Inuk scholar aims to shake up Arctic science

AARON SPITZER

IQALUIT — Karla Williamson says her journey has been like a shaman’s: in order to know her people, she had to leave them behind.

Williamson, a Greenlandic Inuk, went far away, and she’s been gone a long time.

For more than 20 years she’s been living and studying in southern Canada, trying to gain a greater understanding of Inuit and their — her own — world.

Her labours seem to have paid off: Williamson was recently named the executive director of the Arctic Institute of North America. In accepting the appointment she became the first woman to hold that job, and the first Inuk ever to head up a major northern studies centre.

Based at the University of Calgary, the institute houses a research library, offers academic scholarships, and operates research stations on Devon Island and in the Yukon.

Williamson is also working on a Ph.D. degree with the University of Aberdeen, exploring Arctic gender roles. She said she’s debunking the myth than Inuit women were traditionally subservient to men.

Williamson is proud of her accomplishments, but they didn’t come easy.

She said her journey — like those the shamans used to make — required sacrifice in order to produce enlightenment.

“In my case, it was a quest to know who we are as a people,” she said.

“But you have to be away from the people that you love to have those insights. It cost a lot in terms of being away from the community. There was lots of loneliness and doubt.”

“In my case, it was a quest to know who we are as a people. But you have to be away from the people that you love to have those insights.”

— Karla Williamson

Williamson was able to come home — sort of — when she visited Iqaluit last week to participate in the annual Arctic Science Summit. The conference brought together more than 200 scientists from 25 nations around the world.

But in a room full of European and Asian researchers — almost all of them men — Williamson still stood out.

She wasn’t afraid to stand out even more. Despite the scoffs of a few Qallunaat scholars, she was publicly vehement about the need to introduce Inuit wisdom into the workings of Western science.

She scolded researchers for inflicting upon Inuit their “linear ways of knowledge,” which emphasize straight-line rather than holistic thinking.

Viewing and judging Arctic people through a European lens not only disempowers Inuit, she said, but also results in bad science, producing inaccurate results.

“Science is not apolitical,” she said. “Science is not culturally neutral.”

In public speeches and private interviews, Williamson is serious, even stern, and her speech is scholarly and complex. But always, her eyes seem to shine with impish bemusement.

She doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

During a question-and-answer session at the conference, when a Norwegian scientist seemed to dismiss the concerns of aboriginals as irrelevant to European researchers, Williamson stood up and rebuked him for disregarding the plight of the indigenous Sami in his own country.

Williamson said Canadian researchers can credit themselves with being more forward-thinking in their approach to aboriginals.

That’s going to have to be the way of the future, she said.

More and more, if scientists want to get access and funding for work in the North, they’ll have to meet the terms laid out by Inuit-run governments.

“We like to play a role of connecting the scientific community and the aboriginal community,” she said of the Arctic Institute.

“Things are changing.”