In the Empire of Ice

by Gretel Ehrlich

  “I don’t mean to sound too critical. The Nunavut government is young. It was only established in 1999. They thought that after settling the Land Claims Agreement it would be clear sailing. Enormous expectations have been put on people in the north who have very little education or administrative experience. The pace of change is too rapid. People here only came out of a seminomadic life 40 or 50 years ago.”

  Townspeople are targets for the extractive industries, he tells me. Baffinland Iron Mines gave a presentation on its huge open pit mine at Mary River. “They talked as if it was a done deal. They never consulted the community. They came to tell the people here what they were going to do and asked only one question. It was about the shipping route through Foxe Basin. The hunters said the east side of the basin would be better because the west side is the migration corridor for the walrus. It is where they breed and calve in the spring. The mining company paid no attention. They announced a plan to ship the iron ore down the west side, through the walrus.

  “During the discussion, I noted that the elders were quiet. They knew it was wrong, but they felt the younger generation just needed the jobs.”

  ON THE RADIO in John and Carolyn’s house, a woman is giving the school lunch menu, followed by drumming and singing in Inuktitut. I’m reading a 2006 DNA report on a hybrid polar bear/grizzly shot near Sachs Harbour on Banks Island in western Nunavut. Are brown bears moving north as the climate shifts and mating with polar bears, or was it just an anomaly?

  The hunters in Taloyoak on Boothia Peninsula say that polar bears in their area are leaner and more aggressive, that one “broke a cabin in town,” and that they are afraid to live in their camps because there are too many hungry bears around.

  World Wildlife Fund biologists claim that the 15,000 resident polar bears in Nunavut, representing five of the Arctic’s subpopulations, are declining in number in west Hudson Bay, Baffin Bay, Kane Basin, Norwegian Bay, and the south Beaufort Sea. But are all populations suffering? I ask John, and if so, why?

  “Ask Mitch,” John says, and leads me down the path to his friend’s house. Mitchell Taylor is the controversial polar bear biologist based in Igloolik. An American who became a Canadian citizen, he created the Davis Strait polar bear project to assess the health of the bear populations between Igloolik, Baffin Island, and the northwestern coast of Greenland. He’s high energy, wiry, strong, and famously contrary. “For one, I don’t think the climate is changing, and secondly, polar bears aren’t endangered,” he says straight out and looks at me for a reaction.

  “I’ll leave you to it,” John says, grinning as he backs out the door. I look for a place to sit. Mitch takes boxes off a metal chair and pulls it up to a table. His house is nearly empty because he’s leaving soon. “It’s a forced retirement,” he says glumly, then grabs an unopened box of cookies from his “sealift supply” and dumps them onto a plate.

  He shows me a news report about the 10,000-year-old remains of a polar bear just found. “It means that polar bears have survived some huge climatic swings. Like the Medieval Warm Period a thousand years ago when it was warmer than it is now, and the Holocene Climate Optimum 5,000 to 9,000 years ago. “Bears are omnivorous, just like us,” he says. “They love seal, but they can also eat ducks, seabirds, the occasional caribou or musk ox, and they can scavenge the carcasses of walrus and whales.”

  Only one polar bear population in western Hudson Bay has declined since the 1980s because the reproductive success of females in that area has decreased. “I guess that climate change is affecting those bears,” he admits, “but really, there’s no need to panic. A USGS [U.S. Geological Survey] report came out in September that claimed two-thirds of the polar bears would die off in 50 years. That’s naive and presumptuous. They circulate this photograph of a skinny, bag-of-bones bear and use it as ‘proof’ that they’re starving. Well, that was an elderly male bear, probably going off to die, not a young female, as they claimed.”

  He shows me records that indicate the Canadian polar bear population has increased from 12,000 to 15,000, a gain of 25 percent in the past decade. “Davis Strait is crawling with them,” Mitch says. “It’s not safe to camp there. They’re fat, and the cubs are strong. The Davis Strait population is now around 3,000, up from 850, and that’s not theory or computer modeling, that’s direct observation.

