Above & Beyond | Canada's Arctic Journal 2018 | 01

2018 | 01 • $5.95

Listening to the Silence of the Central Arctic Ocean

At the Floe Edge

PM40050872

o www.arcticjournal.ca

Sky Above, Sea Below: Inuit Wayfinding

Martha Flaherty: A Voice for the Relocated

Brock Friesen / XÇ4 K‰n8

Dear Guest, Let me start by offering you the warmest and best wishes for the 2018 New Year! What a year it has been for all of us at First Air. This past year was truly a landmark year for us with the arrival of our new branding and equally important the signing of important new contracts and continued tremendous support from our passengers. This airline flies with the passion of our employees but also with the passion of our customers. We love seeing you all at the airport terminals and getting the chance to catch up with some of our frequent flyers. The personal service is something we take pride in and we will continue to strive to perfect.

With our long history in Canadian aviation, one of the benefits is having a wealth of experienced employees who understand and genuinely support our unique operation. In particular, our Maintenance and Engineering Department have been providing outstanding support to our changing fleet and evolving their capabilities to meet the challenges.

Our Maintenance Operations personnel work tirelessly to support our fleet of 17 aircraft. To meet our high expectations of safety and quality on a cost-efficient basis, we brought the heavy maintenance of our aircraft “in home” a few years ago and have expanded these services to become a service provider to other airlines as well.

Engineering not only provides 24/7 support to internal heavy and line maintenance but also to external Maintenance Repair Organizations and airlines. Since 1998, First Air has been a Transport Canada delegated Airworthiness Engineering Organization (AEO) with extensive Structures, Mechanical Systems, and Avionics & Electrical specialties. First Air has broad modification (STC) experience for the ATR and Boeing aircraft types. One example of our Engineering accomplishments is the modification of the ATR72 with a full custom designed cargo handling system, making First Air the first airline in the world to operate this aircraft type.

The depth of our experience and strong relationships with vendors and manufacturers allow us to maintain a solid On Time Performance as well as bring aircraft back into service on time and on budget. Our team consistently overcomes challenges with innovative solutions yet remaining steadfast in their commitment to safety and quality.

We have many things in store for 2018 and I can’t wait to have our customers experience the continued evolution of our airline. The Arctic is one of the best kept destination secrets of the world. It’s time we share that secret so that people can marvel at this landscape.

Thank you for choosing First Air for your flight today, I wish you the very best New Year and holiday wishes and we hope to see you aboard again soon.

Brock Friesen First Air President & CEO

ᑐᕌᖅᑐᑦ ᐃᑭᒪᔪᓄᑦ,

ᐱᒋᐊᕐᕕᖃᕈᒪᕗᖓ ᐃᓕᑦᓯᓐᓄᑦ ᑐᖖᒐᓇᕐᓂᖅᐹᑎᒍ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᖁᕕᐊᓱᑦᑎᐊᖁᔨᓂᕐᒥᒃ ᐅᖃᕐᕕᒋᔪᒪᓪᓗᓯ 2018 ᓄᑖᒥᒃ ᐅᑭᐅᕆᓂᐊᖅᑕᑦᑎᓐᓄᑦ! ᐄᓛᒃ ᐅᕙᑦᑎᓐᓄᓕᒫᖅ ᕘᔅᑦ ᐃᐊᒃᑯᓐᓂ ᐃᖅᑲᓇᐃᔭᖅᑎᐅᔪᓄᑦ ᐅᑭᐅᕆᓚᐅᖅᑕᑦᑎᓐᓂ ᐱᔭᒃᓴᖃᕐᓗᐊᓚᐅᕋᑦᑕ. ᐅᑭᐅᕆᓚᐅᖅᑕᑦᑎᓐᓂ ᐅᕙᑦᑎᓐᓄᑦ ᓇᓗᓇᐃᕈᑎᔅᓴᐅᓪᓗᓂ ᐱᓕᕆᓂᖃᕐᕕᖃᓚᐅᕋᑦᑕ ᓄᑖᖑᔪᓂᒃ ᓇᓗᓇᐃᒃᑯᑕᖅᑖᕐᓯᒪᓕᕐᓂᑦᑎᓐᓄᑦ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᐊᔾᔨᒋᔭᐅᓪᓗᓂ ᐱᒻᒪᕆᐅᑎᐅᒻᒪᕆᒃᑐᒥᒃ ᐊᑎᓕᐅᖅᓯᒪᓕᓚᐅᕐᓂᑦᑎᓐᓄᑦ ᓄᑖᓂᒃ ᐱᓕᕆᔪᓐᓇᐅᑎᓂᒃ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᑲᔪᓯᑎᑕᐅᓯᒪᓂᖏᑕ ᐊᖏᔪᒻᒪᕆᒻᒥᒃ ᐃᑲᔪᖅᓯᕐᑕᐅᓯᒪᓚᐅᕐᓂᑦᑎᓐᓂᑦ ᐃᑭᒪᕙᒃᑐᖁᑎᑦᑎᓐᓂᑦ. ᑖᒃᑯᐊ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖁᑎᒋᔭᕗᑦᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᔪᓐᓇᖅᐸᒻᒪᑕ ᐃᕿᐊᓱᖖᒋᑦᑎᐊᖅᑑᓪᓗᑎᒃ ᐃᖅᑲᓇᐃᔭᖅᑎᒋᔭᑦᑕ ᐱᓕᕆᓂᕆᕙᒃᑕᖏᑎᒍᑦ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᑭᓯᐊᓂᑦᑕᐅᖅ ᐃᑭᒪᔪᒪᑦᑎᐊᖅᐸᓐᓂᖏᑕ ᐃᑭᒪᕙᒃᑐᖁᑎᑦᑎᓐᓂᑦ. ᖁᕕᐊᓱᒃᐸᒃᑐᒍᑦ ᐃᓕᑦᓯᓐᓂᒃ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᒃᑯᕕᓐᓂ ᑕᑯᖃᑦᑕᖅᑎᓪᓗᑕ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᐅᖃᓪᓚᖃᑎᖃᖅᐸᓐᓂᑦᑎᓐᓂᒃ ᖃᖓᑕᒐᔪᒃᑐᖁᑎᒋᔭᑦᑎᓐᓄᑦ. ᓇᖕᒥᓂᖅ ᐱᔨᑦᓯᕋᕈᑎᒋᕙᒃᑕᕗᑦ ᐃᓕᑦᓯᓐᓄᑦ ᓴᕆᒪᒋᒻᒪᕆᒃᑲᑦᑎᒍ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᑲᔪᓯᑎᑦᑎᓯᒪᓂᐊᖅᑐᑕ ᖁᑦᑎᖕᓂᖅᐹᑎᒍᑦ ᐱᔨᑦᓯᕋᖅᑎᐅᕙᒐᓱᓐᓂᐊᕐᓂᑦᑎᓐᓂᒃ ᐃᓕᑦᓯᓐᓄᑦ. ᐊᒥᓱᑲᓪᓚᐅᔪᓄᑦ ᐅᑭᐅᓄᑦ ᑲᓇᑕᒥᐅᖑᓪᓗᑕ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖃᖅᑎᑦᑎᕙᒃᓯᒪᓂᕗᑦ ᐱᓕᕆᓂᖃᖅᓯᒪᓂᑦᑎᓐᓂ, ᐃᓚᒋᔭᐅᖃᑕᐅᒻᒪᑦ ᐃᑲᔪᖅᕈᑎᐅᓯᒪᓂᖏᑕ ᐊᔪᖖᒋᒻᒪᕆᒃᑑᓪᓗᑎᒃ ᖃᐅᔨᒪᓂᖃᑦᑎᐊᖅᑐᓂᒃ ᐃᖅᑲᓇᐃᔭᖅᑎᖃᖃᑦᑕᖅᓯᒪᓂᕗᑦ ᑐᑭᓯᐊᑦᑎᐊᖅᑐᓂᒃ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᓱᓕᔪᒥᒃ ᐃᑲᔪᖅᓯᓂᖃᖅᐸᒃᑐᓂᒃ ᐊᔾᔨᖃᖖᒋᑦᑐᑎᒍᑦ ᐊᐅᓚᑦᓯᓂᕆᕙᒃᑕᑦᑎᓐᓄᑦ. ᐱᓗᐊᖅᑐᒥᒃ, ᐋᖅᑭᐅᒪᑎᑦᑎᔨᒃᑯᑦ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᓴᓇᔨᓕᕆᔨᒃᑯᑦ ᖁᑦᑎᒃᑐᒻᒪᕆᐅᔪᑎᒍᑦ ᐃᑲᔪᖅᑎᒋᓯᒪᒐᑦᑎᒍ ᐊᓯᔾᔨᖅᐸᓪᓕᐊᑎᑦᑎᓂᑦᑎᓐᓂ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖁᑎᒋᔭᑦᑎᓐᓂᒃ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᐊᓯᔾᔨᖅᐸᓪᓕᐊᑎᑕᐅᑎᓪᓗᒋᑦ ᐱᓕᕆᐊᖃᕈᓐᓇᓕᕐᓂᐅᔪᑦ ᐱᓕᕆᐊᖑᕙᖁᓪᓗᒋᑦ ᐱᔭᕆᑐᔫᕙᒃᑐᑎᒃ ᐱᓕᕆᐊᒃᓴᕆᔭᐅᓕᖅᑐᓂᒃ. ᐋᖅᑭᐅᒪᑎᑦᑎᔨᒃᑯᑦ ᐊᐅᓚᑦᓯᓂᖏᓐᓄᑦ ᐃᖅᑲᓇᐃᔭᖅᑎᒋᔭᕗᑦ ᐱᓕᕆᕐᔪᐊᖅᐸᒻᒪᑕ ᐃᑲᔪᖅᓯᓂᖃᕈᑎᓂᒃ 17-ᖑᓪᓗᑎᒃ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖁᑎᒋᔭᑦᑎᓐᓄᑦ ᐱᓕᕆᐊᒃᓴᐅᕙᒃᑐᓂᒃ. ᐱᓕᕆᐊᖑᓯᒪᓕᖁᓪᓗᒋᑦ ᖁᑦᑎᒻᒪᕆᒃᑐᒥᒃ ᐋᓐᓂᖅᑕᐃᓕᒪᔾᔪᑎᖃᖅᑎᑦᑎᒋᐊᖃᕐᓂᑦᑎᓐᓄᑦ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᐱᐅᑦᓯᐊᖅᑑᓪᓗᑎᒃ ᐊᑭᑐᓗᐊᖖᒋᑦᑐᑎᒍᑦ ᐱᓕᕆᓂᖃᕆᐊᖃᖅᐸᓐᓂᑦᑎᓐᓄᑦ ᐱᔾᔪᑎᒋᓪᓗᒋᑦ, ᐅᖁᒪᐃᑦᑑᑎᓄᑦ ᐋᖅᑭᐅᒪᑎᑦᑎᓂᐅᕙᒃᑐᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖁᑎᑦᑎᓐᓂᒃ “ᓄᓇᓕᒋᔭᑦᑎᓐᓄᑦ” ᓄᒃᑎᖅᑎᑦᑎᓯᒪᓕᓚᐅᕋᑦᑕ ᐅᑭᐅᖑᓕᕐᑐᑦ ᐊᒥᓲᓗᐊᖏᑦᑐᑦ ᓈᓯᒪᓕᖅᑎᓪᓗᒋᑦ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᑕᒪᒃᑯᐊ ᐱᔨᑦᓯᕋᕈᑎᐅᔪᑦ ᐊᖏᒡᓕᒋᐊᖅᑎᑕᐅᓯᒪᓕᓚᐅᖅᑐᑎᒃ ᐱᔨᑦᓯᕋᖅᑎᐅᔪᓄᑦ ᐱᓕᕆᔨᒋᔭᐅᖃᑕᐅᓂᐊᓕᖅᑐᑎᒃ ᐊᓯᖏᓐᓄᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᓕᕆᔨᑯᒻᒥᔪᓄᑦ. ᓴᓇᔨᖃᖅᑎᑦᑎᓂᖅ ᐃᑲᔪᖅᑎᒃᓴᖃᖅᑎᑦᑎᑐᐃᓐᓇᖖᒋᒻᒪᑕ ᖃᐅᔨᓴᐅᑦ ᑲᐃᕕᑦᑐᒍ 24/7-ᒥᒃ ᐱᓕᕆᕝᕕᑦᑎᓐᓂ ᐅᖁᒪᐃᑦᑐᓄᑦ ᓴᓇᕐᕈᑎᒃᓴᓄᑦ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᐱᓕᕆᐊᒃᓴᖑᖅᐸᓪᓕᐊᕙᒃᑐᓄᑦ ᑭᓯᐊᓂᓗᑦᑕᐅᖅ ᓯᓚᑖᓂᑦ ᐋᖅᑭᐅᒪᑦᑎᒋᐊᖅᑎᐅᕙᒃᑐᑎᒃ ᑎᒥᖁᑎᒋᔭᐅᔪᓄᑦ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖁᑎᒋᔭᐅᔪᓄᑦ. ᑕᐃᒪᖖᒐᓂᑦ 1998-ᒥᑦ, ᕘᔅᑦ ᐃᐊᒃᑯᑦ ᑲᓇᑕᒥ ᐃᖏᕐᕋᐅᑎᓕᕆᔨᕐᔪᐊᒃᑯᖏᓐᓂᑦ ᑎᓕᔭᐅᓯᒪᓂᖃᓕᓚᐅᖅᓯᒪᒻᒪᑕ ᖃᖓᑕᔪᓐᓇᑦᑎᐊᖅᑐᓂᒃ ᓴᓇᔨᖃᖅᑎᑦᑎᓪᓗᑎᒃ ᑎᒥᖁᑎᒋᔭᐅᓂᖏᓐᓄᑦ (AEO) ᐊᖏᔪᓂᒃ ᐃᒡᓗᕐᔪᐊᖃᖅᑎᑦᑎᓪᓗᑎᒃ, ᓴᓇᕐᕈᑎᒃᓴᖃᖅᑐᑎᒃ, ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᓕᕆᓂᕐᒧᑦ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᓴᕕᐅᔭᖁᑎᓕᕆᓂᕐᒧᑦ ᖃᐅᔨᒪᔨᒻᒪᕆᖃᖅᑐᑎᒃ. ᕘᔅᑦ ᐃᐊᒃᑯᑦ ᐊᖏᔪᒥᒃ ᐊᒥᓱᐃᖑᓪᓗᑎᒃ ᐋᖅᑮᒋᐊᖅᑕᐅᓯᒪᔪᖃᕐᒪᑕ (STC) ᖃᐅᔨᒪᓂᖃᑦᑎᐊᖅᑑᓪᓗᑎᒃ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᓄᑦ ATR-ᓂᒃ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᓱᐴᔫᓂᒃ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖁᑎᐅᔪᓂᒃ. ᐆᒃᑐᕋᐅᑎᒋᔭᐅᔪᓐᓇᖅᐳᑦ ᓴᓇᔨᐅᔪᑦ ᐱᓕᕆᓂᖃᑦᑎᐊᖅᓯᒪᓂᖏᓂᒃ ᐋᖅᑮᒋᐊᓚᐅᕐᓂᕐᒧᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᑦ ATR72-ᓂᒃ ᐃᓗᐃᒃᑲᐅᓪᓗᒋᑦ ᐅᓯᔭᐅᔪᒃᓴᓂᒃ ᐱᓕᕆᔾᔪᑎᖃᓕᓚᐅᕐᓂᕐᓂᒃ, ᑕᒪᒃᑯᐊᓗ ᐱᔾᔪᑎᒋᓪᓗᒋᑦ ᕘᔅᑦ ᐃᐊᒃᑯᑦ ᓯᓚᕐᔪᐊᓕᒫᒥ ᓯᕗᓪᓕᖅᐸᐅᓕᓚᐅᕐᒪᑕ ᐊᐅᓚᑦᓯᓂᖃᓕᖅᑐᑎᒃ ᑕᐃᒪᓐᓇᐃᑦᑐᓂᒃ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᓂᒃ. ᐊᖏᔪᒻᒪᕆᐅᔪᒥᒃ ᐱᓕᕆᐊᖃᖅᓯᒪᓂᕗᑦ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᓴᖖᒋᓂᖃᑦᑎᐊᖅᑐᒥᒃ ᐱᓕᕆᐊᖃᖃᑎᖃᖅᐸᓐᓂᕗᑦ ᓂᐅᕝᕈᑎᒃᓴᖃᖅᐸᒃᑐᓂᒃ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᓴᓇᔨᐅᕙᒃᑐᓂᒃ ᑐᖖᒐᕝᕕᖃᖅᑎᐊᖅᑐᓂᒃ ᐱᑕᖃᓕᕈᑎᒋᔪᓐᓇᓚᐅᕋᑦᑎᒍᑦ ᑭᖑᕙᖅᑎᑕᐅᓯᒪᖖᒋᑦᑐᑎᒃ ᐱᓕᕆᓂᖃᕈᓐᓇᕐᓂᕐᓂᒃ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᐃᓚᖃᖅᑎᓪᓗᒍ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᓂᒃ ᐊᑐᖅᑕᐅᓕᒃᑲᓐᓂᕈᓐᓇᖅᑎᑦᑎᕙᓐᓂᕐᓄᑦ ᑭᖑᕙᖖᒋᑦᑐᒋᑦ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᐊᑭᑐᓗᐊᖅᑎᓐᓇᒋᑦ. ᐱᓕᕆᐊᖃᖅᑎᒋᔭᕗᑦ ᐊᑕᐃᓐᓇᐅᔭᖅᑐᒥᒃ ᐱᔭᒃᓴᑲᓪᓚᓐᓂᒃ ᐱᓕᕆᔪᓐᓇᖅᐸᒻᒪᑕ ᓄᑖᑎᒍᑦ ᐋᖅᑭᒃᓱᐃᔾᔪᑎᐅᕙᒃᑐᓂᒃ ᐊᑐᖅᐸᒃᑐᑎᒃ ᑭᓯᐊᓂᓗ ᐊᓯᔾᔨᖅᑎᑦᑎᕙᓐᓇᑎᒃ ᐱᓕᕆᐊᒃᓴᖃᖅᑎᑕᐅᓂᑦᑎᓐᓂᒃ ᐋᓐᓂᖅᑕᐃᓕᒪᔾᔪᑎᒃᓴᓂᒃ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᐱᐅᑦᑎᐊᖅᑑᔭᕆᐊᖃᕐᓂᖏᑕ.

