After the Ice

by Alun Anderson

  Across the border from Inuvialuit, in Alaska, is the North Slope Borough, the largest “county” in the entire United States and home to 7,300 people, nearly 70 percent of them Inuit (Inupiat). Farther to the west again, around 1,600 Inuit (Yupik) remain in the Chukotka peninsula of Russia. To Nunavut’s east, there is Greenland, just across Baffin Bay, with a population of 57,000, of which 90 percent are Inuit.

  Nunavut is the biggest and boldest development in Inuit governance of the Arctic (although there are exciting developments in Greenland, to which we will return).7 But the big social and economic challenges that Simon spoke of and the political difficulties of building a new territory in the Arctic cannot be exaggerated.

  Arriving at the capital of Iqaluit, population 6,500, by plane from Ottawa, my first shock was the polar bear posters in the airport arrival hall advising that if attacked, you should shoot the bear and “try to get off a second shot.” The word “try” remained in my mind. Out on the streets another surprise was the amazing number of young people. Downtown Ottawa is a geriatric ward in comparison. Many in the groups of young girls wearing beautiful brightly colored anoraks already had a baby tucked in its hood. This is an astonishingly young society, in which 60 percent of the population is under twenty-five. (In the United States, 32 percent of the population is under twenty-five, and in the United Kingdom it’s just 28 percent.) Nunavut’s population of 30,000 is growing so fast that it is expected to reach 44,000 by 2020.

  The town still has a ramshackle frontier feel with dirt roads, boardwalks, white tufts of bog cotton growing wild on open bits of land, giant SUVs circling, bars where old-style brawls still occasionally break out, and a worrying number of drunks and young people begging.8 There is a clutch of shiny new government buildings clad in blue steel, and the wonderful Nunavut Arctic College providing training in every skill from hairdressing to snowmobile repair. Iqaluit is a small town, but it is the capital of a land beyond the imagination. Everything about Nunavut’s scale will leave you astonished.9 The territory occupies 21 percent of Canada’s area, or 800,000 square miles. That makes it five times the size of California and over eight times the size of Great Britain. Yet its entire population is just around 30,000 people. To put that in perspective, imagine if the entire population of the United States were just 130,000, or if fewer than 4,000 people lived in the whole of Great Britain. These nations would then have the same population density as Nunavut. Only the neighboring island of Greenland, with an equivalent land area and slightly larger population of 57,000 people, is comparable.

  Nunavut’s tiny population is spread out over twenty-five scattered communities. None of them are linked by roads, because there are no roads. There are no railroads, and the only deep port is for a mine at Nanisivik, on Baffin Island, that is no longer in use. Only two communities outside the capital are home to more than 1,000 people, but every small community needs its own electricity generation, school, health care facilities, and sewage and water systems. Distances between communities are vast, and air transport is expensive, infrequent, and subject to severe weather. Transport costs push the prices of daily necessities—especially bulky liquids from gasoline to orange juice—through the roof, as they do everywhere in the Arctic.

  All these circumstances provide big challenges for the government of Nunavut, which has chosen to try to work in a way that will reflect Inuit culture.10 When Nunavut came into being, it set goals of strengthening Inuit identity, delocalizing government by spreading government departments and the jobs they bring around the territory, incorporating Inuit values, working by consensus rather than conflict, and “eventually” seeking greater economic power and self-sufficiency for the territory.

  The parliament began and stuck with a decision that there would be no political parties. Representatives are elected as individuals. That makes Nunavut very different from Greenland. Denmark’s liberal policies through the nineteenth century created a group of educated Greenlanders very early on. By 1910, Greenland’s indigenous elite had formed their own nationalist movement and were determined to end Greenlanders’ status as second-class citizens compared to the Danish colonists. In contrast, Canada’s Inuit were not even able to vote until the 1950s. In 1953, Greenland ceased to be a colony and became a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, and in 1979, it was granted Home Rule, a limited form of autonomy. Greenlanders gained power far earlier than Canadian Inuit, but they also modeled their democracy more closely on those of Europe. Its local parliament has parties that follow the familiar political divisions from right to left.11

  In Nunavut, the goals of promoting and protecting Inuit cultural values are set out in the government’s vision for Nunavut (Pinasuaqtavut) and emphasize the use of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (IQ), the valuable knowledge that Inuit have accumulated, to manage their affairs and foster Inuit social values. Among them are the following, with the first, the value of silence, perhaps most striking to those from the pushier south.

  Aajiiqatigiinniq: Decision making through discussion and consensus. Silence is part of communication and does not necessarily signify agreement.

  Inuuqatigiitsiarniq: Respecting others, maintaining relationships, and caring for people.

  Tunnganarniq: Fostering good spirit by being open, welcoming, and inclusive.

  Pijitsirniq: Serving and providing for family and/or community.

  Avatittinnik/Kamatsiarniq: Respect and care for the land, animals, and the environment.

  Piliriqatigiinniq/Ikajuqtigiinniq: Working together for a common cause.

  Qanuqtuurniq: Being innovative and resourceful.