  “See, people who don’t live here have trouble grasping just how many polar bears there are, the huge area they cover, and variability of habitat and latitude, ice movement and temperatures. Of course, climate change is having an effect on the west Hudson Bay bears—look how far south it is.” He points to the map on the way. “I just don’t know why people find the truth less entertaining than a good story. It’s just silly to predict the demise of polar bears in 25 years based on the current media-assisted hysteria.”

  We munch on stale cookies and study the map. He tells me that before getting his Ph.D. in 1982 at the University of Minnesota, he served in Vietnam. The Arctic became a refuge for him. His thesis was on the distribution and abundance of polar bears in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

  “The first polar bear I saw was in Barrow, Alaska,” Mitch says. “I’d thought nothing could live there. Then I looked out and saw this big male polar bear running through broken ice. He was pissed off at the helicopter bothering him. But that sight thrilled me to the center, like nothing else ever has.”

  When Mitch came to Igloolik and started the Davis Strait polar bear project, people didn’t know what the populations were or where they went. He flew all over Baffin Island, Davis Strait, and northwestern Greenland and walked a good deal of that terrain. One day he ran into an old hunter who said that a polar bear had been coming from a big hole, a den, on Baffin Island. “He showed me where. That was the beginning.”

  They put radio collars on bears in Canada and Greenland to see how they moved. “The West Greenland current travels up and upwells at Coburg Island,” he says. “The clockwise gyre takes the ice down to Bylot Island, and the polar bears stay with the ice. As the ice comes south, the bears go inland on Baffin, up to the areas where there’s snow and make snow dens there. At first we estimated that the population was between 300 and 600 bears. But they were crossing to Greenland on pack ice. Our study was in the spring only, and they had already begun moving. So we came back in the fall to Cape Dyer, Bylot, Devon, Ellesmere, and the mouth of Kane Basin. The count grew to 2,100 polar bears.”

  They worked during the year from field camps in Davis Strait, Labrador, and Baffin Island. There were bears in camp most days. “I used to catch and tag 33 bears in one day and 846 in a season. They were all in good shape, with good cub production.

  “There’s lots of controversy about polar bears and climate change. They may shift their territories, but they’ll be here. Maybe not in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, because the ice is more volatile there and the pack ice is retreating, but in Davis Strait they’ll thrive. See, climate change isn’t happening in the same way in every place. The Arctic is variable.

  “Anyway, like John, I’m still a doubter on the subject of global warming,” he says. “The Arctic Oscillation has changed polarities. So now it should start to get colder. In 20 years, you’ll see. Call me. Are you ready for an ice age?” Laughter.

  His mood changes. “I’m on my way out,” he says, suddenly dejected. Now Lily, the young biologist, will take over. He turns on his computer. He wants to show me photographs. He clicks through image after image of the polar bears he has caught, tagged, radio collared, and talked to. “I’ve seen my last polar bear,” he says. The room is dark. There are tears in his eyes.

  We make tea and eat more stale cookies. “I’ve tried all my life to make things better between animals and people, knowing I was doomed. That conservation wouldn’t overcome economics, that animals are never valued more than people. You have to start by understanding what we are as a critter. The only more dysfunctional system than capitalism is…” He doesn’t finish the sentence.

 
; I give him a copy of my book This Cold Heaven, about traveling with hunters by dogsled in Greenland. He thanks me, then says, “If I was writing a book, I’d go to my own window and look at the land and see what was there. Then I’d look in the mirror and acknowledge the fact of human frailty. I’d do away with the notion that animal behavior is any different from human behavior, or that it always has to be human versus animal. It shouldn’t be. We’re all part of the same continuum.”

  THE DAY IS A BOX of twilight buffeted by wind. Blowing snow is a scrim, a screen that adds light but never clears. I’m walking the coast below town. The houses are small and ragged. Men are working on Ski-Doos, hoods up, tools lying around. Snowdrifts are draped against overturned skiffs.

