This paper addresses questions about the current shape of the humanities raised through two experimental jewelry arts workshops held at a vocational school in the Canadian Arctic. These workshops investigated the idea of an artisanal epistemology in early modern enquiries into the natural world in relation to contemporary modes of indigenous knowledge production. In the Inuit cultural context, the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge is not rooted in textual traditions, but bodily embedded in oral histories, craft technology, and land stewardship. Through this lens of indigenous interaction with Renaissance scholarship, this paper reflects on the utility of reconstruction and material literacy as present-day history of science methodologies, in which scholarly textual interpretation meets physical research, as well as the nature of cultural heritage in shaping material practice. This cross-cultural knowledge exchange also engenders a wider reflection about the turn within the humanities to increasingly greater emphasis on interdisciplinary research and multidisciplinary collaborations, in which breaking down disciplinary siloes poses big challenges. How do our actions and values as scholars shape the intellectual heritage that we are creating right now, in our own historical moment? How might new collaborative practices between humanists, artisans, and scientists reorient this? Who is knowledge for, anyway?