2018 ᐅᑭᐅᕆᓂᐊᖅᑕᖓᓂ ᐊᒥᓱᑲᓪᓚᐅᒻᒪᑕ ᓴᖅᑭᑕᐅᓯᒪᓕᕐᓂᐊᖅᑐᑦ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᐃᑭᒪᕙᒃᑐᖁᑎᒋᔭᕗᑦ ᖃᐅᔨᑎᑦᑐᒪᓗᐊᓕᖅᑕᕗᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖁᑎᑦᑕ ᐊᓯᔾᔨᖅᐸᓪᓕᐊᑎᑕᐅᓯᒪᓂᖏᓐᓂᒃ. ᐅᑭᐅᖅᑕᖅᑐᑉ ᐊᕕᒃᑐᖅᓯᒪᓂᕆᔭᖓ ᐱᐅᓂᖅᐸᐅᓪᓗᓂ ᑕᑯᔭᖅᑐᒐᐅᔪᒪᓗᐊᖅᐸᒻᒪᑦ ᓱᓕ ᓯᓚᕐᔪᐊᓕᒫᒥ. ᓴᖅᑭᓯᒪᓕᕆᐊᖃᓕᕋᑦᑎᒍ ᖃᐅᔨᔭᐅᓯᒪᓕᖁᓪᓗᒍ ᑭᒃᑯᓕᓵᓂ ᓄᓇᐅᑉ ᐱᐅᓪᓚᕆᒃᑑᓂᕆᔭᖓᑕ. ᖁᔭᓐᓇᒦᒃ ᓂᕈᐊᖅᖠᓯᒪᓚᐅᕋᑦᓯ ᕘᔅᑦ ᐃᐊᒃᑯᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖓᓂ ᐃᑭᒪᔪᒪᓪᓗᓯ ᐅᓪᓗᒥ, ᐃᓅᓯᕆᔭᓯ ᑲᔪᓯᑦᑎᐊᖁᓇᖅᐳᑦ ᓄᑖᒥ ᐅᑭᐅᕆᓂᐊᖅᑕᑦᑎᓐᓂ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᕿᓚᒥᐅᔪᖅ ᐃᑭᒪᒃᑲᓐᓂᕈᒫᕐᓂᑦᓯᓐᓂᒃ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᑦᑎᓐᓂ ᓂᕆᐅᒋᓂᐊᖅᐸᑦᓯ.

ᐸᕌᒃ ᕗᕇᓴᓐ ᕘᔅᑎᐊᒃᑯᓐᓄᑦ ᐊᖓᔪᖅᑳᖅ & ᐊᐅᓚᑦᑎᔨᒻᒪᕆᒃ

Johnny Adams / ÷i ≈bu Chairman of the Board, First Air grjx5typz vtmpq5b, { wx Président du Conseil d'Administration, First Air

Chers invités, Permettez-moi de commencer par vous offrir mes vœux les meilleurs et les plus chaleureux pour 2018! Quelle année incroyable 2017 a été pour nous chez First Air! Elle a été vraiment marquante par le lancement de notre nouvelle image de marque et également par la signature d’importants nouveaux contrats, ainsi que par l’appui exceptionnel de nos passagers. La passion de nos employés et de nos clients est source d’inspiration pour le bon fonctionnement de notre compagnie aérienne. Nous aimons bien vous voir dans les aérogares et rencontrer quelques-uns de nos fréquents voyageurs. Nous sommes fiers de notre service personnel et nous poursuivrons nos efforts en vue de le perfectionner.

Grâce à nos antécédents de longue date dans l’aviation canadienne, l’un des avantages est celui de disposer d’un grand nombre d’employés expérimentés qui comprennent et soutiennent réellement nos activités. En particulier, le personnel de notre division de maintenance et d’ingénierie apporte un excellent soutien à notre flotte en pleine évolution et renforce ses capacités à relever les défis.

Notre personnel de maintenance et d’exploitation travaille sans relâche pour appuyer notre flotte de 17 aéronefs. Afin de répondre à nos hautes attentes en matière de sécurité et de qualité de manière efficace en termes de coûts, nous effectuons la maintenance lourde de nos avions à l’interne depuis quelques années et nous avons élargi ces services pour devenir aussi un fournisseur de services à d’autres compagnies aériennes.

La division de l’ingénierie fournit non seulement du soutien 24 heures par jour, sept jours par semaine à la maintenance interne lourde et en ligne, mais aussi à des entreprises d’entretien et de réparation, et à des compagnies aériennes externes. Depuis 1998, First Air est un organisme agréé en ingénierie de navigabilité de Transports Canada, disposant d’un degré élevé de spécialisation en structures, systèmes mécaniques, électriques et avioniques. First Air a de l’expérience dans la modification à grande échelle (STC) de types d’aéronefs ATR et Boeing. Un exemple de nos réalisations dans le domaine de l’ingénierie est celui de la modification de l’ATR-72 en un système de manutention du fret conçu sur mesure, qui fait en sorte que First Air soit la première compagnie aérienne au monde à exploiter ce type d’aéronef.

La richesse de notre expérience et de nos relations solides avec les vendeurs et les fabricants nous permet de maintenir une ponctualité solide et la remise en service d’aéronefs dans les délais et selon les budgets prévus. Notre équipe relève constamment des défis tout en demeurant fidèle à son engagement envers la sécurité et la qualité.

