Puberty, pregnancy, and menopause: lifecycle acculturation in a Copper Inuit community

In the past three decades Copper Inuit women have gone from a situation of family-centered births in tents and snowhouses, to community births in government-run nursing stations to hospital births hundreds of miles from home. This process, which has been well documented by John O'Neil, Patricia Kaufert and others, is one aspect of the medical acculturation of the Canadian Inuit. The present work demonstrates how this medical acculturation has profoundly affected both the quality and the character of information flow between generations regarding all life cycle processes from bith to puberty to menopause. This paper examines the changes in the transmission of cultural information about life processes for 3 generations of Inuit women in the Central Canadian Arctic village of Holman and will consider the historical and social roots of these changes. Among the findings of the authors is that both elderly and young women are relatively knowledgeable regarding issues related to reproductive health and are comfortable discussing these topics. Women in their middle years, however, appear to be less knowledgeable and often display discomfort with the subject.