Cameron Turley

CAMERON C. TURLEY, then a graduate student at City University of New York, New York, New York, was awarded a grant in April 2018 to aid research on “Ethnogenesis at Alluitsoq Fjord: Inuit Negotiations of World Systems Changes in Colonial Era Greenland,” supervised by Dr. Thomas Howatt McGovern. The Alluitsoq Project supports research for multiple MA and PhD archaeology students in the United States and Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). Their research is contributing to a multi-sited study of mission life in early-modern Greenland and to the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO), North Atlantic Encounters. and RESPONSE projects’ investigations of millennial-scale environmental and social changes in the region. These research activities have garnered international attention, including endorsements as sponsored activities in the UNESCO BRIDGES pilot program, building an international coalition of institutions, scientists, and local stakeholders to address environmental and societal threats in the 21st century. Wenner-Gren support funded phases of the Alluitsoq Project that introduces expanded local collaboration and knowledge co-production to these research programs. This is accomplished on three levels: 1) collaboration and knowledge co-production between American and Greenlandic junior scholars to build a relevant and ethical archaeology in Greenland; 2) collaboration and knowledge co-production with Alluitsoq’s descendent elders through ethnographic work so their knowledge builds the archaeological narratives; and 3) archival research to provide colonial-period reference points. Ethnographic and archival analyses are demonstrating strategies for negotiating colonialism, modernity, and changing environments in politically and ecologically uncertain times, and suggest support for the grantee’s PhD hypotheses of active, long-term Greenlandic ethnogenesis.