Nous avons de nombreux projets en réserve pour 2018 et j’ai hâte de voir à ce que nos clients vivent l’expérience de l’évolution continue de notre compagnie aérienne. L’Arctique comme destination est l’un des secrets les mieux gardés au monde. Le temps est venu de partager ce secret afin que les voyageurs puissent s’émerveiller de ces paysages.

Merci d’avoir choisi First Air pour votre vol aujourd’hui.

Meilleurs souhaits pour la nouvelle année et les fêtes, et nous espérons vous revoir bientôt à bord.

Brock Friesen Président-directeur général de First Air

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We value your support and thank you for making First Air The Airline of the North.

Nous apprécions votre soutien et vous remercions de votre appui à First Air la ligne aérienne du Nord.

ᐃᖅᑲᓇᐃᔭᖅᑎᐅᑉ ᐅᔾᔨᕆᔭᐅᑎᑕᐅᓂᖓ

Employee Spotlight | Iqqanaijaqtiup Ujjirijautitauninga

ᒨᕆ ᐹᓪᔪᕐ | Murray Balzer

ᐱᕈᖅᓴᓂᑰᓂᕐᒥᓂᑦ ᕚᓐᑰᕙ ᓯᓚᕐᔪᐊᓕᒫᒥ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᒃᑯᕝᕕᖓᑕ ᖃᓂᒋᔭᖓᓂ, ᐳᕈᑎᔅ ᑲᓚᒻᐱᐊᒥ, ᐊᖏᔪᒥᒃ ᒨᕆ ᐹᓪᔪᕐ ᐃᖅᑲᓇᐃᔮᖃᓕᕈᒪᓂᖓ ᐊᒃᑐᖅᑕᐅᓯᒪᓕᓚᐅᕐᒪᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖅᑎᖖᒍᕈᒪᓕᓚᐅᕐᓂᕐᒥᓄᑦ.

13-ᓂᒃ ᐅᑭᐅᖃᖅᑑᓪᓗ, ᐃᓚᒋᔭᐅᖃᑕᐅᓕᓚᐅᖅᓯᒪᕗᖅ ᕈᐃᐅᓪ ᑲᓇᑕᒥᐅᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖅᑎᑦ ᐅᓇᑕᖅᑐᒃᓴᖖᒍᐊᒃᑯᖏᓐᓄᑦ ᑕᐃᑲᓂᓗ ᓇᓗᓇᐃᒃᑯᑕᖅᑖᕐᓯᒪᓕᓚᐅᖅᑐᓂ ᐃᑯᒪᖃᖖᒋᑦᑐᓄᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᒃᑯᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖅᑎᐅᓂᕐᒥᓄᑦ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖅᑎᖖᒍᓵᖅᑐᑦ ᐃᓴᕈᖖᒍᐊᖏᓂᒃ. ᕗᕋᐃᓱᕐ ᕚᓕ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖅᑎᑦ ᐱᓕᕆᐊᖓᓐᓄᑦ ᐃᓕᓐᓂᐊᕈᑎᓄᑦ ᓯᓚᑦᑐᖅᓴᕐᕕᒻᒥ ᐃᓕᓐᓂᐊᕆᐊᓚᐅᖅᓯᒪᕗᑦ, ᑕᐃᒪᓂᓗ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖅᑎᖑᓂᕐᒧᑦ ᐃᓕᓐᓂᐊᕌᓂᒃᓯᒪᐅᑎᖃᓕᓚᐅᖅᑐᓂ.

ᐃᖅᑲᓇᐃᔮᕆᔭᖓᓂ “ᐃᑳᕆᐊᖅᓯᒪᓂᖃᖅᑎᑕᐅᕗᖅ” ᖃᖓᑕᓲᕆᔭᐅᔪᓄᑦ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᐱᓕᕆᕝᕕᐅᔪᓄᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖅᑎᐅᔪᓐᓇᕐᓂᖏᓐᓂ. ᖁᓕᓄᑦ (10) ᐃᐊᕐ ᐲᓰ-ᑯᓐᓂ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖅᑎᒋᔭᐅᓚᐅᕐᐳᖅ, ᐊᕕᒃᑐᖅᓯᒪᓂᐅᔪᒥ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖅᑎᓄᑦ ᑲᓇᑕᐅᑉ ᐅᐊᖕᓇᖓᓂ. ᑕᐃᑲᓃᑦᑐᓂ, ᐱᓕᕆᔪᓐᓇᐅᑎᑎᒍᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖅᑎᒋᔭᐅᔪᓐᓇᓚᐅᕐᒥᔪᖅ ᑕᐃᕉᓕᐊᓐ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖅᑎᖏᓐᓄᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᒃᑯᕕᖃᖅᑐᓄᑦ ᐃᓐᔅᐳᕋᒃ, ᐋᔅᑐᕆᐊᒥ, ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᐊᐳ ᑖᐱ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖅᑎᒃᑯᖏᓐᓄᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᑯᕕᖃᖅᑐᓄᑦ ᔪᓇᐃᑎᑦ ᐊᐃᕋᑉ ᐃᒻᒧᕋᐃᑦᔅᓂ. ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖅᑎᐅᓂᕐᒧᑦ ᐱᓕᕆᓂᖃᓕᖅᓯᒪᔫᓪᓗᓂ ᑕᕆᐅᕐᔪᐊᑉ ᐊᑭᐊᓂᕐᒥᐅᓂ, ᐃᓚᒋᔭᐅᖃᑕᐅᓕᓚᐅᖅᓯᒪᕗᖅ ᐹᒻᐹᑦᑎᐄ ᐊᐃᕈᓯᐲᔅᑯᓐᓄᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᒃᑯᕕᖃᖅᑐᓄᑦ ᒪᓐᑐᕆᐋᓪ, ᑯᐃᐸᒃᒥ, ᑕᐃᑲᓂᓗ, 17-ᓗᐊᓄᑦ ᐃᖅᑲᓇᐃᔮᖃᓕᕐᓯᒪᓂᕐᒥᓂ, ᐃᓕᕆᔨᐅᖃᑦᑕᖅᓯᒪᓪᓗᓂ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᒃᑯᕕᖓᑕ ᑎᒥᖁᑎᒋᔭᖓᓂ, ᐊᖏᓂᖅᐸᐅᔪᒥᒃ ᐃᑭᒪᖃᑦᑕᖅᑐᓕᕆᓂᕐᒧᑦ ᐱᓕᒻᒪᒃᓴᐃᔨᖏᓐᓂ, ᐱᓕᕆᕝᕕᐅᔪᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖅᑎᒃᑯᖏᓐᓄᑦ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᐱᓕᕆᕝᕕᐅᔪᓄᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖅᑎᓕᕆᔨᖏᓐᓂ. ᒫᓐᓇᓵᖑᓂᖅᓴᐅᔪᒥ ᓇᐅᑦᓯᖅᑐᐃᔨᐅᓚᐅᕐᐳᖅ ᐊᐅᓚᑦᓯᓂᐅᔪᓄᑦ ᓵᓚᓐᔪᕐ 650-ᑯᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖁᑎᖓᓐᓂᒃ ᐹᒻᐹᑦᑎᐄ ᐱᓕᕆᕝᕖᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖁᑎᖓᑦᑕ ᖃᖓᑕᖃᑦᑕᕐᓂᖏᓐᓄᑦ ᓯᓚᕐᔪᐊᓕᒫᒥ ᐊᐅᓚᑦᓯᔨᒋᔭᐅᓪᓗᓂ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᐃᓱᒪᑕᐅᓪᓗᓂ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖅᑎᒋᔭᐅᓪᓗᓂ. ᕘᔅᑦ ᐃᐊᒃᑯᓐᓄᑦ ᐃᓚᒋᔭᐅᖃᑕᐅᓕᓚᐅᕐᑐᖅ ᔪᓚᐃ 2017-ᖑᑎᓪᓗᒍ ᐃᓱᒪᑕᒻᒪᕆᒋᔭᐅᓪᓗᓂ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᓂᒃ ᐊᐅᓚᑦᓯᓂᐅᔪᓄᑦ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᐊᑐᕙ, ᐋᓐᑎᐊᕆᐅᒦᑦᑐᓂ ᐃᖅᑲᓇᐃᔮᕆᔭᖓ, ᑕᕝᕙᓂᓗ ᓇᐅᑦᓯᖅᑐᐃᔨᐅᕙᒃᑐᓂ ᖃᐅᑕᒫᑦ ᐱᓕᕆᓐᓂᕆᔭᐅᕙᒃᑐᓂᒃ ᑲᒻᐸᓂᐅᔪᒧᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖅᑎᐅᔪᓂᑦ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᓂ ᐃᑲᔪᖅᑎᒋᔭᐅᕙᒃᑐᓄᑦ.

ᕘᔅᑦ ᐃᐊᒃᑯᓐᓄᑦ ᐃᖅᑲᓇᐃᔭᖅᑎᐅᓕᕈᒪᓚᐅᕐᒪᑦ ᐱᔾᔪᑎᒋᓪᓗᒍ ᐊᔾᔨᖃᕋᑎᒃ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖅᑎᐅᓂᕐᒧᑦ ᐱᓕᕆᕝᕕᖃᖅᑑᓂᖓᓐᓄᑦ. ᕘᔅᑦ ᐃᐊᒃᑯᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖏᑦ ᐃᓄᓐᓂᒃ ᐃᑭᒪᔨᖃᖅᐸᒻᒪᑕ ᑭᓯᐊᓂᓗᑦᑕᐅᖅ ᐅᓯᔨᐅᕙᒃᑐᑎᒃ ᐱᖁᑎᓂᒃ (ᐊᒥᓱᑲᓪᓚᐅᕙᒃᑭᓪᓗᑎᒃ ᐅᓯᔭᐅᕙᒃᑐᑦ). ᕘᔅᑦ ᐃᐊᒃᑯᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᕝᕕᒋᕙᒃᑕᖏᑦ ᐋᖅᑭᐅᒪᑎᑕᐅᓂᖃᖅᐸᒻᒪᑕ ᑭᓯᐊᓂᓗᑦᑕᐅᖅ ᖃᖓᑕᔭᕆᐊᖃᓕᖅᓯᒪᔭᕌᖓᒥᒃ ᓵᑐᒋᔭᐅᕙᒃᑐᑎᒃ ᖃᖓᑕᕙᒻᒥᒻᒪᑕ. ᕘᔅᑦ ᐃᐊᒃᑯᑦ ᑕᐃᒪᐅᔭᕆᐊᖃᓪᓚᕆᒃᑐᑎᒃ ᐋᓐᓂᐊᕐᕕᓕᐊᖅᑐᓄᑦ ᐊᒃᔭᖅᑐᐃᔨᐅᕙᒃᑭᕗᑦ ᐃᓄᖏᓐᓄᑦ ᓄᓇᓕᖃᖅᑐᓄᑦ ᐅᖓᓯᒃᑐᒥᐅᖑᓪᓗᑎᒃ ᐅᑭᐅᖅᑕᖅᑐᒥ ᓄᓇᓕᖏᓐᓄᑦ. ᕘᔅᑦ ᐃᐊᒃᑯᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᕆᔭᖏᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᕙᒻᒪᑕ ᒥᑦᑕᕐᕕᓕᐊᕆᔭᐅᓯᒪᔪᓂᑦ ᕿᖁᕐᓂᑦ ᓴᓇᔭᐅᓯᒪᔪᓂᑦ ᑭᓯᐊᓂᓗᑦᑕᐅᖅ ᖃᖓᑕᕙᒻᒥᔪᑦ ᓇᐃᑦᑐᑯᓘᓪᓗᑎᒃ ᑐᐊᐸᓐᓂᒃ ᒥᑦᑕᕐᕕᖃᖅᑐᓂᑦ. ᕘᔅᑦ ᐃᐊᒃᑯᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᕙᒻᒪᑕ ᓯᓚᒋᔭᖏᑦ ᓂᒡᓚᓱᒃᑐᒻᒪᕆᐅᕙᒃᑲᓗᐊᖅᑎᓪᓗᒋᑦ. ᕘᔅᑦ ᐃᐊᒃᑯᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᕙᓐᓂᖓᑦ ᓱᓪᓗᐊᕐᓇᐃᑦᑑᕙᖖᒋᓚᓂᓛᒃ...

