In Winter We Hunt: A short film - part of an ongoing personal work
©Tamara Stubbs
East Greenlandic Inuit hunter Justus, hunts for seal in the wintertime during the months the sea ice is frozen around his home village, Kulusuk. The successful hunts will feed his family, and his dogs.
Justus hunts by traditional methods using passed down knowledge, he is one of the few remaining hunters that hunt by dogs’ sled, enjoying the quiet that comes with that form of travel and the added protection from Polar bears. He lives the life of a hunter, living with, and from the land he knows well, each season brings a different way of life.
In winter he hunts over sea-ice with his dogs. Throughout summer, he fishes and hunts by boat out at sea, using long established familial migratory routes and storied knowledge about the land and where to find sustainable food sources.
Not every hunt is a successful hunt, this day was going well, but the ring seal shot from the edge of the sea ice was lost, sunk before it could be retrieved.
We are in an age where maybe the majority of humans, through circumstance, are distant from nature, disconnected and dissociated. We as people are not necessarily seeing ourselves as equal or a part of nature. Apart from the loss that entails, humans are taking more than their share of nature’s resources, we are not alone in the eco-system, but act like we are.
This is a relatively new place humans find themselves, and there is an acceleration of disconnect happening now, in the rapid adoption of a new age of ‘virtual’ space. This disconnection alongside humankind’s ability to plunder and globally distribute the Earth’s resources unsustainably, comes at huge cost to the eco-systems we are taking from. Maybe we should look at where we have come from and what we are doing now whilst we can? Fortunately, there are still communities living a more traditional life, the knowledge they hold, whilst relevant to their immediate environment, is vital for sustainable living. The curve ball is the acceleration of climate change that is giving these communities incredible challenges to overcome and adapt too.
This film is a small window to personal work I am making as part of a much larger project documenting collaboratively with significant communities still living as part of and within the natural environmental. The ‘old way’, we were taught, in my personal experience, is ‘backward’. Maybe we should decide for ourselves? To do so we really need to think about it, and to know for ourselves before dismissing and putting out this way of life.
I will be exploring this concept in a long-term project for book and film format. Please feel free to get in touch if you would like to collaborate, help fund, or chat through this project.
I am always looking to connect with significant communities who live by hunting, herding, fishing, gathering, migrating.
Please get in touch if you are interested in collaborating or sharing stories.