Aboriginal communities help put names to faces of the past

For over half a century, Barnabus Arnasungaaq's self-confident stare rested anonymously in the vaults of Library and Archives Canada. The image of the sculptor from Baker Lake, Nunavut was one of thousands begging to be named.

Then, Canada's archivists decided to do something about the stacks of nameless or erroneously identified photos in its vaults. In partnership with Nunavut Sivuniksavut an Ottawa-based leadership program for Inuit youth and Nunavut's department of culture, the national archives launched Project Naming in 2001.

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Its main goal was to answer a simple question: do you know this person?

More than a decade later, the project's success in answering that question has led it to expand its call for help, to identify Inuit, First Nations and Mtis people of the past in the rest of Canada.

"Names are a crucial part of [Inuit] self identity and who they connect with. Their relatives and their whole kinship system and values are based around that. So adding names to those faces is an important thing to do," explained Beth Greenhorn, manager of Project Naming.

Project team members went through the laborious task of digitizing the photos, loading them onto laptops and then sending them back to Nunavut's far-flung villages with the students of Sivuniksavut. The young adults would then visit elders in their home towns and ask if they knew the people in the photos. In the last decade and a half, 2,000 faces have been named.

"It's a way also by just working with younger generations of aboriginal communities, we can hopefully give them a sense of their past and a grounding of who they are and hopefully a sense of pride in their culture," said Greenhorn.

Turning to Facebook

This week, Project Naming launched a new online search tool to help expand the project in a quest for names from Inuit communities in northern Quebec, the Northwest Territories and Yukon. Next week sees the launch of a Facebook page.

On top of that, the project will begin to put collections of southern First Nations and Mtis peoples online.

"I think it helps with understanding your identity and feeling like you're part of the community to learn about your ancestors," said Deborah Kigjugalik Webster, an author and historian, who comes from Baker Lake, Nunavut.

Webster got involved when she and her mother started poring through LAC's online database.

"We searched Baker Lake and we found photos of relatives and community members," she said. She and her mother used the online forms to identify the people they knew.

There is a certain urgency to Project Naming that Webster made sure to emphasize.

"She [Webster's mother] is the one who knows the family. She's older than me so she can identify people I can't. I think it's important this information be recorded now, before it's too late," she said.

One of Webster's favourite finds is a picture given to her by Greenhorn. In it is a woman and three girls fishing through a hole in the ice.

It was Webster's grandmother, her mom and two aunts.

"A beautiful family photo of my mother doing her favourite thing with her family."