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Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance

Robert Proctor, Londa L. Schiebinger

Stanford University Press, 2008 - History - 298 pages

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What don't we know, and why don't we know it? What keeps ignorance alive, or allows it to be used as a political instrument? Agnotology the study of ignorance provides a new theoretical perspective to broaden traditional questions about "how we know" to ask: Why don't we know what we don't know? The essays assembled in Agnotology show that ignorance is often more than just an absence of knowledge; it can also be the outcome of cultural and political struggles. Ignorance has a history and a political geography, but there are also things people don't want you to know ("Doubt is our product" is the tobacco industry slogan). Individual chapters treat examples from the realms of global climate change, military secrecy, female orgasm, environmental denialism, Native American paleontology, theoretical archaeology, racial ignorance, and more. The goal of this volume is to better understand how and why various forms of knowing do not come to be, or have disappeared, or have become invisible.

Cold War forced relocations Cornwallis and Ellesmere Islands feature in the history of the Cold War in the 1950s. Efforts to assert sovereignty in the High Arctic during the Cold War, i.e. the area's strategic geopolitical position, led the federal government to forcibly relocate Inuit from northern Quebec to Resolute and Grise Fiord. The first group of people were relocated in 1953 from Inukjuak, Quebec (then known as Port Harrison ) and from Pond Inlet, Nunavut. They were promised homes and game to hunt, but the relocated people discovered no buildings and very little familiar wildlife. They also had to endure weeks of 24 hour darkness during the winter, and 24 hour sunlight during the summer, something that does not occur in northern Quebec. They were told that they would be returned home after a year if they wished, but this offer was later withdrawn as it would damage Canada's claims to sovereignty in the area and the Inuit were forced to stay. Eventually, the Inuit learned the local beluga whale migration routes and were able to survive in the area, hunting over a range of 18,000 km² (6,950 mi²) each year. .

In 1993, the Canadian government held hearings to investigate the relocation program. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples called the relocation "one of the worst human rights violations in the history of Canada". The government paid $10 million CAD to the survivors and their families, but as of 2007 has yet to apologize.

Having lost most traditional skills and purpose, its Inuit residents are now to a large degree dependent on government support. The whole story is told in Melanie McGrath's The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic.