Arctic Domus Project

One of the interesting “spin offs” emanating from the recent International Congress of Arctic Social Sciences that was hosted at the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George B.C. was to learn of  a project known as the Arctic Domus, which is based at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.  The Arctic Domus team is comprised of scholars associated with universities located throughout all of the “northern” countries.  One of the team members, Dr. Clinton Westman from the University of Saskatchewan was interviewed on Northern British Columbia radio regarding a conference round table discussion that focused in part on the topic of domestication of animals in the north….in the radio interview, he ended up talking primarily about the relationship between humans and sled dogs.

Dr. Westman commented that that the domestication of animals was a key event in the evolution of the way of life of these northern peoples.  Further, maintaining sled dogs actually changed the way of life of those First Nations people who were dependent on teams of dogs for transportation, hunting and much later, to compete in the fur trade.  He drew comparisons between the domestication of (sled) dogs and the domestication of reindeer, something I had never thought of.    While this project is taking a look back in time, it struck me that those of us who are involved  with working sled dogs  are really part of this continuum.  It would be interesting to look at just  how our relationship with sled dogs  is changing not only the dogs we interact with but also how we ourselves are changing over time.

I don’t pretend to understand these concepts very well…it would be great to have comments from others who may have a better handle on the Arctic Domus project and the objectives that it is attempting to accomplish.

The Arctic Domus website is www.arcticdomus.org and virtually everything quoted below is lifted from that website.

“This five year (Arctic Domus) project investigates how people and animals today and in the past build sustainable communities around the circumpolar arctic.”

“Stories of how the lives of people and of animals interweave can help us solve fundamental questions about the environment. Through fieldwork in seven fieldsites across the Arctic from the Russian Federation, to Fennoscandia, Canada, and Alaska, we hope to document a wide variety of relations between humans, animals and places where they live. Our focus will be on 'domestication' - the skill of building relationships with entities outside of one's home.”

“Research sites will be reindeer herding camps, fish camps, evocative landscapes, archives, as well as biotechnological laboratories.”  (I would suggest that kennels of working sled dogs could provide additional research sites).  “Aside from challenging the idea that domestication is always dominating, we will develop a language to express how communities of people and of animals invigorate life in Northern places.”

The project has the following objectives:
“to place Arctic field examples at the forefront of debates on animal domestication, man/animal co-evolution, and commensalisms (two animals or plants always found together)
to build a new model of human-animal relationships by categorising person and place in a new way, and open to understanding how these relations change, advance and retreat
to critically apply a range of new analytical techniques in ethnography, the history of science, environmental archaeology, osteology and animal genetics to a range of new sites
to build a strong, interdisciplinary research environment for young scholars.”


“The Arctic is sometimes portrayed as 'species-poor' region - an idea that misrepresents the complexity of the relations that one finds here. In this project we will focus upon the relations between human-persons, rangifer (reindeer and caribou), canines (dogs), and fish (salmon and white fish).”

“Biologists and ethnographers have recognized these three sets of animals as 'key' species across the North, and much attention has been spent on which species was domesticated 'first' in time,  but there has been little work on how they negotiate their co-existence.
In our fieldwork we will look at these species in an active mood studying how they become 'wild' or are brought into domestication today. This is particularly relevant to the re-establishment of reindeer husbandry across many spaces of the former Soviet Union as with the creation/domestication of domestic breeds of fish.”    

“Dogs are perhaps the most well-known domestic species thought to be the first animal ever domesticated and the focus of much popular and scientific literature today.  Ethnographically, as in genetic studies, they have been taken for granted. The project therefore will perform fundamental work on documenting dog breeds and how dogs co-produce domestic relations together with human persons.”

Here is an example of some of the research that is being done that could be of immense interest and value to those of us interested in the history and evolution of the use of working sled dogs.  The full article is available through a link on the project web site and it compares and  discusses the implications of tooth loss in both northern dogs and wolves.  Dr. Rob Losey, an archaeologist at the University of Alberta,  is a leading author of the article that was published in a prestigious journal PLoS ONE.  The article is entitled "Craniomandibular Trauma and Tooth Loss in Northern Dogs and Wolves: Implications for the Archaeological Study of Dog Husbandry and Domestication.”  There is an extensive bibliography on the website.