  The first time I came to the Canadian high Arctic was in 1991, when I spent three weeks at a seal biologist’s camp. The ice that May was six feet thick. By mid-June it had melted completely.

  A terrible storm came one day. It blew more than 85 miles an hour for three days and three nights. Our parcol—an insulated tent used by research camps on the ice—was coming apart, and we stayed up day and night, barely managing to keep it upright.

  Our food cache was buried under 15 feet of snow. Our WC tent blew away, never to be seen again. When the storm cleared, two hunters from the village of Resolute came looking to see if we had survived. They were surprised to see that we had. “You should try living in a house with real walls,” one of them said, and laughed his toothless laugh at us and roared away.

  At Mitch’s house I meet Sonia, who is using his spare room until she can find a place of her own. She’s a blue-eyed Midwesterner in her late 50s, on a Fulbright scholarship to write about life in a high Arctic town. She has a shambling, crooked gait as a result of polio, and walks with two canes. “I came here with my parents long ago. Now I’m back to stay for a year,” she tells me.

  Eager to be on location for Zach Kunuk’s new film, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, she caught rides out to camp with whomever would take her. “I like the way Zach works, making films where he lives, about the old ways and contemporary Igloolik,” she says.

  Mitch interjects impatiently: “But the ‘old ways’ represent a lifestyle no longer considered viable by most of the young people. They’ve been taught to expect free money, nursing care, air travel, and gas subsidies by well-meaning people. In all of Nunavut there are only 800 ‘elders’ over 65 years old.”

  When she first came to Igloolik, Sonia stayed with a family. “There were two elders providing food for all—five adopted children ranging in age from four to twenty-three.” She explains that two of the youngest children are actually grandchildren whom they adopted when social services removed the children from their drug- and alcohol-addicted mother. “Another six natural and adopted children live in the community, except for one son who is in jail for attempted murder. The boyfriend of the 23-year-old also lives in the house, and the couple is expecting a baby in the late spring. All are on welfare. No one has a job.”

  She goes into the kitchen to make more tea and tells me how exasperating it is for a writer to live in such a household: “At last count the family had 16 grandchildren. At any time of day or night one can find people crammed in the small living room, visiting, eating a meal, or watching TV, often with the sound off since many older locals don’t understand English. None of the children know how to hunt, even though they come from a once prominent hunting family. Several say they don’t like to camp in the summer because they prefer to have daily showers, even though water supply is an issue here. Every month the family allowance is spent on gambling.

  “Crowding is one of the worst problems in Igloolik. There are 62 families on the waiting list for houses. The once yearly sealift barge failed to bring the components, so they have to wait another year. Without hunting, there’s a big vacuum in people’s lives, and lawlessness erupts frequently despite the strong presence of the RCMP,” she says.

  Mitch says he was called at his office by two high school girls. “They said, ’Thirty dollars for one, fifty dollars for two.’ I said, ‘No thank you’ and hung up.” Alcohol can be obtained legally only by applying to the community’s Alcohol Education Committee, which turns down the worst offenders. Most alcohol flows into the community via bootleggers. A bottle of bootleg vodka runs about $300, a can of beer is $10 to $15, a joint is $30. Suicide rates are 11 times higher than the national average. Only one in four students graduates from high school, and teenage pregnancies are soaring.

  Sonia: “I walked in on one family where the older daughter was on drugs, and she flipped and was threatening to kill her mother. Her partner comes in and there’s a brawl. The mother calls the cops, so the daughter trashes the house. By the time the RCMP arrived, they could only ask the mother what she wanted done, and she said, ‘Nothing. Leave us.’”

  To deal with such problems, there’s a justice committee of elders who handle minor infractions but not violence. They have a counseling group that meets with couples or families. They try to work things out locally, but when the binding threads have been pulled out of a society, nothing makes sense anymore.

  “A tenth of the violence isn’t even reported, and almost no one is prosecuted,” Sonia says. “A judge came for one day in November. He’ll come back in May. The attorneys meet their clients for the first time in court. Ninety percent of the clients don’t show up at all.

