People of the Ice Unit III: Sea Ice & People Seasonal Resources ACTIVITY TIME 90 minutes LEARNING OUTCOMES • Illustrate the relation- ship between food resource harvesting and seasonal cycles. • Discuss the role of sea ice in food resource harvesting in Arctic communities. • Describe how natural resource harvesting is fundamental to cultural identity and food security in the Arctic. • Describe the traditional Inuit six-season calendar and how it varies across different re- gions of the Arctic. • Consider the availability of lo- cal food resources in students’ OVERVIEW own communities and how this may or may not be influ- The Arctic environment changes dramatically over the course of a enced by seasonal changes. year, transforming from a landscape of ice and snow in the winter to a • Compare and contrast food kaleidoscope of biological activity in the spring and summer. Traditional security in different commu- knowledge passed down through the generations has helped the Inuit of the nities. Arctic make the most of what nature has to offer throughout the seasons. In this activity students use a food wheel to explore the seasonality of food resources harvested in Sanikiluaq, an island community in Hudson Bay. Students create their own food wheels depicting the seasonal availability of key food items in their own communities, and compare them to the community of Sanikiluaq. FLOW 1. Watch video 4. Research individual plants and 2. Read season cards animals 3. Make food wheel 5. Complete worksheets 6. Post-discussion questions ArcticSeaIce.com THE ARCTIC SEA ICE EDUCATIONAL PACKAGE TEACHER VERSION 1 Seasonal Resources G CONTENTS Student Overview 2 Worksheet 12 Background 3 Extensions 17 Preparation 5 Links 17 Procedure 6 Sources 21 Discussion Questions 8 Attribution 21 Belcher Islands’ Season Descriptions 8 STUDENT OVERVIEW WHY? HOW? Food that is not grown or harvested in your Talk about country food that you community must travel a long distances to have eaten before. reach you, making it more expensive, less fresh and not as nutritious. Knowing what food is Watch a video to learn about the available from the land (or water), when it can Belcher Islands. be harvested and how it is best prepared can help Choose a wildlife species from you maintain a healthier lifestyle. the Belchers and read cards to WHAT? determine when it is harvested. Fill in a worksheet and food • What resources can be harvested locally. wheel with your new knowledge. • When local resources are normal harvested. Repeat focusing on your community. Talk about your findings and figure out what it all means. Image 1 Hunter and Canada goose (S. DesRoches and M. Gordon) 2 TEACHER VERSION THE ARCTIC SEA ICE EDUCATIONAL PACKAGE ArcticSeaIce.com People of the Ice Unit III: Sea Ice & People BACKGROUND VOCABULARY Harvesting: Collecting, For centuries, the diets of Inuit people in the Arctic have been shaped fishing or hunting plants or by seasonal changes in the local environment. In order to survive and animals for food. thrive in the arctic climate, people had to develop a keen understanding of seasonal cycles and a diverse set of skills for successful harvesting of Calving: When female wildlife and plants. They had to know the timing and specific geography reindeer/caribou give birth to their young; young cari- of food availability and adapt to changing and unpredictable conditions bou are called calves. year after year. What people ate was governed by the seasons, by their ability to harvest, as well as by cultural and personal preference. Country food: Foods that can be harvested locally. In northern communities, store-bought foods are extremely expensive eco-region: A sub-category of an and contain far less nutritional and caloric value, gram for gram, than ecozone that contains a distinct country food, or foods that can be harvested locally. Subsistence biodiversity of flora and fauna. hunting remains a way of life in many arctic communities today. Modern Inuit apply skills honed over generations to use harvested Flaw leads: Cracks between flow ice animals as thoroughly as possible for food, clothing, tools, art, medicine, and landfast ice. These are used by animals such as seals to access air and many other uses. Depending on location, animals such as seal, to breathe, and by eider ducks for caribou, muskoxen, various whale species, and fish are used to varying access to food at the sea floor. degrees by Inuit across the Arctic. For example, the Inuit of Baker Lake call themselves the “caribou people” because of the important role Floe edge: Where the sea ice caribou plays in their diets. The community of Baker Lake is the only attached to land, meets the moving floe ice of Hudson Bay. non-coastal community in Nunavut, and so marine wildlife, such as whales and seals, feature much less prominently in the local diet. Food security: Having access to nutritious food. On