  The people of Nunavut aren’t alone in trying to restate their values. In Alaska and again in Arctic Norway, I met Patricia Cochran, head of the Inuit Circumpolar Council. She began by explaining to me that her real name was “Sigvonna.” Her mother had named her after a girl who died young. “I was given the responsibility to carry on her life, it was an honor and it changed me,” she said. With that reminder of her different culture, she went on to explain: “We are spending a lot of our time remembering who we are and where we came from, because that is our strength for the future. We have a strength that comes from our values, that comes from our knowledge of living on the land.”

  That’s just what the Arctic Council’s Pan-Arctic SLICA survey found.12 Ninety percent of Inuit thought traditional activities, from berry gathering to hunting and fishing, important to their identity. Family ties, social support of each other, and traditional activities have a lot to do with why indigenous people choose to remain in Arctic communities; well-being is closely related to locally available fish and game and a sense of local control, as well as to job opportunities.

  Strength is sorely needed. Appalling difficulties with education, employment, training, alcoholism, family violence, and suicide plague Nunavut as they do the whole of the Inuit land, from Russia to Greenland. “In all of our Arctic nations, in Russia too and in Greenland, in all of our communities, we have very high suicide rates, domestic violence rates, and increasing drug problems,” says Cochran. “Now drugs are a very large issue in Barrow and in communities on the North Slope. Who would have ever thought that crystal meth would make its way into Arctic villages, and yet it has.”

  Back in Iqaluit, local statistics lend substance to this view. With fewer than 7,000 residents, police record more than 2,000 drink-related offenses each year. Across Nunavut the rate of violent crime is eight times that of Canada as a whole, unemployment reaches 50 percent in some communities, a quarter of families are headed by a single parent, only a quarter of Inuit children graduate from high school (just half the rate of other indigenous groups in Canada; the national average is closer to 90 percent), and 70 percent of adults are barely literate. Over half of Nunavut residents live in overcrowded conditions. The suicide rate in Nunavut is shockingly high. Young men between fifteen and twenty-four years of age in Nunavut are about forty times more likely to commit suicide than the average Canadian in that same age group. Although it is
natural to think that high suicide rates might be linked to long, dark winters, over 80 percent of suicides occur during the time of twenty-four-hour sunlight.13

  These are not just Inuit problems, says Cochran. “Many of the indigenous communities’ worldwide face the same kind of issues because of the poverty rates, because of poor conditions that people live in, the education, and the lack of economic opportunities. I think a lot of it also has to do with the loss of culture.”

  Amagoalik draws attention to the particular loss of identity caused by the alleged killing of sled dogs by police officers. “The slaughtering of our dogs teams happened over a period of twenty-five years, as many as twenty-five thousand husky dogs were shot and destroyed by the RCMP during that time,” he says. “Husky dogs are a very important link to our culture because they allowed us to travel and to be able to provide for our families. When that disappeared a lot of Inuit hunters who were proud hunters and proud men ended up staying at home doing nothing. I remember it very well, and the negative impact it had on our people.”

  The dog slaughter is very controversial. Some claim that it was a deliberate policy to end Inuit self-sufficiency and force them to switch to snowmobiles. Vehicles require gasoline, participation in a cash economy, and dependence on colonial authority. Others say that it is simply a myth and never happened at all. A massive RCMP inquiry reported in 2006 that a small number of dogs had been shot “for reasons of both public health and public safety,” but found no evidence of a “widespread conspiracy to deny the Inuit people their ability to live on the land, and so force them into living in fixed settlements and a culture of perceived dependence.”14 A Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been appointed and should report in 2010. “That should really help Canada as a whole to find the truth,” says Amagoalik.

  Greenland, too, suffers from many of the same social problems, although the health services reflect those of the Danish welfare state. In the small town of Tasiilaq, I talked to Hans Christian Florian, the head of the local hospital and a tough mountaineer. His face became grim when he turned to the issue of young people and suicide. “The rate is very high, comparable to other Inuit communities in Canada and Alaska, but it is very difficult to give an answer to how to solve this problem. We seem not to be able to do so much about it. I think if you give young people a future or a perspective of a future, with something meaningful, education, a job, a family, I think that’s what is needed, as many cases tend to be young people from a poor social background…. For young people here it is uphill. Where are the jobs?”

  In Nunavut, the NTI blames the federal government, not the territorial government with its limited budget, for the lack of prospects. In its view, the federal government still “keeps Inuit dependent and in a state of financial and emotional despair despite promises made when the NLCA was signed in 1993.”15 At the end of 2006, the NTI sued the Government of Canada for sixteen different breaches of contract and demanded $1 billion in damages. The lawsuit is still dragging on.

  The heart of the complaint is that the Canadian government failed to help train Inuit, which means that less than half the jobs in public service go to them, and they are mostly the poorly paid ones. More skilled jobs are filled by southerners.

  The lawsuit did not come out of the blue. The land claim agreement did demand a “representative level of Inuit employment,” and earlier talks between the NTI and government had broken down. An attempt at conciliation by Justice Thomas Berger culminated in a report in 2006 that described Nunavut as being “in a state of crisis.”16 Berger laid the blame squarely on poor education and recommended that Inuktitut, the first language for most Inuit, should be used for early education. Berger painted a graphic picture of the difficulties.

