Survey of Living Conditions in the Arctic: Inuit, Saami and the Indigenous Peoples of Chukotka (SLICA)

Abstract

National Science Foundation, "For the last few decades the scientific community has expressed concern about the vulnerability of the Arctic and its residents to environmental, social, and economic changes…[Recent] research results show that arctic climate and ecosystems are indeed changing substantially with impacts on people living in and outside the Arctic." The scientists listed as the first key question, "How are the rapid social, political, economic and environmental changes occurring in the Arctic today affecting the people there?" (ARCUS, 1998:3). Delegates to the 1998 Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC) passed a resolution supporting an international survey of living conditions in the Arctic. The resolution noted, "Rapid social change characterises all indigenous peoples of the Arctic…There is a need to document and compare the present state of living conditions and the development among the indigenous peoples of the Arctic." This essay presents a comparative study of living conditions among the Inuit and Saami peoples of the United

SLiCA: Arctic living conditions

“…The fieldwork, the actual interviewing started in Canada in 2001 and was not finished in Norwegian, Swedish and Kola Peninsula parts of Sápmi until 2008. The reporting on living conditions in Inuit Nunaat, the Inuit homelands, took place in 2007 (see chapter 1) and parallel to the questionnaire development, the implementation of the interviewing, the subsequent data processing, database construction, website development and analyses and until today roughly 50 peer reviewed articles and book chapters have been published, five doctoral dissertations and several masters and bachelor projects, based on different aspects of SLiCA (including theoretical and methodological approaches), have been successfully completed and close to one hundred presentations have been given at research and public conferences, seminars, workshops and town hall meetings. So the research process has been going on for a while and has been very productive and dissemated through a number of other activities as well.…”

“…1 The process included establishing partnerships and getting funded, developing a new research design, doing field work, processing data to finally being able to analyse data and disseminating results in a way that is accessible and useful to the indigenous peoples of the Arctic. The intent was to increase the knowledge of their own and other indigenous peoples' history and living conditions and at the same time improve the basis for policy planning and implementation.…”

“…Furthermore the anthology provides samples of analyses -including comparative and contextual studies -that can be accomplished using SLiCA data. ────────────────────────── 1 The intention is to give a flavour of the SLiCA research process and not an all-encompassing and in-depth study of all aspects in all phases and in all regions. That means that individuals and organisations that made important contributions to the progress of the SLiCA project may not be mentioned.…”

“…The survey results in this chapter are based only on the Greenlandic Inuit. 6 Based on proposals from some of the indigenous participants in the international research team five international comparison research themes were chosen: (1) The importance of social relationships and the standard of living to settlement patterns; (2) The importance of a mixed cash-and harvest/ herding-based economy to living in the Arctic; (3) Relationships between social problems and other dimensions of living conditions; (4) The influence of educators and missionaries; (5) The influence of policies on living conditions. research themes are all analysed in the SLiCA Overview article (Kruse et al 2008;and www.arcticlivingconditions.org).…”

“…The motivation for launching SLiCA was the ambition to describe these aspects with re-gard to indigenous language, tradition and resource utilisation. The background of SLiCA is described in detail elsewhere (1)(2)(3). The sampling methods used in the survey have been different due to country/regional variability in indigenous population density and register availability.…”