the Belcher Islands of southeast Hudson Bay, Inuit in the community of Sanikiluaq use eider ducks as a major source of food and Food wheel: Shows which natural resources are available or harvested clothing. Several dietary staples can be found year-round in Hudson Bay, in each month. including ringed and bearded seals, common eiders, and sea-bottom Polynya: An area of open water surrounded by sea ice; often re- mains open throughout most of the winter. Seasonality: Variation that occurs in time with the seasons. Subsistence hunting: Providing food by using local resources for person- al, non-commercial consumption. Image 2 Fish is dried and preserved over a fire. (J.Heath) ArcticSeaIce.com THE ARCTIC SEA ICE EDUCATIONAL PACKAGE TEACHER VERSION 3 Seasonal Resources G animals such as mussels and sea urchins. Among other environmental factors, the presence (or absence!) and quality of sea ice greatly influences what will be available for Inuit to harvest. Early spring is a particularly difficult time for food resource gathering in the Belcher Islands. Polynya can freeze over at this time, decreasing the availability of open water in which eider ducks can feed, forcing them to spend more time in open water at the floe edge. The floe edge is where the sea ice attaches to land and is called landfast ice, which meets the moving floe ice of Hudson Bay. Cracks often form between the floe ice and the landfast ice, opening what are called flaw leads. Flaw leads can be used by animals such as seals to access air to breathe, and by eider ducks for access to food at the sea floor. Seals are also more difficult to hunt during the early spring. Seals start making multiple breathing holes in the late fall as the ice develops, and they maintain these holes over the winter by scraping back the ice with their thick nails. However, in the early spring the sea ice is so thick that seals have a hard time keeping their breathing holes open. In the spring months Inuit hunt the seals by waiting at their breathing holes. But as the holes freeze up it becomes more challenging to find both the holes and the seals. Each of the six (sometimes more) seasons on the Inuit calendar have different environmental conditions important for the local area. Wildlife observations, such as the return of migratory birds, and natural events, such as the breakup of sea ice, typically define the start and end of each season in a local context. In general, the Inuit seasons consist of ukiuq (winter), upirngassaq (early spring), upirngaq (spring), aujaq (summer), ukiassaq (early fall), ukiaq (fall). A table showing how these Inuit seasons correspond to the commonly known 12-month calendar is shown in Figure 1. Interestingly, the spelling of the seasons changes with different local dialects. The criteria for each season also changes between different eco-regions throughout the Arctic. This emphasizes how seasonal calendars were understood and used in the local area they were describing. Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Ukiuq Upirngassaaq Upirngaaq Aujaq Ukiassaaq Ukiaq FIgure 1 Calendar months’ names with corresponding Inuit seasons. How do these seasonal cycles affect people in the Arctic? Understanding the intricate cycles and annual patterns, and being able to adapt harvesting practices around them, have played a critical role in the survival and persistence of Arctic peoples. By creating a seasonal food wheel diagram, we can visualize and understand how different environmental and biological conditions at different times of the year give rise to the diverse local diets characteristic of Inuit communities. 4 TEACHER VERSION THE ARCTIC SEA ICE EDUCATIONAL PACKAGE ArcticSeaIce.com People of the Ice Unit III: Sea Ice & People PREPARATION RESOURCES Map of Sanikiluaq and the Belcher Islands SIKU map of the Belcher Islands and the community of Sanikiluaq. https://arcticeider.com/links/sre4 People of a Feather Location Video A video from People of a Feather that explores the landscape and ecosystem of the Belcher Islands. https://arcticeider.com/links/sre9 Optional: Interactive Food Wheel Activity When doing the activity with the entire class or reviewing students’ work, this SMART notebook activity allows the teacher or students to drag and drop images of the resource onto the season when it is harvested. https://arcticeider.com/links/sre3 Optional: Belcher Islands Seasons Presentation This PowerPoint presentation contains photos and summarized information from the Belcher Islands Seasons Descriptions section and can be used to do the activity together as a class. https://arcticeider.com/links/sre12 Image 3 Seamstresses in Sanikiluaq sew together eider duck skins, which have been harvested on the land, to make traditional parkas. (J.Heath) ArcticSeaIce.com THE ARCTIC SEA ICE EDUCATIONAL PACKAGE TEACHER VERSION 5 Seasonal Resources G PROCEDURE ParT I: INTrODuCTION 1.