ᒨᕆ ᐅᔾᔨᕆᔭᖃᓚᐅᕐᐳᖅ ᕘᔅᑦ ᐃᐊᒃᑯᑦ ᐱᐅᓂᖅᐹᒥᒃ ᐱᑕᖃᕈᑎᖃᕐᓂᖏᓂᒃ ᐃᓄᓐᓂᒃ ᐃᖅᑲᓇᐃᔭᖅᑎᖃᕐᓂᖏᑕ; ᐃᖅᑲᓇᐃᔭᕐᕕᐅᒻᒪᑦ ᐱᓕᕆᐊᖃᖅᓯᒪᔪᓂᒃ ᐊᒥᓱᑲᓪᓚᒻᒪᕆᐅᔪᓂᒃ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᐊᑐᖅᓯᒪᔭᖃᖅᑐᑎᒃ ᐊᒥᓱᑲᓪᓚᐅᔪᓂᒃ.

ᒨᕆ ᓄᓕᐊᓂᓗ ᑲᑎᖖᒐᓯᒪᓕᖅᐳᒃ 19-ᓄᑦ ᐅᑭᐅᓄᑦ. ᑎᒍᐊᖅᑖᓚᐅᕐᓯᒪᔫᒃ ᓂᕐᔪᑎᖁᑎᒥᓐᓂᒃ ᐅᑲᓕᕐᒥᒃ ᓇᓂᓚᐅᖅᓯᒪᔭᒥᓐᓂᒃ ᐃᒡᓗᒋᔭᒥᑦᑕ ᓯᓚᑖᓂ.

ᒨᕆ ᓱᓇᑐᐃᓐᓇᓂᒃ ᑐᕌᖓᑐᐊᕌᖓᑕ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᓄᑦ ᖁᕕᐊᒋᔭᖃᕐᐳᖅ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ “ᓇᖕᒥᓂᖅ ᓇᓗᓇᐃᖅᓯᒪᓪᓗᓂᐅᒃ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖅᑎᓪᓚᕆᐅᓂᕐᒥᓄᑦ” ᐃᖅᑲᓇᐃᔭᕐᓇᖅ ᐃᓱᓕᓯᒪᓕᑐᐊᕌᖓᑦ ᐅᖃᓕᒫᖅᐸᒃᑐᖅ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᓕᕆᓂᕐᒧᑦ ᐱᓕᕆᓐᓂᐅᓯᒪᔪᓄᑦ ᐱᔾᔪᑎᖃᖅᑐᓂᒃ. ᐊᒥᓱᕐᓚᐅᔪᓂᒃ ᑎᑎᕋᖅᓯᒪᔪᓕᐅᖃᑦᑕᖅᓯᒪᕗᖅ ᑐᕌᖓᔪᓂᒃ ᐃᑯᒪᖃᖖᒋᑦᑐᑎᒍᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᕙᓐᓂᕐᒧᑦ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᐅᖃᓕᒫᒐᓕᐅᓚᐅᖅᑐᓂ ᑕᐃᔭᐅᔪᓂᒃ “ᓄᓱᐊᒃᑎᐅᓪᓗᑎᒃ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᕆᔭᐅᕙᒃᓯᒪᔪᑦ ᐃᐊᕐ ᑲᑎᑦᑯᑦ ᖃᖓᑕᓲᖅᑎᐅᓂᕐᒧᑦ ᐃᓕᓐᓂᐊᕈᑎᒃᓴᓄᑦ”.

Growing up near the Vancouver International Airport in Richmond, British Columbia, had a big influence on Murray Balzer’s career aspirations of becoming a professional pilot.

At the age of 13, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Cadets where he was awarded his glider pilot and private pilot’s wings. He attended the University of the Fraser Valley’s Aviation Program in Abbotsford, British Columbia, where he became a commercial pilot.

His career has been “bridged” between airline and corporate flying.

He spent 10 years with Air BC, a regional airline based in Western Canada. During this time, he was fortunate enough to fly as a contract pilot with Tyrolean Airways based in Innsbruck, Austria, and Abu Dhabi Aviation based in the United Arab Emirates. With experience gained overseas, he joined Bombardier Aerospace based in Montreal, Quebec, where, over the course of a 17-year career, he held roles within their aviation organization, mainly in Customer Training, Business Aircraft Sales and the Corporate Flight Department. Most recently he oversaw the operation of the Challenger 650 aircraft for Bombardier Business Aircraft flying worldwide as the Operations Manager and Chief Pilot.

He joined First Air in July of 2017 as the Director of Flight Operations and is based in Ottawa, Ontario, where he oversees the day-to-day activities of the company’s pilots and flight attendants.

He was drawn to First Air because it is very unique in the aviation industry. First Air carries passengers but also hauls freight (and lots of it). First Air is a scheduled air service but also does on-demand charters. First Air provides essential medical transportation for the people in remote Northern communities. First Air operates its aircraft from paved runways but also operates from short gravel airstrips. First Air operates in extreme weather conditions. First Air is anything but boring....

Murray notes that the best part of First Air is the people; it is a place full of experience and history.

Murray has been married to his wife Lynne for 19 years. They have adopted a rabbit which they found in their backyard.

Murray likes anything to do with airplanes and is a “self declared aviation nerd” spending too much of his spare time reading about aviation history. He’s written several articles about gliding and has published a book about the “History of the Towplanes with the Air Cadet Gliding Program”.

Dedicated to being first in service — and our commitment to the communities and people we serve!

From the Flight Deck How is snow removed from a runway?

© Mark Taylor

Following a winter storm, traffic reports remind drivers to adjust their speed to reflect the road conditions. That’s relatively easy when driving in a car since we just need to slow down and give ourselves a bit more time to get anywhere. If we make those changes, we can drive on roads in poor condition. Unfortunately, in an airplane, we don’t have the option to simply slow down — takeoffs and landings have minimum speeds. As a result, we need to ensure that the runway is in a good enough condition to let us reach those speeds. Keeping the runway clear may sound like a simple process but it is quite complicated once you factor in all the special requirements required.

For example, the runway in Iqaluit, Nunavut, is more than 2.5 kilometres long and, if it was a city street, it would be over 22 lanes wide. A great deal of snow can accumulate on a surface that size. The most obvious solution is to use a snow plow to simply push the snow out of the way — that’s what they tend to do on city streets. There are two main issues with that approach on a runway.

The edges of the runways are marked with lights to permit operations at night. If only a snow plow was used, either those lights would all get knocked over or they would be buried by the resulting snowdrifts that the plow would leave along the runway edges.

Those drifts also cause another hazard — the wings and engines of an aircraft need to pass over the drifts. As a result, while a plow can be used to clear most of the runway, a snow blower is also required to blow the drifts far enough away from the runway edges so they aren’t a hazard and the runway edge lights are all visible.

The plows and blowers take care of snow but ice is an even bigger challenge. The first choice is to apply a layer of sand. While sand can help improve traction, it isn’t always good enough and the ice has to be cleared off the runway. In some provinces they use salt to do this on city roads but that isn’t an option on a runway since the salt can cause severe damage to an aircraft’s metal components. In place of salt, airports use either urea or magnesium chloride. Both products melt the ice in much the same fashion as salt, but they take longer than salt to have the same effect. Large sweepers can also be used to break up the ice in some conditions.

After a winter storm it can take airport crews quite some time to get the runway ready for us to use. Things get even more complicated when a storm occurs in the middle of the day, while we are trying to operate. In that case, the airport staff must work almost continuously to keep the runway clear. On a

city street that process is simple — a car can follow a snow plow while it is clearing the road. This isn’t possible on a runway since all the snow removal equipment needs to be well clear of the runway when each aircraft needs to take off or land. Snow clearing passes must be coordinated to occur between the various take offs and landings. The heavier the snow fall, the more frequently we need to pause the take offs and landings to give them time to clear the runway again.

Given where we fly, we can’t do anything to prevent winter storms but, thanks to the considerable efforts of the runway maintenance staff, we can keep operating safely despite the falling snow.

Captain Aaron Speer Vice President, Flight Operations First Air

If you are curious about a specific topic regarding flying and aircraft operations, let us know what you’d like to learn about and we’ll try to include it in a future column.

Email: editor@arcticjournal.ca

Dedicated to being first in service — and our commitment to the communities and people we serve!

Introducing onboard entertainment…

First Air will soon be launching a wireless in-flight entertainment onboard our all-passenger Boeing flights. It is a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) concept where passengers simply use their electronic device on-board, connect to the Wi-fi network and enjoy hours of entertainment.

Watch movies, listen to music, play games, read magazines!

Inuktitut and English Titles

Orphan and the Polar Bear

The Owl and the Lemming

Movies

Amaqqut Nunaat: The Country of Wolves

Amautalik

Black Mass

CHIPS

Dolphin Tale

Going in Style

The Great Gatsby

Harry Potter Deathly Hollows 2

King Arthur

Wonder Woman

11.22.63

Arrow

ER

Gotham

Mom

Pinky and the Brain

The Big Bang Theory

Teen Titans

The Flash

Westworld

The Mentalist

Cirque du Soleil

Friends

Bugs Bunny

Tom and Jerry

Television

Check out the entertainment onboard for further titles.

...and more.

Dedicated to being first in service — and our commitment to the communities and people we serve!

2018 | 01 • $5.95

Listening to the Silence of the Central Arc c Ocean

Sky Above, Sea Below: Inuit Wayfinding

Martha Flaherty: A Voice for the Relocated

Contents

At the Floe Edge

PM40050872

o www.arcticjournal.ca

A hunter’s row boat at the ready, waiting by the floe edge. © Michael Shaughnessy

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The views and opinions expressed in editorial content, advertisements, or by contributors, do not necessarily reflect the views, official positions or policies of First Air, its agents, or those of above&beyond magazine unless expressly stated. above&beyond ltd. does not assume any responsibility for any errors and/or omissions of any content in the publication. Reproduction in whole or part without permission is prohibited.

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28 Features

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At the Floe Edge

On a trip to Arctic Bay, Nunavut, I had the opportunity to visit the “Sinaaq” (Inuktitut for Floe Edge, where the melting ice meets the Arctic Ocean).

— Text and photos by Michael Shaughnessy

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Listening to the Silence of the Central Arctic Ocean

Throughout human history, the Central Arctic Ocean (CAO) has sat relatively undisturbed at the top of the world, protected by a perennial shield of sea ice. With icebreakers being the only surface vessels to navigate these waters, you can imagine my surprise when we received an email enquiring if we were interested in sailing to the CAO with our two 50’ sailboats. — Krystina Scheller-de Jong

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Sky Above, Sea Below: Inuit Wayfinding

To survive, any organism must explore its environment, and for thousands of years, circumpolar peoples have excelled at both.

— Michael Engelhard

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Martha Flaherty: A Voice for the Relocated

Flaherty has travelled far, physically and emotionally, since she first stepped onto the shores of southern Ellesmere Island in 1955. Her family was part of the federal government’s High Arctic relocation project.

— Season Osborne

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January | February 2018 Volume 30, No. 1

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09 Destination Focus

14 Living Above&Beyond 21 Resources

38 Culture Inuit Carving — Nick Newbery

43 Culture Caribou People — Charlie Swaney and Peter Mather

47 Adventure To the “Top of the World” — Parks Canada

51 Education The Journey Forward, Novellas on Reconciliation — Richard Van Camp & Monique Gray Smith 54 Inuit Forum — Natan Obed National Inuit Leader & President, ITK

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64.2304° N, 76.5410° W

CAPE DORSET

Cape Dorset has been home to the Inuit for over 3,000 years and is believed to be one of the first communities to be discovered by European explorers. It is a go to for Arctic

enthusiasts and art collectors alike looking for adventure and a piece of the community they can display proudly at home.

