Cold Warriors Settled Canada’S Northernmost Community
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Fifty years ago, Inuit landed on the southern shore of Ellesmere Island and Cold warriors settled Canada’s northernmost community. Now the changing climate is forcing them to adapt once again. BY LISA GREGOIRE ~ PHOTOGRAPHY BY PATRICE HALLEY Residents of Grise Fiord (from left), Kevin Kiguktak, Gerry Pijamini, Ooleesee Akeeagok, Daniel Flaherty and Peter Flaherty, cavort on the frozen shores of Jones Sound. 34 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC OCTOBER 2008 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC 35 Ayles Ice Shelf QUTTINIRPAAQ NATIONAL PARK t i D a r N t ARCTIC A S L OCEAN S I Kane Axel s e Basin r a Heiberg E N R GREENLAND Island E Smith M Sound S E Enlarged Norwegian L area L Beaufort Sea E Davis North Water NUNAVUT Strait Bay Polynya IQALUIT Grise Fiord HUDSON W Craig Harbour BAY e l l d CANADA i Jones Soun Coburg Island n g t Cornwallis o Lady Ann n Island C DEVON Strait Polynya h Resolute a ISLAND n P . A R R BAFFIN Y Lancaster Sound Jones Sound (RIGHT) C H A N N E L BAY sparkles in the shadow 0 100 200 km Bylot BAFFIN I. Island of melting glaciers. Nunavut’s second small- est community, Grise Fiord (BOTTOM) is made up of 40 houses and another 20 public and commercial buildings. “You lean when I lean,” yells Marty Kuluguktuk Fiord’s assistant senior administrative officer. “Last year, it The vast landscape Inuit navigated for centuries by over the engine’s shrieking. We’re careening sideways on a shrank 1.5 metres.” We continue northward up the slope, Ysnowmobile around boulders and frozen tundra, approach- pull a U-turn at the top and head south along a rocky ridge reading its subtle signs is becoming warmer, softer ing the foot of a glacier just east of Grise Fiord (pop. 141), dusted with snow. He points to a hill leading to town. Canada’s most northern community. Bare-faced in the cut- “That was all glacier just 10 years ago,” he says. “It’s gone.” and unpredictable because of the changing climate. ting May wind, Kuluguktuk knows only two positions on The glacier is Grise Fiord’s main water supply. Fragmen- the throttle: full and idle. tation is accelerating its retreat into the hills, and last On a steep embankment, we lean hard to no effect. The summer, the runoff didn’t fill the reservoir. In spring, when — Grise Fiord is at the epicentre of global climate change. uphill ski lifts, and we teeter on the brink of flipping over. the hamlet ran out of water, officials dispatched a front-end But it’s not just change that has Inuit families reeling, it’s the I pry numb fingers from the safety bars and clench his loader to chip off chunks of an iceberg just offshore. pace of change, says Sheila Watt-Cloutier, who was nomi- waist like someone drowning. Kuluguktuk accelerates to flat A tottering scramble over jutting rocks leads to an nated for a Nobel Prize last year for travelling the world, terrain. “I don’t want to die today, Marty,” I yell with uncon- inuksuk on the edge of a cliff — a sturdy sentry over Jones raising concern about the impact of global warming and vincing levity. Sound and distant Devon Island. Mountains separate pollutants on her people, the Inuit. He shouts back his trademark reply: “Nothing serious.” Ellesmere’s southern fiords like talons. The air is cool and In the wink of one generation, nomadic children raised Halfway up the glacier’s smooth white tongue, he pulls moist, and the evening’s 24-hour sun glows through a gauzy with dog teams in the 1950s wound up in sedentary nine- over to a pair of aluminum poles poking out of the ice and haze. Directly below us is Grise Fiord, a cluster of dots to-five jobs, many disconnected from the land, their elders cuts the engine. One of the poles is attached to a white metal tangled in a spiderweb of snowmobile trails. Like the and their P. Diddy-and-Facebook offspring. The conse- box and a solar panel — a remote weather monitor. “This 25 other Inuit communities in Nunavut — the two-million- quences of this wholesale cultural shift are well documented: is where we measure the glacier,” says Kuluguktuk, Grise square-kilometre territory that covers Canada’s eastern Arctic MAP: STEVEN FICK/CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC; OPPOSITE BOTTOM: BRIAN & CHERRY ALEXANDER PHOTOGRAPHY/ALAMY violent crime and suicide rates are climbing; life expectancy 36 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC OCTOBER 2008 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC 37 is falling. Surviving on the land taught Inuit patience, persistence, courage — skills that could ground them, and their children, during this modern tumult. But the vast landscape they navigated for centuries by reading its subtle signs is becoming warmer, softer and unpredictable because of the changing climate. “It’s the very thing we’re going to need as we go into the second wave of change,” says