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The Nunavut Land Claims Agreement (NLCA) between the Inuit in the Nunavut Settlement Area (formerly part of the Northwest Territories) and the Crown of Canada, led to the creation of Nunavut in 1999. A public government in the Inuit homeland, Nunavut has the responsibility to put into effect the Inuit rights and benefits set out in the NLCA as well as provide a wide range of services tailored to the needs of all Nunavummiut of which 85% are Inuit. With a vast and largely untapped mineral, oil, and gas potential, Nunavut is now preparing to a private sector market economy open to global investors in natural resource exploration and exploitation. Certainly, Nunavut is a place where economic development and indigenous rights intersect crosscutting global, national, and territorial boundaries. This chapter looks at how indigenous peoples rights and the imperatives of a globalized/globalizing economy, are projected into and taken up by Nunavut Arctic College, Nunavut's sole postsecondary education institution. Integrating textual and contextual instances of analysis, this chapter highlights how the College translates seemingly conflicting policy messages, into all-encompassing education practices that weave into the omnipresent right to indigenous self-determination.

Teacher education has existed in Nunavut, Canada, for more than 40 years, yet the programs offered have not been able to meet the demand for Inuit educators in the territory. The reasons for this are complex, but related to the history of education in Nunavut, the policies and employment conditions impacting educators and the conflicting values of colonial and Inuit ways of being and understanding the world. However dim the embers of teacher education programs may appear, when statistics on graduation rates from postsecondary or Inuit composition in schools are shared, there are many initiatives that reinvigorate the flames. This chapter outlines five such initiatives in which three critical factors emerge that offer suggestions for restructuring teacher education to support Inuit.

Rational time accompanies the onslaught of hyper-globalization. The Inuit of Arviat, Nunavut, paradoxically use rational time to resist rational time, setting aside temporal zones to protect Western cultural paradigms from impinging on their lives all of the time. Additionally, because temporal norms indicate membership in a group, doing time differently is one of the most effective ways in which to say “I’m not a part of your group!” While resisting rational clock-time, for example by walking off the job each day promptly at 4:59 pm, the Inuit of Arviat nevertheless have a myriad of clocks in their homes. This chapter explores their temporal resistance and the riddle of “why so many clocks in Arviat?”

Howard Becker’s theory for the sociology of art (including music) revolves around the simple, and often overlooked fact, “All artistic work, like all human activity, involves the joint activity of a number, often a large number, of people.” Among Becker’s writing about music, he presents an idea that I find is still relevant today, namely, that sociological and ethnomusicological work seem to be two hands of a single body that have little idea of what each other are doing. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Becker and Kay Kaufman Shelemay, I propose a model for the construction of the music event that highlights the relationship among the many systems behind the musical experience. I provide a case study of Inuit throat singing to demonstrate the effectiveness of this model in trying to explore the relationships among music, culture, and society.

Purpose – Occasionally, we find our social roles transitioning from friend to researcher. This chapter is a reflexive account of one such transition. The author examines the emotions, the concerns and the rewards and stresses of this shift in her relationship with individuals and community.

Methodology/Approach – The author moved to Arviat, Nunavut, in 2004 and gradually found her inner sociologist could not be contained. Through a process of consultation with the Inuit community in which she was residing, she transitioned from the role of friend to that of researcher. This was complicated by her social location as a Western outsider who had been accepted as a community member.

Findings – Reflexivity is a key component of mitigating the challenges which arose and pursuing ethical research, as well as managing the dynamic range of experiences and feelings which emerged during this process.

Purpose – Using the example of the Dene Games competition, this chapter examines the connections between contemporary sports and the games of the Dene (Athapaskan), a group of indigenous cultures inhabiting the subarctic regions of the Canadian Northwest Territories.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter is based on participant-observation and individual interviews conducted during attendance at the Dene Games gatherings over the course of several years.

Findings – I argue that the indigenous Dene Games gathering, where traditional games are organised as a contemporary sports competition, opens a space for the reconstitution of indigenous physical activity practices. The tensions that occur when participation in indigenous games articulates to the practical logic of competitive sports, identify the Dene Games as a space of active cultural contestation.

Originality/value – The chapter examines the articulation of historically disparate social practises. It views the hysteretic effects of a pre-existing indigenous physical activity practice as a point of reference for resistance to the normative constraints emanating from the organisational modality of contemporary sports, without offering up an explanation that relies on voluntaristic assumptions of agency. It adopts this perspective in order to avoid grasping the indigenous practice as the operationalised object of its own intervention, a ‘museum piece’.

Intergenerational confinement is an under-recognized, policy-driven issue which greatly impacts Indigenous and racialized peoples in countries with ongoing colonial legacies. Numerous policy solutions enacted over colonial history have exacerbated instead of mitigated this situation. This chapter advances an improved understanding of the impacts of carceral legacies, moving beyond the dominant focus of parental incarceration in the literature. Focusing on Indigenous peoples, multiple generations in families and communities have been subjected to changing methods of confinement and removal. Using critical policy analysis and interview research, this chapter interrogates these intergenerational impacts of carceral policy-making in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 124 people in the three case countries, this chapter centers perspectives of people who have been intergenerationally confined in carceral institutions. With a goal of transformation, it then explores an alternative orientation to policy-making that seeks to acknowledge, account for, and address the harmful direct and indirect ripple-effects of carceral strategies over generations.