Cape Dorset boasts some of the most sought after carvings and drawing prints that have

made their way into the spotlight internationally in museums all over the world. Art is a

primary livelihood in this Arctic locale and the quality of the work produced is outstanding.

While most communities specialize in one or two art styles, Cape Dorset dabbles in most

traditional mediums such as carving and drawing prints, producing fine quality art for all

privileged enough to see it and meet its creators first hand.

The most common wildlife in the area are caribou, seals, beluga whales, walrus and,

of course, polar bear. You can hire a local guide who can take you on a trip of a lifetime to

view these animals as well as impart Inuit traditional hunting and fishing techniques

that Inuit have depended and thrived on for thousands of years to survive in this challenging climate.

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D E S T I N AT I O N F O C U S

Cape Dorset. © Government of Nunavut

When travelling to Cape Dorset, make sure you take part in:

• Exploring both Dorset and Mallik Island.

• Hiking or snowshoeing Mallikjuaq Territorial Park, which is a 45-minute walk away from the community. There you can visit ancient Thule, Dorset and Inuit archeological sites.

• Check out over 100 Inuksuit at the National Historic Site, Enukso Point or Inuksugasait on the Foxe Peninsula.

• The Mallikjuaq Park visitor Centre for any special events hosted during your stay.

• The West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative to view art and sometimes meet the artists.

• Kinngait Studios, which hosts the graphic arts program that produces a yearly acclaimed print collection.

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The ever-present sun dogs kept us company throughout our journey. © Michael Shaughnessy

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At the Floe Edge

By Michael Shaughnessy

On a trip to Arctic Bay, Nunavut, I had the opportunity to visit the “Sinaaq” (Inuktitut for Floe Edge, where the melting ice meets the Arctic Ocean).

We travelled by qamutiit (enclosed wooden sleds pulled behind snowmobiles) over what was often very rough terrain. Our guides told us to expect about a 14-hour day and, even with the warmth from the 24 hours of sun, the cold can still permeate even the best of Arctic outerwear.

They also explained they would be on constant guard throughout our journey scanning for the ever present nanook (polar bear), which tend to congregate wherever the floe edge recedes.

While I’ll admit to feeling somewhat between nervous and excited, this journey would also prove to be a photographer’s dream!

Narwhals put on an unforgettable performance. © Michael Shaughnessy

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A qamutiq, an Arctic chariot. © Michael Shaughnessy

A hunter retrieves his bounty from icy waters. © Michael Shaughnessy

One of the most rewarding aspects of photography is that it teaches one how to “see”.

And, just as absolute silence can sometimes be deafening, the seemingly barren white of the Arctic can also serve as a huge vibrant canvas full of textures, shapes and colours.

The sun dogs, foggy prism rings of ice crystals that form in the sky, constantly served as gentle escorts throughout the day. Our hosts made us tea with chips from 15,000-yearold ice from the incredibly blue icebergs that floated past.

Along the route, at Lancaster Sound, a green row boat with oars at the ready sat by the floe edge. A hunter used it to retrieve a recently shot seal — a gift from the icy waters.

Arriving at our destination, our guides immediately unpacked the qamutiit and boiled up some tea. As they set up for the meal preparation, they suggested we make ourselves comfortable and remain as quiet as possible. This, they explained, was where the narwhals might soon congregate and there was a very good chance we might soon get to see one.

Our silence was suddenly interrupted by what sounded like a deep “moan” coming from below. Then, amidst a fury of bubbles, the water surface broke to an entire pod of 10 narwhals. It felt like we all had front row seats to a private show they were putting on just for us! It was a memory I knew I would never, ever forget.

Since my journey, I have become a lifelong advocate of Canada’s Arctic.

Michael Shaughnessy is a management consultant who serves as an advisor to the Project North board. He accompanied a group of dedicated Project North volunteers on their journey to deliver new hockey equipment to Arctic Bay, Nunavut.

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LIVING ABOVE&BEYOND

Fabric give-away well attended In 2009, Canada Goose, in association

with First Air, established the Resource Centre Program to help bring raw

materials necessary to create warm, reliable parkas to Canada’s Arctic communities.

Today, Canada Goose donates

fabric to the Canada Goose Resource Centre Program several times a year.

First Air transports the materials to the

communities at no cost to support the program and the communities.

At the end of October 2017,

Canada Goose stopped by the com-

munity of Cape Dorset, Nunavut, to

share free fabric and parka-making

supplies.

© Canada Goose

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LIVING ABOVE&BEYOND

At the hills before Tasiujaq Lake, eight kilometres from the Northern Village of Umiujaq. This is one entry point for Tursujuq Park for visitors to go kayaking and camping around the lake. For Inuit, it is a traditional place to go fishing and hunting. © Annie-Claude Roberge

Nunavik’s 4th park inaugurated

Parc national Tursujuq was inaugurated during a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the park visitor pavilion in Umiujaq, Nunavik, at the end of October.

Tursujuq is Nunavik’s fourth national park. Covering 26,107 km2, it is also Quebec’s

largest. It is defined by Hudson cuestas, two immense lakes and the Nastapoka River.

The protected area is also home to unique species of salmon, freshwater seal and

beluga. Traces of human activity dating back 3,000 years have been discovered in the park, as well as Inuit and Cree trading posts.

In attendance at the ceremony were: Chairperson of the Kativik Regional Government, Jennifer Munick; Québec Premier Philippe Couillard; the Minister of Forests, Wildlife and Parks and Minister responsible for the Abitibi–Témiscamingue Region and the Nord-du-Québec Region, Luc Blanchette; the Minister responsible for Native Affairs, Geoffrey Kelley; the MNA for Ungava, Jean Boucher; and the Mayor of Umiujaq, Jack Niviaxie. © Kativik Regional Government

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Commission recommends Inuit-controlled authority

After consultations with citizens in communities

connected with the Pikialasorsuaq, the Inuit

Circumpolar Council’s Pikialasorsuaq Commission

is calling for the creation of an Inuit-identified, Inuit-managed protected area in the ecologically

and culturally significant area shared by Canada and Greenland in the High Arctic, as well as

reinstatement of free movement for Inuit between historically connected communities in both countries.

Pikialasorsuaq is the West Greenlandic name

for the North Water polynya — an area of

historically open water teeming with marine life that depend on the upwelling of nutrients caused

by ocean and wind currents in that location.

“People from the communities adjacent to

Pikialasorsuaq want to be involved in the manage-

ment and monitoring of this unique ecosystem.

They recognize that the health of the species

upon which they depend is connected to the health of the Pikialasorsuaq,” says Kuupik V. Kleist,

the Greenlandic commissioner and former premier of Greenland.

“It will take all levels of governments to

realize this most important step in Inuit selfdetermination and management of their lands

and waters. The Commission and the ICC urge the

governments of Canada, Greenland and Denmark to work with Inuit and create a positive future

for the Pikialasorsuaq and its peoples,” says Eva

Aariak, Canadian commissioner, and former

premier of Nunavut.

Wildlife that rely on the North Water polynya

include narwhals, belugas, Arctic char, little auks (alle alle), eiders, gulls, kittiwakes, seals, bearded

seals, hooded seals and other mammals that polar bears depend on for food.

Consultations took place with Canadian Inuit

communities (Grise Fiord, Resolute, Arctic Bay, Pond Inlet and Clyde River) and in Northern

Greenlandic communities (Siorapaluk, Qaanaaq, Savissivik, Kullorsuaq, Nuussuaq and Upernavik).

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LIVING ABOVE&BEYOND

Arctic archaeology scholar receives award Recognized as one of the world’s foremost scholars in Arctic archaeology, Dr. David Morrison is the recipient of the Massey Medal for his out-

standing achievement in the investigation and public interpretation of the history of Canada.

Dr. David Morrison worked at the Canadian

Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec, for more than 30 years. He was director of the Archaeology

and History Division and co-lead curator of the

First Peoples Hall. He not only led the Museum’s

work on repatriation of archaeological remains

to Indigenous communities, but also set standards in repatriation practices across North America.

With more than 20 years of field experience in

Canada’s Arctic, Dr. Morrison wrote numerous

books and scholarly articles on the history and

archaeology of northern Canada. Much of what is known about the history of Inuit and Inuvialuit culture across Canada’s Arctic is a direct result

of his prolific fieldwork and ground-breaking publications.

From left: Mark O’Neill, President and CEO of the Canadian Museum of History; Dr. David Morrison; and James Fleck, Interim Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Canadian Museum of History. © Canadian Museum of History

Arctic seas were once frozen year-round. But as

historic agreement was signed in December

years of consultation. It’s the first agreement of

about 40 per cent of those waters were open

Arctic for at least 16 years, and be renewed

China, Japan, South Korea, the European Union

no commercial fishing in the region but the area

high seas of the Central Arctic, which is about

The agreement commits the signatories

the possibility the region could see commercial

fisheries in the Arctic will not be affected.

Historic fishing agreement signed climate change continues to reshape the Arctic, during the summer of 2017. There is currently is becoming increasingly free of ice, opening vessels.

To provide precautionary protections to

fish stocks before they’ve become depleted, a

2017 to ban commercial fishing in the High

every five years after that. The ban covers the

322 kilometres offshore. Current Indigenous Inuit traditional knowledge played a role in

developing the ban with numerous Indigenous

its kind that involves Indigenous people. Canada, and Iceland all signed the agreement.

to an extensive science program, which will

include scientists trying to understand the size and health of the region’s fish stocks.

organizations consulted during nearly three

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L to R: Meg Beckel, President and CEO, Canadian Museum of Nature; Dr. Louis Fortier; and Kevin Kablutsiak, Executive Director of the Arctic Inspiration Prize, who presented Louis with his award.

Martin Lipman © Canadian Museum of Nature

Arctic research leader receives Lifetime Achievement award

Dr. Louis Fortier received a Lifetime Achievement

award at the Canadian Museum of Nature’s

Inspiration Awards Gala.

Louis Fortier, Ph.D., is the Scientific Director

of ArcticNet, Scientific Leader of the Canadian

Research Icebreaker Amundsen and Director of Science and Innovation at Institut nordique du Québec. Over the past 20 years, his leadership

has secured funds to develop national and

international research initiatives in the Arctic,

including the Canadian Arctic Shelf Exchange Study (CASES) and ArcticNet. His vision and

influence have helped engage Inuit at all levels

of the research process, cross barriers among the natural, social and health sciences, and

forge new partnerships between academia and

the private sector. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada (2007).

The Lifetime Achievement Award was

presented to Fortier for two decades of leader-

ship in coordinating Arctic research programs that integrate different fields of study.

The Call for Nominations for the 2018

Canadian Museum of Nature’s Inspiration 18

Awards will start in February 2018.

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LIVING ABOVE&BEYOND

NWT Tourism awards presented

L to R: Minister Wally Schumann, Minister of Industry, Tourism & Investment, Government of the Northwest Territories; Lucy Simon; Margaret Peterson, My Backyard Tours, accepting on behalf of Mary Tapsell; Marion LaVigne; Gordon Gin, Yellow Dog Lodge; and Susan Wright, Chair, NWT Tourism Board. © Bill Braden/NWT Tourism

The 21st annual NWT Tourism Conference and Annual General Meeting was held in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, November 1 to 3, 2017.

The conference stimulated dialogue not only about the new highway to Tuktoyaktuk and the new tourism opportunities that it will create but also how the tourism industry can help grow the Northwest Territories’ economy to $235 million by 2020-21. Keynote speaker Bruce Kirkby inspired delegates to think about such changes, like the new highway, as new opportunities to pursue for success.

The 2017 NWT tourism awards were announced at the Gala dinner. Lucy Simon, camp attendant at Sambaa Deh Territorial Park, received the GNWT Parks Hospitality Award.

Mary Tapsell, Guide for My Backyard Tours, received the Service Excellence Award. Yellow

Dog Lodge was named NWT Tourism Operator of the Year. Marion Lavigne, from Outcrop Communications/Up Here Magazine, was presented with the Mike Stillwell Lifetime

Achievement Award, acknowledging over 40 years of a positive legacy and significant contribution to NWT’s growing tourism industry.

