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A great deal of hurt and misunderstanding can grow out of a clash of cultures. This was precisely the case when the Canadian Northern Administration established numbering and a renaming system for Inuit. Traditions of the Inuit were violated by administrators who sought to simplify Inuit names "for convenience' sake."
Valerie Alia has written a well-documented study of the handling of Inuit names by administrators responsible for Northern Affairs. Her study is short, but powerful, in that it takes on the issue of ethnocentrism: a hierarchy of administrators representing the dominant culture who ignore traditions of the minority culture. The result is a lot of grief and degradation. The book illustrates the need to overcome ethnocentrism and the need to build "cultural respect" (p. 106).
In the North, administrators initially had difficulty pronouncing Inuit names. A numbering system was therefore devised in the 1930s. Inuit...