Northern Indigenous communities are showing southerners that traditional knowledge should be taken seriously. “When Inuit knowledge is mobilized into graphs and diagrams, that [information] can’t be ignored and written off as anecdotal stories,” says Joel Heath, the executive director and cofounder of the Arctic Eider Society.
The ingenuity of SIKU is how it weaves together all kinds of insights about life in the North and supports community-driven research. “It’s part science and part Inuit knowledge,” says Arragutainaq. “It can work both ways, instead of one dominating the other.”
A group of Inuit elders and hunters from Sanikiluaq, Nunavut, came up with the idea for SIKU more than a decade ago to document and understand the changing sea ice they were witnessing in southeastern Hudson Bay. The group turned to the local nonprofit Arctic Eider Society to develop a web-based platform where hunters in nearby coastal communities could upload photos and videos and share knowledge. Contributors began using the portal in 2015 to log water temperature and salinity data, note observations of important wildlife species—such as beluga and common eider ducks—and track the flow of contaminants through the food web.
Over the years, SIKU has evolved, and recently, the elders saw that the platform could help address a familiar challenge: sharing knowledge with younger people who often have their noses in their phones. In 2019, SIKU relaunched as a full-fledged social network—a platform where members can post photos and notes about wildlife sightings, hunts, sea ice conditions, and more