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled in favour of the original recommendation to protect 80 per cent of the pristine Peel watershed from development. The region is a 68,000-square kilometre swath of land in northern Yukon, representing about 14 per cent of the territory. The Vuntut Gwitchin, Tr’ondëk Hwëch'in, and Na-Cho Nyäk Dun First Nations all have traditional territory in the region.

In 2012, a land-use planning commission made the recommendation to protect 80 per cent of the watershed against development as part of a legally mandated consultation process.

Instead, the Yukon government chose to protect 30 per cent of the area from development, sparking a five-year court battle. The dispute had effectively put land use planning processes on hold throughout the Yukon, pending a resolution on the Peel case.

With the unanimous Supreme Court decision on December 1, the Yukon government can move forward with the land use planning process in the territory with consultations on the Commission’s final recommendations for the plan, including dealing with many exploration claims in the region.

The ruling strengthens the interpretation of Indigenous treaty rights and land-claim agreements between Indigenous groups and different levels of government across Canada.

Supreme Court of Canada decision reached

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LIVING ABOVE&BEYOND

L to R: Minister Louis Sebert, Minister of Justice & Minister of Lands, Minister Responsible for the Northwest Territories Power Corporation, Minister Responsible for Public Engagement and Transparency; Minister Wally Schumann, Minister of Industry, Tourism and Investment and Minister of Infrastructure; Premier Bob McLeod and Minister of Executive and Indigenous Affairs; Her Excellency the Right Honourable Julie Payette, Governor General of Canada; Minister Amarjeet Sohi, Federal Minister of Infrastructure and Communities; Minister Carolyn Bennett, Federal Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs; Commissioner of the Northwest Territories Margaret Thom; Member of Parliament for the Northwest Territories Michael McLeod; and Jozef Carnogursky, President of the Nihtat Gwich’in Council. © Government of the Northwest Territories

New Arctic coast highway opens The long awaited 137-kilometre Inuvik

Tuktoyaktuk Highway opened November 15,

2017 with celebrations taking place in Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk.

Beginning in the morning at Inuvik, Inuvialuit

and Gwich'in representatives welcomed guests

followed by the singing of Canada’s national

anthem by the East 3 Choir. Federal and territorial

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speeches were then followed by the screening

of the documentary trailer, End of the Ice Age — Last Season of the Inuvik to Tuk Ice Road.

After a lunch reception, guests convened to the start of the highway near Muskrat Road for the

official ribbon cutting ceremony before the inaugural drive to Tuktoyaktuk.

Once in Tuktoyaktuk, the opening celebrations

were repeated with the anthem performed by

the Tuktoyaktuk Mangilaluk School choir and

included a fireworks display, community feast

and craft sale. Entertainment included the

Tuktoyaktuk Drummers and Dancers and the Collectif9 ensemble, as well as another screening of the documentary.

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RESOURCES

NWT

Awards recognize resource development

The inaugural NWT MAX Awards, recognizing mining and exploration excellence in the Northwest Territories, were presented in November coinciding with the Chamber of Mines’ 50th anniversary and the 45th Annual Geoscience Forum.

MAX Award recipients have all played an enormous role in responsible and successful resource development, generating opportunities and demonstrating leadership in their respective categories. Their contributions include finding and developing resources, engaging with the public and governments, ensuring Indigenous participation, creating jobs and business benefits, and training northerners.

Recipients of the 2017 MAX Awards are: Aurora Geosciences for Distinguished Service, Ekati Diamond Mine and Diavik Diamond Mine for Economic Leadership, Diavik Diamond Mine and TerraX Minerals for Environmental & Social Responsibility, Joe Rabesca and Darrell Beaulieu for Indigenous Achievement and the Mine Training Society and Altaf Lakhani for Special Achievements.

The awards were sponsored by the NWT & Nunavut Chamber of Mines and the Government of the Northwest Territories.

NUNAVUT

Are there more diamonds?

Bulk samples of kimberlite at Peregrine Diamond's Chidliak site in Nunavut now seem to be over twice as deep as previously reported. One of their most promising kimberlite pipes — CH 6 — extends 540 metres below the ground, 280 metres deeper than initially announced. It shows the presence of “very rare” green diamonds at the claim, which may indicate other rare, coloured diamonds are also there. The finding could potentially add significantly to both the mine life and eventual economic outcome of the project.

The Chidliak site, which sits 120 kilometres northeast of Iqaluit, hopes to be the next diamond mine in Nunavut. Over the next few years, Peregrine hopes to finance a feasibility study.

Gold mine gets go ahead

The Nunavut Impact Review Board has given the nod for Agnico Eagle’s Whale Tail gold mine. The open-pit satellite operation on the company’s Amaruq property is located about 65 kilometres from its existing mine at Meadowbank.

The Board says they believe Agnico Eagle can operate in a way that protects the environment and the well-being of Nunavut residents. They

Recipients of the inaugural NWT MAX Awards are L to R: Gary Vivian (Aurora Geosciences), Patrick Evans (TerraX Minerals), Chantal Lavoie (Dominion Diamond), Darrell Beaulieu (Denendeh Investments Incorporated), Al Harman (Mine Training Society), Rebecca Alty (Diavik), Jessica Kozian (Diavik), and Altaf Lakhani (Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency. Far right is Wally Schumann, Government of the Northwest Territories Minister of Industry, Tourism, and Investment, who presented at the event. Joe Rabesca, Tlicho Government, was unable to attend and is missing from the photo.

Photo courtesy Chamber of Mines/GNWT

did, however, recommend 64 stringent terms and conditions to the federal and territorial governments. These included collecting more information on caribou and working with the Baker Lake Hunters and Trappers Organization to ensure infrastructure is in place to allow for the safe passage of caribou and other wildlife through the mining area.

Agnico Eagle must also work with the Government of Nunavut and the Nunavut Housing Corporation to help Whale Tail employees pursue homeownership or find affordable housing, assist with financial planning life skills and career training, and ensure employees receive timely health care. The company is contributing to a $3 million community initiatives fund for these expenditures.

Following construction in 2018, the open pit mine would begin operation in 2019.

Inuit training project announced

The Qikiqtani Inuit Association in partnership with Baffinland Iron Mines Corp., the Government of Canada, the Government of Nunavut and Kakivak is launching a new Inuit employment and training project.

The Qikiqtani Skills and Training for Employment Partnership (Q-STEP), is designed to meet the employment needs of Inuit. This program will boost skills development across Qikiqtani, with a focus on training in the mining sector, for a four-year period ending on March 2021.

The Government of Canada, through the Skills and Partnership Fund, will provide

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$7.9 million towards training 360 unemployed Inuit through Q-STEP. Baffinland will provide $9.4 million in-kind support to the project and Kakivak will provide up to $1.6 million in-kind support to the project. The Government of Nunavut will offer operations support to Q-STEP. The Q-STEP program includes training in work readiness, heavy equipment, trades apprenticeships and mining essentials and general skills development.

YUKON

Exploring the future of oil and gas in the Yukon

In late November, Yukon's Energy, Mines and Resources Minister Ranj Pillai announced the Yukon government is halting the process by which exploration rights are granted in Kandik and Eagle Plains basins of northern Yukon.

The Yukon government, annually issues Requests for Postings to assess industry interest in certain areas. Companies make submissions indicating which areas they would like to explore, and a competitive process to win exploration rights follows. In the fall of 2016, the Yukon government received 15 submissions: 13 for the Kandik basin and two in the Eagle Plains basin. No submissions were received in 2017.

The Vuntut Gwitchin, Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in, and Na-Cho Nyäk Dun First Nations do not support the process. Cancelling it will allow the government to work with the First Nations “to have a broader conversation on oil and gas exploration and development in north Yukon,” says Pillai.

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Listening to the Silence of the Central Arctic Ocean

By Krystina Scheller-de Jong

Throughout human history, the Central Arctic Ocean (CAO) has sat relatively undisturbed at the top of the world, protected by a perennial shield of sea ice. With icebreakers being the only surface vessels to navigate these waters, you can imagine my surprise when we received an email from polar explorer Pen Hadow, enquiring if we were interested in sailing to the Central Arctic Ocean with our two 50’ sailboats as part of his Arctic Mission project to raise awareness about CAO’s increasingly accessible waters.

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Band of sea ice. © Erik de Jong

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Female Polar Bear with her two cubs. © Krystina Scheller

Lion’s Mane Jelly Fish. © Conor McDonnell

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In my mind, the CAO was still locked in ice, a place where a sailboat could only get to by freezing in and drifting like the Fram in 1893 or the Tara in 2003. A quick look at the ice charts from the summer of 2016 brought me back to reality. The CAO was not just marginally accessible, large portions of its waters are now ice free in the summer and significant leads have opened all the way to 88N, only two degrees from the North Pole.

While I have spent a significant amount of time sailing in Greenland, Svalbard, Arctic Canada and Alaska over the last decade and have noticed significant changes in accessibility and ice cover in those areas. I had not anticipated that the CAO would change as rapidly. By March 2017, the Arctic sea ice extent had reached a record wintertime low and the question became not if we would be able to sail into the CAO the following summer but how far would we be able to go and what would we find?

In addition to bringing awareness to these newly assessible waters, we would also be studying and documenting the marine wildlife and ecosystem that are no longer shielded by year-round ice.

The seas finally subsided as we crossed the invisible border between Alaska’s Exclusive Economic Zone and the Central Arctic Ocean. It felt as if we had entered a calm lake, perfect conditions for our science team to begin their work documenting the wildlife and ecosystem. While the whole team had to adjust to life without land, scientist Tim Gordon and wildlife biologist Heather Bauscher had the added A B OV E & B E YO N D — C A N A DA’ S A RC T I C J O U R N A L

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complexity of carrying out their work from a sailboat instead of a large, well-equipped research vessel. While a larger vessel would have made their work easier, both felt it was important to have as little impact on this newly accessible part of the Arctic as possible.

On our way North, we stopped frequently to gather scientific data, including using a CTD (short for conductivity, temperature and depth). Tim and Heather lowered it to a depth of 100 metres to measure the chemical and physical properties of the water to gain a better understanding of how melting ice is changing the habitat for animals living below the surface.

It can take a year or even two before all the analysis and results from a scientific research trip like this can be completed and shared but not everything we saw needed to be verified by a lab. On two separate occasions we found sizable chunks of plastic in the form of polystyrene foam. Though it was disheartening to see, it was a reminder that a lot of decisions need to be made about the CAO’s future.

Even after we started to encounter sea ice, we still found ourselves sailing through large amounts of open water and rarely having to make major adjustments to navigation.

The presence of ice however, meant that we needed to keep a vigilant polar bear watch.

Scanning both the ice and the water, it wasn’t long before we spotted fresh tracks and in the distance with the aid of binoculars, Heather spotted a mother and cubs on a small ice floe.

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The Arctic Mission team at work on the ice. © Erik de Jong

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Scientist Tim Gordon preps his acoustics equipment on an ice floe. © Conor McDonnell

Bagheera and Snow Dragon II going through broken sea ice. © Conor McDonnell

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The presence of ice made it easier to transfer team members and gear between the boats but it was not always easy to find sea ice that was stable enough to walk on. Being able to work from the ice was convenient for Tim’s acoustics recordings. From the ice Tim could set up his equipment and launch it on a paddleboard, far enough away from the boats that their presence would not interfere with the recordings.

Sound travels extremely well through the sea, especially in the Arctic Ocean where special thermal gradients lead to ‘acoustic ducting,’ a physical phenomenon that causes sound waves to travel faster and further in these waters than they do anywhere else on Earth. Many of the animals that inhabit the CAO’s waters have had to adapt to use sound rather than sight as their main tool for communication, navigation and hunting as historically with the ice cover, very little light has penetrated these waters. Narwhals for example hunt for fish up to a mile below the ice using biosonar, emitting 1,000 high-pitched clicks every second and listening to the reflected echoes, essentially seeing by sound. As well as looking for ways to protect the Arctic Ocean, it is also important we listen and understand the silence of the CAO’s waters to understand how big the impact of noise pollution would be if commercial activity entered the area.