  “Once the whole community was on lockdown,” she tells me. “They flew in 25 RCMP. Leah’s mother said it was so ridiculous. They could have had an elder go in and solve the problem. The justice system is alien to this culture. They’re used to handling things on their own. If a couple has a fight, they’re separated, or the violent one is sent to another community. They want things to remain confidential.

  “In the old days the elders got together and talked things out. Women weren’t treated well by our standards. They were told not to upset their partners. The traditional thought was that, if there’s abuse, it’s the woman’s fault.

  “There’s also racism here on both sides,” Sonia says. “Most of the Qallunaat—the white people—live on the Anglican side up here where we are. The white contractors and technicians don’t seem to have much interest in knowing Inuit families. John and Carolyn, of course, are the great exception. To take two such different cultural systems and blend them. Maybe it’s not possible.”

  Mitch is restless. He gets up, paces the room, and sits down again: “I see more similarities than differences in how the older generation thinks and makes decisions. But the younger ones—well, the unemployment and suicide rates tell the story. The prognosis is not good. What we have here is aboriginal rednecks. The society is coming apart. The elders are dying, and each loss has a huge effect on the youngsters. Each generation has less and less authority. Elders are being replaced by a void. There are some good leaders stepping up, but not enough of them. It has become a culture of entitlement.”

  At school, he tells me, everyone passes. There are special cases for fetal alcohol syndrome kids who can’t function at all, and in other classes the teachers are just trying to keep things under control. “When the kids aren’t taught properly and can’t read or write, they act out,” Mitch says. “They think school is for losers. They stay up all night. A girl will throw over a boy for some white guy who has more skills and money. Then the Inuk boyfriend hangs himself. There’s violent crime in every village—breaking and entering, stabbings…. We can’t leave our houses untended for an hour, much less a day, without double locking them. That’s the reality of Nunavut. But out on the land, it’s different. The people are great. There’s a welcoming community anywhere you go who do things the old way.”

  In 21st-century Igloolik, as in other Arctic communities, the opposing worlds of “town life” and subsistence hunting life out on the ice and land are warring forces. Is it possible to live in such an inhospitable place if you are no longer an “ice-adapted” hunter? “It’s like watching a death spiral in the making,” S
onia says. “Think of it: It costs $250 in gas for the snowmobile to go out and get a seal. How can you expect people to live traditionally?”

  The seasonal cycle in Igloolik now is very different from 75 years ago. In the fall the annual sealift arrives, bringing a year’s supply of fuel, building materials, snowmobiles, fire trucks, guns, ammunition, food, televisions, and clothing. In January, when the sun appears, there’s a townwide celebration with a qulliq-lighting ceremony, a feast, games, and a talent show. There’s singing and dancing—not just traditional Inuit dances but the whalers’ square dances, accompanied by an accordion with Inuktitut calls.

  Sonia has recently met some young hunters who go out every day and hunt for their families and are committed to living a more traditional life, drug free. “There are about a hundred of them,” she tells me. “They’re wonderful young men, and their wives are trying hard too. There’s always hope, isn’t there?”

  DINNER PARTY. Carolyn has made one of her amazing patchwork meals with piquant tastes of curry, Mexican spices, homemade wine, and fresh-baked bread. She has invited Georgia, a tiny, sassy, spry woman who is nearly 80 but looks 60. She says she came to Igloolik one summer as a young woman to help the local priest and never left. She’s written a lively diary of her early years here. American born, she changed her citizenship quickly to Canadian, dropping her surname in protest against Operation Surname. “Now I’m just Georgia. That seemed like enough.” She has done a little of everything in town and helps Carolyn at school, teaching reading and writing. “I live in a tiny house in the Catholic part of town. I like it there just fine,” she says.

  Sonia walks up the stairs, followed by Mitch. He tells the crowd he has just been relieved of his job. “Too bad,” John says. “I claimed you were personally known by every polar bear between Greenland, Ellesmere Island, and Igloolik.”