Sivunitsatinnut ilinniapunga : A new project in archaeology for high-school students.
By Jrene Rahm
Sivunitsatinnut ilinniapunga (For our future, I go to school) will be an Inuit youth driven exploration of postsecondary education through archaeological fieldwork, networking, and culturally grounded media projects in high school. This year the project will be pursued together with Akulivik high-school students starting this summer with an archaeological field school on Qikirtajuaq (Smith Island).
Since 1985, Avataq has been engaged in archaeological field schools, working for local Inuit while also training Inuit youth and involving Elders in a quest to document and preserve the rich cultural heritage and the Nunavik history. Avataq also supported the travel South of a subgroup of the participating Inuit youth which led to the development of the Avataq Archaeology Week. The latter emerged from a collaboration with the Kativik School Board and was supported by Air Inuit and the CURA project (http://www.avataq.qc.ca/en/CURA/Le-projet-ARUC). Its main objective centers on the encouragement of Inuit youth to stay in school. During that week, the youth meet different people working in the field of culture and thereby gain insights into possible career trajectories in that field. The second aim is for the youth to learn what happens to the artefacts after the excavation, how they are stored and preserved. Museums, Universities, and Colleges are some of the institutions that the students visit during that week.
The goal of this project is to enrich the summer archaeological field school experience through additional youth centered educational activities during the summer and the school year. The proposed youth participatory media projects are tools for Inuit youth to reflect upon and come to own their experiences in the field school and follow-up activities, and to build a sense of cultural identity. It also offers the youth a means to deconstruct a vision of education as being about conformity and to contemplate their future aspirations as life-long learners and role models for the younger generation, as emergent agents and voices of their community, engaged in the preservation of culture. In addition, the project makes accessible to Inuit youth a rich social network of mentors and individuals, including Inuit youth, Elders and professionals, all committed to collaborative participatory work and invested in respect and learning from the other.
Through the sharing of the youth-driven productions of the project with the community and peers at the school in the North and through Avataq, youths’ ideas will gain visibility while offering youth with a sense of success that might then translate into high aspirations in education.
(Jrene Rahm is Professor at Université de Montreal, Faculty of Education).