Four hundred and nine miles into the CAO, we rafted the boats to an ice floe for a 24-hour science stop and to get a better feel for how the ice was moving before continuing North. While the current, wind and water temperature forecast were

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favourable, those conditions never materialized. Instead, the updated satellite images showed the ice was closing in behind us. It was almost September and the water around us was already showing signs of freezing for the winter. There was no question, it was time to turn around and head south.

The ice chart for the last week of August 2017, showed that there was a lead from the Russian coast all the way to the Geographic Pole. The lead appeared to be navigable, but we were over 1,000 miles to the east and the lead was only open for five days. It was a sobering reminder that it is only a matter of time before a small yacht can get to 90 North. It was humbling enough knowing that we were the first to make it to 80 North in the Central Arctic Ocean with normal surface vessels. There was no question in our minds that a fishing fleet could easily enter these waters.

Before we left the CAO, we took the time to pause and admire its waters, from the lion’s mane jellyfish surrounding us in the clear water to the newly forming ice starting to skim its surface. While we felt privileged to sail in waters that had previously been inaccessible. Our main goal was that our journey and findings would bring awareness to the fact that the international community is in a unique position to decide whether commercial activity will ever take place in the COA. While the five Arctic countries have already agreed to hold off on fishing until further studies are carried out, there is no agreement in place that prevents other countries from fishing these waters.

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The Arctic Mission team at 80 North.

L to R: Conor MacDonnell, Heather Bauscher, Jaap van Rijckevorsel, Frances Brann, Nick Carter, Erik de Jong, Tim Gordon, Krystina Scheller, Fukimi (Shikoku Ken), Pen Hadow, and Tegid Cardwright. © Conor McDonnell

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Inupiaq man in a qajaq, near Noatak, Alaska, ca. 1929.

Photo by Edward S. Curtis / Library of Congress

Sky above, sea below Inuit Wayfinding

By Michael Engelhard

To survive, any organism must explore its environment, and for thousands of years, circumpolar peoples have excelled at both.

During William Edward Parry’s 1821-23 push for the Northwest Passage, Lieutenant William H. Hooper queried Toolemak, an Iglulingmiut shaman, about ice conditions along their prospective route. After some chanting, Toolemak called upon his spirit helper or tuurngaq, who told the assembled that sea ice would force the explorers’ ships to turn around and sail back to Kabloona-noona, “White Man’s Land.” As predicted, ice jams in Fury and Hecla Strait south of Baffin Island thwarted the expedition, which promptly left Canada’s Arctic.

Hooper had followed Toolemak’s “conjurations” with skepticism and only because the geographical knowledge of Inuit shamans reputedly was extensive. The incident, Toolemak’s performance notwithstanding, indeed betrays a fine-tuned literacy of place rather than any ability to contact supernatural powers.

“It is known,” editorialized the New York Sun on January 24, 1897, “that Indian tribes, and the Eskimos also, frequently have the geographic instinct well developed, and their rude sketch maps have sometimes been of considerable assistance to explorers.” Paternalistic assessments such as this disguise the fact that Inuit geo-spatial concepts and navigational skills equal those of Australian Aboriginals and of intrepid voyagers in the South Pacific, which have been commended for their accuracy. With Arctic societies in transition, with language loss, handheld GPS, and long-distance travel overland and by sea diminished, this knowledge is quickly fading. Artificial features such as radar towers and radio masts are replacing snowdrifts and stars as beacons for young Inuit hunters. Where formerly a culture incorporated nature’s elements in its mental maps, another now designs instruments that with each improvement seek to shake off bonds of nature. There no longer are men of a valley who are that valley, men whose soul, like the poet’s, “is composed of the external world.”

Far from being a mere “instinct,” orienting skills and the related canon of environmental knowledge painstakingly had to be learned and then practiced. They were passed on orally from one generation to the next, by listening to and observing expert elders. The role of pupil often fell to explorers, whose travelling savvy and charts could be spotty or nonexistent.

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Ammassalik Island in southeastern Greenland, seen from Kulusuk Island. Photo by Algkalv (talk) - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/ index.php?curid=10340002

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Traversing largely featureless pack ice and winter landscapes, often in whiteout conditions, resembles course-setting at sea, and similar information can be used. The Inuit kit of wayfinding aids included landmarks twinned with stories that “explained” such natural features, but also the “reading” of currents and surf sounds on shore, of constellations, migrating birds, whales, and caribous, atmospheric phenomena, and the shape, drift, and consistency of snow “waves” or sastrugi. Arctic snowdrifts hold clues about prevailing winds and thereby, cardinal directions. A whaleback-shaped drift is ag˙viuraq (usually about 30 feet in length) and one with a sharp downwind side and a less steep upwind side, aniuvauraq. Resembling a map’s contour lines, qayuqłait are small ripples. Ice-free stretches of sea also announce themselves indirectly, as “water sky,” darkly reflected off the underbelly of clouds. In “looming,” objects below the horizon — boats, ice-shelves, islands — float high above their real position, mirages of bent light resulting from temperature inversions. Prevailing warm southeasterly winds blowing across a lake melt ice along its northwestern banks, and the white-lidded eye on still days becomes a compass.

The expanding twilight of spring, conversely, makes stars indistinct. And even in winter, Polaris shines at too high a position to serve as a true marker of North — the Greek root for the region’s name arktikos, after all, refers to lands that spread below the Great Bear.

Even temporarily lost voyagers had, and have, a shot at returning home by tuning into a setting’s flow, by being attentive, by assessing intricacies of a landscape or seascape and not journeying against its grain.

Ethnographers of the past who worked with veteran Inuit travellers falsely claimed that, although they had never seen a map, they could read one, recognizing nuna, “the land,” in its graphic abstraction. Many Inuit, in fact, easily switched to a bird’s eye perspective like a shaman transformed into a raven. Ephemeral maps traced into snow, A B OV E & B E YO N D — C A N A DA’ S A RC T I C J O U R N A L

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“Caribou” (Tukturjuit, the Big Dipper) and “Two in Front” (Sivulliik, “the first ones,” Boötes—a little orphan boy chased by an angry grandfather). Arcturus is the Old Man. Inuit constellations illustrated by Johan Meuris. (Free Art License 1.3) http://johanmeuris.eu/portfolio_page/stellarium-constellation-art/

ice, and the air were a tradition. In 1825, upon Captain F. W. Beechey’s request, some Inupiat of Alaska’s Kotzebue Sound built a relief map of Cape Krusenstern’s littoral using sand, sticks, and pebbles. Place names portrayed landforms envisioned from above. When prompted, informants would sketch the terrain with great detail and topographic context. Contrary to the explorers, for the “Human Beings” no wilderness, no terra incognita existed. “Here be dragons” became “here be delicious walrus,” and a few maps based on their knowledge were thus annotated. To the indigenous tenants, unpeopled lands were inconceivable: routes everywhere scored the space they inhabited, proof of deep occupancy and use.

Rasmussen elicited many graphic representations of their environs on his dogsled trip through the Northwest Passage during the 5th Thule Expedition of 1921-24. Judging from these, the Arctic, larder for people and refuge of spirits, had been fully internalized.

The distortions also are telling. Some Inuit depicted familiar settings, their bays, lakes, lagoons, and islets in a sophisticated scrimshaw of travel and toil. Lesser known coasts and plains on the periphery appeared vague, diminished in detail and size compared to their home ground. Women intimately knew areas near the camps, orbits for snaring hares, picking berries, digging up roots. Men focused on distant trading locations, on passes, portages, furbearers’ itineraries, and the grooves caribou herds gouged in the soil. Exaggeration in scale also signified vital shelter or good hunting sites.

Carved from driftwood, Inuit maps of a Greenlandic archipelago could be fingered under a parka or in a qajaq’s hatch, upside-down, in a blizzard or in polar darkness. If washed overboard, they would float. Plotting a navigable fringe, the map’s knobs and notches — the coves, fjords, and capes of that sea-riven shore — ascend one side of the artifact and descend the other, as if North did not matter. A man named Kuniit whittled these memory-sticks before his small, mobile band encountered the first A B OV E & B E YO N D — C A N A DA’ S A RC T I C J O U R N A L

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Ilulissat or Jakobshavn, in Disko Bay, West Greenland.

Photo by Kristine Riskær - Ilulissat 3 2008 149, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5079146

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One of three driftwood maps from Ammassalik, with corresponding islands on the Greenlandic coast. Carved map photo courtesy of Greenland National Museum and Archives / Illustration courtesy Mark Garrison, Hakai Magazine

Sastrugi near Tromsø, in Arctic Norway.

Photo by Bo Eide @ Flickr.

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Europeans in the 1880s. In their simplicity, the sculpted burls condense ingenuity.

Touching the dear objects like worry stones or rosary beads must have been reassuring to any storm-tossed soul. Staking out new frontiers, replica etchings of the Ammassalik Island maps will soon be encapsulated and launched on the Moon Ark as cargo with other tokens of human creativity.

In some Inuit communities, orienteering know-how outlasted the arrival of skidoos and TVs. A researcher from Ontario’s Carleton University recalls a modern hunter who retrieved seven fox traps his uncle had set across 20 square kilometres of seemingly flat, monotonous tundra. The traps lay buried deep under snow and had been laid 25 years earlier. The hunter collected them all in roughly two hours.

Psychologists now categorize sensitivity to the natural world as a type of intelligence that augments musical, spatial, emotional, logical, linguistic, and other forms.

Linguists in turn say that about one third of the world’s languages describe the space occupied by one’s body not in terms of right and left but with cardinal directions.

Speakers of such languages are said to be more skilled at keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar places. For nomadic cultures, travelling light is a virtue; tools are best carried inside one’s head and improvised when the need arises, from local materials.

Too often, explorers and missionaries judged harshly the “stone age” technology of people, who never invented gunpowder or the wheel. One wonders, if leaders before Rasmussen and Stefansson had heeded the wisdom required to endure in these barrenlands, how many of Franklin’s sailors might have returned.

Michael Engelhard is the author of the essay collection, American Wild: Explorations from the Grand Canyon to the Arctic Ocean and of Ice Bear: The Cultural History of an Arctic Icon. He lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, and works as a wilderness guide in the Arctic.

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Martha Flaherty A voice for the relocated

By Season Osborne

Martha Flaherty’s landing on the beach at Grise Fiord, Nunavut, in August 2017 couldn’t have been more different than her arrival 62 years earlier.

“It was a happy occasion. And it’s always nice to see the people I knew and the new children,” says Flaherty. “I used to be embarrassed to be from Grise Fiord because it used to be such a poor place: isolated.

I was happy to leave Grise Fiord. I didn’t feel like I’m from there.”

Flaherty at Radstock Bay on Devon Island, Nunavut, September 2017 © Michelle Valberg

Flaherty has travelled far, physically and emotionally, since she first stepped onto the shores of southern Ellesmere Island in 1955. Her family was part of the federal government’s High Arctic relocation project. To uphold sovereignty in the High Arctic, it needed people to live there. In 1953 and 1955, a total of 87 people — mainly families — were picked up from Inukjuak, in western Nunavik, and from Pond Inlet on Baffin Island. They were taken North aboard the Eastern Arctic Patrol ship CD Howe, and dropped off at Resolute Bay on Cornwallis Island and at Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island — 1,500 miles from home, friends and family.

They were told it would be a northern paradise with good hunting, and they could go home in two years. Flaherty was five when her family was deposited at a rocky spot at the base of immense cliffs at Lindstrom Peninsula, eight kilometres west of Grise Fiord. It was a “scary,” harsh environment, devoid of recognizable plant life and the plentiful game the government had promoted. The government reneged on its promise to return people home, and they were forced to stay and eke out an existence. They were given nothing — no housing, food, or skins to make clothing. They were expected to adapt.

