only to see where the exercise leads. It is a kind of mental exploration. And, the survival at stake is that of the biologist's reputation and possibly his job, but not his life.
It is easy to see how these different approaches to knowledge cause misunderstanding. Each person, the hunter and the biologist, learns "facts" about caribou, but learns what is important to his own way of life. In a certain sense, the hunter learns from the inside and the biologist from the outside. An Inuit hunter learns about caribou by experience, by doing what his father has taught him to do, and a biologist applies to caribou the same basic system of learning that he would apply to learning anything.
There are some similarities. Both of these "ways of knowing" are built upon and develop over time, and both make sense in their own cultural context. Moreover, while the biologist's explanation of science may seem foreign to an Inuit hunter, concepts of organizing knowledge should not. For example, Inuit have their own ways of categorizing animals and the relationships between them.
An example will show that while the biologist's approach produces results, it is often not the only useful way to learn about caribou. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was growing concern among biologists because the Kaminuriak herd appeared to be declining. Many native hunters said there was no problem and that the caribou would come back, that they were merely somewhere else. In late 1981, Inuit at Repulse Bay were saying that Kaminuriak caribou were showing up in the vicinity of Wager Bay. Biologists, because they had not actually seen Kaminuriak caribou moving north-eastward and had seen no signs to suggest that they were, doubted that it could be so.
But Repulse Bay people were adamant, saying that many caribou in their area were not the same as the animals they were used to - they looked different and they tasted different. This did not qualify as scientific information, so biologists tended to reject the idea. Since calving ground surveys in recent years have shown much greater numbers of Kaminuriak caribou, biologists have had to reconsider what Inuit had been saying. And some may be willing to admit that, to some degree at least, the Repulse Bay people had been right.
Caribou News. Vol. 9, No. 2, August 1989. Reprinted with permission of the author.