This article explores the contemporary use of open-access video-sharing sites by Inuit youth and young adults. Based on 12 months of cyber-fieldwork and focused specifically on YouTube, it explores how Inuit young people across the Canadian Arctic are using online spaces to post short excerpts from their lives and connect with others. The paper situates these digital autobiographies in the recent trajectory of Inuit storytelling, showing that Internet technology allows individual narrators the freedom to bypass established rules and institutions of cultural representation. Self-produced videos posted online are more multivalent, dialogical, and provocative expressions of Inuit selfhood than those texts that may have circulated in the past. While the Internet has been celebrated for its global reach, many of the social relationships and dialogues seemingly fostered by this technology are intimate and localised. Inuit youth and young adults use video-sharing technology to creatively mediate pasts, presents, and futures in the creation of new social worlds.

This article reflects upon the interplay of digital, material, and social relations in the context of a small-scale digital archiving project currently being undertaken by a group of women ethnographers, videographers, and sealskin seamstresses in the Canadian Eastern High Arctic Inuit settlement of Mittimatalik (Pond Inlet). I illustrate the documentation work of our Mittimatalik Arnait Miqsuqtuit Collective, situating it in the new media landscapes that have developed in the Canadian Arctic, and draw on case studies to challenge claims that new communications technology has led to the breakdown of social and environmental relationships. Clips from our digitizing work in progress offer insight into the relational ecologies emergent the making of this archive: illustrating how the unique materiality of sealskin and digital archives, the politics of Inuit hunting, the sensibilities of family and friends, and the challenges of broadband connectivity in Arctic settlements shape this initiative. Technology also emerges here as a key agent, enabling new collaborative relationships, political voice, and forms of knowledge production, but also denying others.

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Efforts to digitally engage with indigenous source communities andcraftspeople are many and diverse. This paper has as its starting point a comparisonbetween two such digital engagements, both celebrations of Arctic animal furclothing, yet each at seemingly opposite ends of a continuum of possible digitalinterfaces. Skinddragter Online and Mittimatalik Arnait Miqsuqtuit Collectivewere both launched the same year, 2015, in Copenhagen and Mittimatalik,Nunavut, Canada respectively. By comparing each with the other, our ambition isto illuminate some of the curatorial choices involved in the making of such digitalplatforms, and the consequences they have in terms of wider visibility, audiencesreached, knowledge included, and collaborative engagements invited. Postcolonialcritique can come at the expense of general outreach, conversations betweendesignated experts can be difficult to make equal. Technological sophistication canbe challenged by the digital divide. Attention to issues of cultural appropriation isa constant. Yet, driving these initiatives is the need to maintain a digital diversityin online and offline spaces.