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Traditionally, Inuit named places for many reasons. Place names contain cultural knowledge about a place such as a landmark or reference point, a source of wildlife, fish or other resources important to survival, a site of spiritual power, or the location of an historical event. The new comers, who first came to the north, often named places after expedition supporters, important political figures, friends, family and themselves. Recently northern communities have worked to reclaim their traditional names for places.
Note: Inuktitut has many dialects. In the Kitikmeot some Inuit speak a dialect called Inuinnaqtun. Stephen Angulalik, who was introduced briefly in the opener spoke Inuinnaqtun and Inuktitut and so the terms will be used interchangeably.
Traditional place names were first recorded either by non-Inuinnaqtun speakers or by missionaries who applied their own phonetic spelling systems to the names. Inuinnaqtun/Inuktitut is an oral language and standardized orthographies have been created and applied in recent times. Official community names are spelled in several different forms including old phonetic spellings, and different regionally applied standard orthographies. As this ads confusion a version of each word will be shown in the modern standard orthography adopted by the Department of Education in Nunavut. For example, the community name adopted for the community formerly called Coppermine is Kugluktuk. This word is taken from a waterfall that is some distance up a river from the community. In the modern standard spelling Kugluktuk is spelled Qurluqtuq and is a generic Inuinnaqtun/Inuktitut word for “waterfall”. As the proper pronunciation is not evident for some place names students who want to say the words correctly can learn to do so by clicking on the hyperlinks in the attached map.
In the next activity students will be given the opportunity to learn a little bit of Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit, to identify place names and their meanings. This will give context to the places Angulalik traveled, lived and ran his buisiness.
1. Photocopy a class set of the table, What’s in a name? for each student in your class. Give a copy to each student.
2. Read through the instructions with your class. In the chart provided, the Inuinnaqtun place names are not given as complete names. They are broken down into the parts of a word. For example, nuna means land and vut means our. When put together the territory Nunavut means ‘Our Land’.
3. The task for the students is to study the word lists and then ‘guess’ the meaning of the place names given in the list. A teacher answer key is given. All of the community names in the Kitikmeot plus Nunavut and its capital city, Iqaluit, are included in the list.
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