Inuit knowledge of Arctic Terns (Sterna paradisaea) and perspectives on declining abundance in southeastern Hudson Bay, Canada.

The Arctic Tern (Sterna paradisaea; takatakiaq in Inuttitut) breeds in the circumpolar Arctic and undertakes the longest known annual migration. In recent decades, Arctic Tern populations have been declining in some parts of their range, and this has been a cause of concern for both wildlife managers and Indigenous harvesters. However, limited scientific information is available on Arctic Tern abundance and distribution, especially within its breeding range in remote areas of the circumpolar Arctic. Knowledge held by Inuit harvesters engaged in Arctic Tern egg picking can shed light on the ecology, regional abundance and distribution of this marine bird. We conducted individual interviews and a workshop involving 12 Inuit harvesters and elders from Kuujjuaraapik, Nunavik (northern Québec), Canada, to gather their knowledge of Arctic Tern cultural importance, ecology, and stewardship. Interview contributors reported a regional decline in Arctic Tern numbers which appeared in the early 2000s on nesting islands near Kuujjuaraapik. Six possible factors were identified: (1) local harvest through egg picking; (2) nest disturbance and predation; (3) abandonment of tern nesting areas (i.e., islands that have become connected to the mainland due to isostatic rebound); (4) climate change; (5) natural abundance cycles within the Arctic Tern population; and (6) decline of the capelin (Mallotus villosus) in the region. Recommendations from Inuit contributors related to Arctic Tern stewardship and protection included: (1) conduct more research; (2) let nature take its course; (3) conduct an awareness campaign; (4) implement an egg picking ban; (5) coordinate local egg harvest; (6) start 'tern farming'; (7) protect Arctic Terns across their migration route; and (8) harvest foxes predating on terns. Our study highlighted complementarities between Inuit knowledge and ecological science, and showed that Inuit harvesters can make substantial contributions to ongoing and future Arctic tern research and management initiatives

Indigenizing the internet

To write of digital indigeneity or digital Natives is to confront the fact that, as Anishinaabe/Métis games designer Elizabeth LaPensée described in a cryptic but resonant tweet: “The Internet has been colonized” (2017 n.pag.). Popularized in the title of Marc Prensky's influential 2001 paper on educational reform, the term “digital Native” is defined by the OED as “A person born or brought up during the age of digital technology and so familiar with computers and the Internet from an early age.” Similarly, artifacts that are created with digital tools and so originate in a digital environment, having no analog equivalent, are called “born-digital” objects. The discursive colonialist violence of cyberspace as a territory inhabited by “indigenous” artifacts and “digital Natives” preempts efforts to discuss the digital creativity of actual Indigenous artists and communities. The digital then is a discursive realm where the profound conflicts generated by settler-colonialism continue to be played out. Indigenous digital interventions pose counter-discourses that oppose the violence of colonialist stereotypes, claiming digital storying as an extension of a form of expression and communication that Indigenous peoples have been using long before the advent of contemporary electronic technology. Indigenizing the digital medium constitutes a powerful message that Natives are not primitive, pre-technological, and “vanishing.” Living Indigenous cultures endure, witnessed by digital creations that work to preserve and disseminate tribal languages in genres of digital storying that perform traditional customs, beliefs, traditions, and values. Indigenous digital storying is a claim to rhetorical sovereignty that articulates Native self-determination through specific ways of knowing and being. Tribal epistemologies express a unique relationship with the world, a relation of interconnection that is performatively enacted in digital genres. This chapter offers close analyses of two dominant “digital Native” forms of storying that use the capabilities of virtual media in conjunction with traditional literary genres to instantiate Indigenous cosmologies: digital film-poems, videopoems, or “poemeos” exemplified by Heid Erdrich's Anishinaabe storying; and Elizabeth LaPensée's Anishinaabe/Métis storying through Indigenously-determined digital narrative or videogames