Watt- Cloutier, whose book in progress, The Right to Be Cold, frames the climate-change debate around human rights and indigenous self-determination. “It’s ironic, the very thing we’re reaching out to is under threat.” When Inuit arrived on the southern shore of Ellesmere Island some 50 years ago, it was colder and farther north than any of them had ever been. They called it Ausuittuq, “the place that never melts.” “Never” proved to be a very short time. The creation of Grise Fiord and Resolute, on southern Cornwallis Island, established at the same time, was a social experiment perpetrated on a handful of ill-prepared families from northern Quebec and northern Baffin Island in what many believe was an attempt by the federal government to assert its ownership of the Arctic islands within what it considered its northern boundaries. Most of the relocated Inuit had never experienced 24-hour darkness or seen a muskox before. The first few years were extremely difficult. Some families eventually returned home. Others made a life here despite being tethered to the air supply and government assistance common to almost any remote fly-in community. Those who stayed adapted to a new climate and a new environment and it appears they’ll have to do so again. Meanwhile, their leaders are lobbying governments at home and abroad. Mary Simon, president of Canada’s Inuit organization Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, is urging governments Ricky Pijamini learns about climate change in school. Is he worried? ‘No way! It means longer summers and more fishing.’ Pauloosie Nungak rides an old washing to help her people prepare for the future by selecting an Inuit insists that the time to mitigate global warming has nearly machine drum scavenged from the model community to address building and engineering expired. “We can’t stop it entirely,” she says, “but we can town dump (ABOVE) as Jason Qaapik (at challenges related to slumping permafrost and to experiment maybe slow down the process.” left) and Gerry Pijamini wait their turn. with culturally sensitive design and sustainability. Watt- Grise Fiord is a traditional, family- Cloutier, who was instrumental in helping to push through Viewed from a Twin Otter about 2,000 metres oriented community, with sled dogs for the 2001 Stockholm Convention banning Persistent Organic above-ground, the Arctic’s puzzle-piece geography becomes hunting and wooden frames for drying Pollutants, which were turning up in the flesh of marine real and identifiable: the retreating shores of Cornwallis seal pelts (LEFT). mammals that are a critical part of the Inuit diet, is unflinch- Island, Wellington Channel — windswept and textured ing before world leaders and international forums. She like fur — bumpy Devon Island. Canada’s third largest 38 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC OCTOBER 2008 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC 39 ‘Young and elderly aboriginal residents, in particular those pursuing aspects of traditional ways of life, are the most vulnerable.’ island, Ellesmere is the most northern of the Arctic Archipelago and its most mountainous, though 40 percent of it is pinned under shrinking cloaks of ice, some of them 900-metre-thick remnants of the last ice age. Clouds obscure the aerial view. We hunch against the air- craft’s chilled interior until a wall of rock suddenly, and alarmingly, materializes out of the mist. The plane banks 90 degrees west, drops onto the runway and halts on half a kilometre of gravel. With eight passengers and luggage on board, there was scant room for food and supplies for the community’s only store, a common misfortune with just two scheduled flights weekly. The town went smoke-free for a couple of days this summer when the store ran out of $20 packs of cigarettes. “Do you know what we got today?” asks the exasperated store manager, Doug Field. “Coffee whitener. Two boxes of coffee whitener.” Unlike Nunavut’s capital, Iqaluit, with its cappuccino and racquetball, Grise Fiord, the territory’s second smallest community, is traditional and family-oriented. There are about 40 dwellings and another 20 public and commercial buildings. No housing shortage here; no food bank. Women make parkas for their bachelor brothers, and everyone hunts or knows someone who does. Many rely on seal, beluga, nar- whal, muskox, ptarmigan, Arctic char, hare, caribou and polar bear for food and skins. But subsistence hunting, even here in the High Arctic, could eventually be threatened as animals react to a fluctuating ecosystem. Thanks to our addiction to fossil fuels, even southern Ellesmere has an earlier spring, a warmer summer, a later freeze-up and less sea ice for travelling and hunting. Less ice eventually means more international shipping through the Arctic as well, more resource exploration, a greater risk of environmental contamination — and reduced habitat for the polar bears and seals that eat, mate and reproduce on the ice.