Elders and resource persons have been interviewed by BuSK and school children in Greenland about their memories on hunting trips and hunting travels. In BuSK project these memories have been located, digitally preserved and published.
The case study for Greenland covers an area just above the Arctic Circle between the west coast of Greenland and the Greenland Ice Sheet. In the area, the caribou (reindeer) has been a valuable resource back in time and still – both for local inhabitants hunting to feed their family as well as full-time hunters utilizing the resource as a living.
The hunters travel by boat through the fjords, anchor at the inlet, hike into the mainland, and tent near the lakes to cover the mountainous areas bringing in their search for the nutritious and low fat meat resource. Their travels and activities bring traces into the landscape of campsites and dirt tracks, but as importantly also into the common memory of place names, stories, myths, and tips and tricks of difficult areas or good routes, hunting and fishing grounds.
The case study partners have interviewed elders and resource persons in the town Sisimiut and the nearby village Sarfannguit on how they remember places in the area, interesting stories of travels and hunting trips, and certain resources. They have drawn on maps and told their stories to the BuSK partners, now digitally preserved and published, together with similar studies and interviews done 30 years ago for elaboration of the data set on the common memory on resources.
To prolong the indigenous and local knowledge up to present, the project partners have contacted the local schools on how pupils can interview and map the knowledge of their parents and grandparents using online mapping apps. Active, professional hunters and fishermen has been introduced to the apps to record their current knowledge likewise as well as modernize the reporting of their harvest to the local and central government contributing to the data sets used by biologist scientists.
Karl Zinglersen