  Imagine the odds faced by a student attempting to do homework with twelve or thirteen other people in the house (on average, half of them children), perhaps sleeping two, three, or four to a room. Nunavut’s climate dictates that these tiny homes will be shut tight against the weather for possibly eight months of the year; virtually every home has at least one resident smoker; oil heating may produce carbon monoxide and other pollutants. The fact that even one-quarter of Inuit students graduate from high school is, under the circumstances, a testament to the tenacity of those students, their parents, and their communities.

  For Mary Simon, early education in Inuktitut is “a critical missing link.” She explained that a relationship between early learning in one’s mother tongue and later success in education had been recorded in a wide variety of cultures and societies.17 “Unfortunately,” she says, “we can teach up to grade 3 [8–9 years old] in Nunavik and other parts of the Arctic, but beyond that we don’t yet have the teachers or the curriculum.”

  While that struggle continues, a very different challenge has arrived in Nunavut, as it has in Greenland and across the whole of the Inuit lands. Almost every Inuit community is built by the sea, and residents don’t need scientists to tell them about climate change.18

  In 2008, Amagoalik went back to his childhood home of Resolute in the summer, which he had not done for a long time. “When I left, thirty-five years ago, during the month of July, the Northwest Passage was choked with ice. There was hardly any open water. The temperature usually hovered around zero and there was very little vegetation in the surrounding islands,” Amagoalik told me. “Going back, I found the Northwest Passage was ice-free, the temperature was hovering around twelve to fifteen degrees and there was a lot of new vegetation growing.”

  “In Nome, where I grew up,” says Cochran, “there were no trees, there was no such thing as grass. I was up in Nome this summer and I saw someone not only with a lawn but mowing a lawn! I thought I would never see such a thing. There is grass, there were trees growing in yards.”

  Even a newcomer to the Arctic like me can spot the impact of these changes. I went for a walk in the eastern suburb of the Greenland town of Ilulissat. People don’t live there; it is the area reserved for sled dogs and you can wander, very cautiously, among the fierce chained-up Greenlandic huskies. There are vacant lots and empty kennels everywhere. In 2002, 4,700 sled dogs lived here, a little more than the town’s human population. Now the number is less than 3,000. The winter ice is disappearing and the locals are trading in dogs for boats.

  Everyone knows change is happening, but it is harder to know where it may lead. James Ford from McGill University is one academic who has been looking at the resilience of Arctic residents. He has worked mostly in the community of Igloolik, and change has been rapid. “In the 1960s, records show that the winter ice was freezing in late September. Now it is delayed until mid-November, and the spring breakup comes earlier too,” he says. Igloolik is big by Nunavut standards, with just over 1,000 residents, but it is located on an island off the Melville Peninsula and has no roads. “Ice is essential to move between communities and to hunting areas, and as a platform to hunt from,” Ford explains. At first, change created difficulties for people; it was a cause of accidents and injuries, with hunters falling through thin ice and losing their equipment. But people are adapting with speed; they find new, safer routes and change hunting practices, and share new information. The hunters’ ability to observe nature is helping see them through.

  Amagoalik has a similar view. “Hunters are very adaptable, and if they need to change their travel patterns and if they have to learn how to hunt new species, that is what will happen,” he says.

  The range of animals, birds, and fish taken in the hunt can be very large as a market in Tasiilaq in Greenland reveals. Although the town has a vast store that sells almost everything you might find in Copenhagen (plus rifles and ammunition) and includes an ice cream counter, there is another small market down by the harbor. Here, Kalaalimernit or “wild foods” are sold rather than Qallunaamernit or “white man’s foods.” On sale are seal ($8 a kilo), polar bear ($20 a kilo), narwhal ($30 a kilo), minke whale ($18 a kilo), and walrus ($20 a kilo). The fish include salmon, cod, and halibut, and then the
re are many kinds of birds: murre (black guillemot), eider duck, kittiwake, ptarmigan, red-throated loon (red-throated diver), common loon (great northern diver), long-tailed duck, razorbill, dovekie (little auk), and seagulls, both adult and young. Seabirds like murre, razorbill, kittiwake, and dovekie are hunted in truly staggering numbers in Greenland with more than 200,000 thick-billed murre killed each year in southwest Greenland alone. At the market, razorbill are $10 each, murre $6, and dovekie, a really tiny bird, just $2 each.

  Changing hunting and fishing practices is certainly possible, but hunters may need help. As the ice deteriorates, they have to travel farther but can’t easily afford the gasoline, Ford explains. They may have to switch to fishing rather than hunting, but investing in a boat takes a lot of money. Loans may be needed, and so might insurance as hunting gear becomes more expensive. Search and rescue may need to be upgraded too. On top of these demands comes the damage to houses caused as permafrost thaws and bigger waves in ice-free seas erode the land. The Alaskan village of Kivalina provides the most famous example. Coastal erosion means that the entire population of close to 400 people will have to be moved inland at an estimated cost of $100 million. In Alaska alone there are another twenty-six communities needing urgent action.19 Adaptation will certainly increase the load for Arctic governments.