“I have no memory from age five until about 11,” says Martha. “We arrived in Grise Fiord in August, and it was already beginning to be fall. There was nothing there.” As the oldest child, she was expected to go with her father, Josephie, and look after the dogs when he went out hunting.

When her father had a nervous breakdown, the little girl was often the target of his outbursts.

“You don’t totally get over the traumatic stuff that happens to you when you’re young,” says Gordon Spence, Martha’s partner of 32 years. “I’m always amazed at how they were able to survive the whole relocation thing, living in 24-hour darkness for six months and minus 67-degree temperatures.”

Amazingly, they survived. In 1956, the RCMP moved its post to the present community of Grise Fiord. In 1959, the people purchased and built little houses with money earned from fox furs. When the elementary school opened in Grise Fiord in 1962, people moved their houses to the community on dogsleds.

“When school came, we all started to live together here in the community. That was when I got to know Martha,” says Larry Audlaluk, Josephie’s stepbrother, who was a toddler when his family was relocated to Grise Fiord in 1953. “Martha was always very shy and very quiet, and she was very pretty. She was picked on quite a bit because she was a cute little girl.”

The RCMP officer in charge wanted her to get a southern education. At 15, Flaherty was sent to high school in Carcross, Yukon. She lived in a foster home where she was the only Inuk.

She was teased constantly. She withdrew, stopped talking and became mute. After a year, they gave up on her, and she was sent back to Grise Fiord. Then she went to Churchill, Manitoba, to study home economics. Afterwards, Flaherty took nursing at a vocational school in Fort Smith,

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Filmmaker and art curator John Houston met Flaherty when she was translating in Ottawa in the early ’80s.

“She was part of the interpreter corps, one of the great simultaneous translators. I was around Ottawa and the stuff I was doing with the printmakers needed simultaneous translation, and so we met that way,” says Houston.

A few years later, Houston visited Grise Fiord and spent time with Josephie, the son of Robert Flaherty whose 1922 film Nanook of the North captured traditional Inuit life. It was then he realized what had happened in the 1950s, and “how people were torn from where they grew up and moved to the High Arctic.”

“Martha seems to be coming out more about that now,” says Houston. “I guess as we grow older, there is a bit of a sense of ‘if not now, then when?’”

Flaherty’s translation work became known in Ottawa and she was hired for the Nunavut Land Claims negotiations, translating all the materials and documents. In 1992, she joined Pauktuutit, the national Inuit women’s organization. She became a strong advocate for Inuit women’s rights. Within a year, she was elected president, and held that position until 1998.

Baby Martha in Inukjuak, circa 1951, with her mother Rynee Flaherty on the far right. Photo courtesy of Martha Flaherty

Northwest Territories, then worked at the hospital in Iqaluit, Nunavut, for three months.

In 1973, Flaherty got a job in Yellowknife with Interpreter Corps, a new government organization providing simultaneous Inuktitut translation for members of the Northwest Territories Legislative Assembly.

“That’s when she really got her voice. That was her training period when she started to talk about her beliefs and she became quite vocal,” says Audlaluk.

Flaherty moved to Ottawa in the fall of 1979. She got a journalism degree, worked as a translator, then as special assistant to Peter Ittinuar, MP for Nunavut. She says she loved Ottawa. It was an escape; the first place where she was anonymous and not bullied.

On a visit to Grise Fiord in 1977, Flaherty is second from right, with her brothers Jamie and Johnny. Her oldest daughter Lalĕna is in front in the blue parka. Photo courtesy of Martha Flaherty

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Flaherty, between her father Josephie and her mother Rynee not long after arriving in Grise Fiord in 1955. Josephie’s young stepbrother Larry Audlaluk is on the left.

Photo courtesy of Martha Flaherty

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Flaherty met then Governor General Ray Hnatyshyn in 1990 to commemorate the $100 coin issued by the Canadian Mint that had the image of Martha with her daughter Alyssa in her amauti. Photo courtesy of Martha Flaherty

“She is a remarkable person,” says Shontelle Prokipcak who is co-writing Martha’s biography. “She is remarkable because she lived through extreme poverty and culture shock.

The relocation to Grise Fiord was traumatic, but she’s found her way in this world. She’s wizened to it in a good way, not bitter and negative.”

In Inukjuak in August 2010, the federal government made a formal apology for “the mistakes and broken promises of this dark chapter of our history.” A month later, two monuments were unveiled. One, on a gravel terrace above Grise Fiord’s town centre, depicts a woman and her child looking out towards Resolute Bay. In Resolute, a carved solitary man looks toward Grise Fiord. They symbolize the families separated by the 1950s relocations.

Martha returned to Grise Fiord in August 2017 as a culturalist aboard Adventure Canada’s cruise ship Ocean Endeavour. She met Audlaluk there, and the two visited the relocation monument to talk about its significance to the ship’s passengers.

Flaherty’s mission is to inform Canadians. The film Martha of the North is helping, but she wants the High Arctic relocation to be an exhibit in the Human Rights Museum in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The museum focuses on human rights failures, such as the Holocaust, interred Japanese-Canadians, as well as First Nation’s residential schools. The story of Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay is not included yet. She says, “I’ll shut up when it’s finally in there.”

Season Osborne has a passion for Arctic history, and is the author of In the Shadow of the Pole: An Early History of Arctic Expeditions, 1871-1912. She lives and writes in Ottawa, Ontario.

Martha Flaherty with then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Paul Quassa during the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement ceremonies in 1993. Photo courtesy of Martha Flaherty

“After going through Pauktuutit, I started learning about issues,” says Flaherty. “I became more aware of my own issues, and I said, ‘This is wrong. This is not normal.’

I started going to healing sessions, and it opened me up. Now, I can talk about it with no more tears.”

Flaherty’s opinion was valued. She was appointed to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, and became a board member for the Healing Foundation that extended from the Royal Commission. She sat on the Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women in the early 1990s, and travelled to communities across Canada. She was also secretary for Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, now Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the national organization formed to protect and advance the interests of Canada’s Inuit.

During the Royal Commission hearings, film director Marquise Lepage saw Flaherty speaking in the media and contacted her to make a documentary about Flaherty’s personal experience of the High Arctic relocation.

Martha wasn’t ready to share her story then. “I was so full of frustration and trauma and didn’t know how to get out,” says Flaherty. But Lepage persisted, and Flaherty finally agreed. In 2009, the National Film Board’s Martha of the North was released.

Flaherty has raised her voice for women’s rights and violence against women as part of the Inuit Circumpolar Council and Indigenous Women of the Americas.

She has spoken at conferences across Canada and internationally. Flaherty has met countless dignitaries and influential leaders, including Canadian Prime Ministers, several Governors General, Prince Charles, and Desmond Tutu.

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The monument, carved by Looty Pijamini, in honour of the Inuit families relocated in 1953 and 1955. © Season Osborne

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Inuit Carving

Sharing a culture’s stories

Nick Newbery

Man in qajaq. Whalebone, caribou antler and soapstone; Abe Kingmiaqtuq, Taloyoak. Abe’s carvings became well-known during his lifetime and much in demand, with one being reproduced on a Canadian postage stamp. © Nick Newbery/Government of Nunavut

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Carving has long featured in the culture of northern indigenous peoples in their production of weapons and utensils in a variety of materials. The finding of hundreds of human figures, amulets, masks and ritual objects leads to speculation about the importance of art, particularly in the Dorset culture and religion, and its use in attracting spirits, helping the sick and predicting the future.

This skill took a different twist after the arrival of Europeans who occasionally bought some of these items as souvenirs or to sell when they returned home.

The production of Inuit carvings as ‘art,’ first introduced to the southern market on a regular commercial basis by James Houston in the late 1940s, (as well as other cultural art forms such as print making) has expanded and continues to provide a partial or total income for many Inuit today. Few have formal training but with high unemployment in many communities, their familiarity with their subject matter and their wish to continue to share their culture and stories has led to their artwork contributing to the Nunavut economy as well as attracting world-wide interest.

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C U LT U R E

Drum-dancer. Soapstone; Jimmy Akavak. Jimmy, a retired RCMP officer, is well known for some of his larger sculptures which are appreciated for their detailed work and fine finish. Carving offered a contrast to police work and the chance to work alone, using a different group of skill sets. © Nick Newbery/Government of Nunavut

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C U LT U R E

Three walruses. Caribou antler; Thomasie Kooneeloosie, Clyde River. This theme of walrus trios started in the late 1980s and Thomasie was one of the first to produce these groups of three small walrus. Modern versions tend to be much larger and more expensive. © Nick Newbery/Government of Nunavut

Fish and bird. Soapstone; Lootie Pijamini, Grise Fiord. Lootie is among the finest carvers in Nunavut, working in a variety of materials, traditional and modern, including gold and silver.

He has attended college jewellery courses in Iqaluit and many of his creations using northern materials make his work much sought after. © Nick Newbery/Government of Nunavut

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C U LT U R E Walrus. Soapstone and ivory; Tommy Pallister, Iqaluit. For a while in the early 2000s, a carving area was made available just past the Iqaluit airport where carvers would work together. Many carvers like working outside with others; it provides companionship and the chance to learn from each other. Tommy was the youngest in the group the summer this photo was taken. © Nick Newbery/Government of Nunavut

Women in umiaq. Whalebone; Bob Kussy, Yellowknife.

Not only does the tilt and angle of the boat give the impression of riding the waves but many of the figures are intriguing, all occupied with some activity or other such as playing the accordion, drumming, playing string games, rowing or caring for their babies. © Nick Newbery/Government of Nunavut

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Nick Newbery taught in several communities in Nunavut from 1976-2005. He would like to acknowledge the assistance he received for this article from Bert Rose, northern educator and long-time resident of Nunavut. The photos in this article are from Nick’s Arctic photo collection that can be found at www.newberyphotoarchives.ca and should be viewed from a historical perspective.

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C U LT U R E

Caribou People

The Sacred Place Where Life Begins

A young caribou in the boreal forest of the Yukon Territory.

Charlie Swaney and Peter Mather

I sit with Gwich’in hunter Charlie Swaney outside under a classic blue camping tarp, rain silently drumming.

Thin, tall, and not so young anymore, we talk caribou. It’s our favourite subject. Charlie is one of the hunters of Arctic Village, a small First Nations community nestled into a fairy tale valley, hundreds of miles from the nearest road.

Today we are in Arctic Village for the biannual Gwich’in Gathering and Charlie talks about his people, their connection to the caribou and why they held the first Gwich’in Gathering in Arctic Village 28 years ago, when the calving grounds of the Porcupine Caribou herd was under threat from proposed oil and gas development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

this mountain, all the way to the other end.

When we got to the other end, we sat down and there is a mountain over there, they call it “Duchanlee.” We see a caribou coming down.

We start walking over that way. We get up there and... well, I didn’t know that my rifle sight was

off that time…. That caribou pop out in front of me. I shot four times, what was in my magazine, and I re-loaded and I shot five more times. That caribou took off. My sight was that far off.

Well I thought that caribou is long gone. But something just tell me, just go over that ridge

This is Charlie’s story:

“In the old days. People they respect the caribou.

Everything they had, they respect caribou with.

This particular time it was in the fall. We walk up the mountain to look around for caribou. We end up staying there that night. We didn’t have no tent that night. We didn’t really need no tent.

It’s warm out, you know.

Well the next day, we went up to the top and we look all over. We look everywhere, and we see some caribou, but they’re way back. Way too far. So we walk all the way along the edge of

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Members of the 200,000 strong Porcupine Caribou herd migrating to the foothills of the Coastal Plain of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

and just go over and check. Well what do you know, I went over that ridge and check and I’ll be darn, if that caribou didn’t turn around and start coming back towards me and turn sideways. I was able to shoot it and I knock it down.

Well… we skin it and gut it right there.

When we got back to the village we heard that just at that moment when that caribou turn around and come back, there was an elder from here, well his wife passed away. I tell everybody about this caribou that it turned around and come back to us… just like it gave itself to us. It’s almost like it sensed that we lost an elder, so that caribou turn around and come back and give him-

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self to us… cause on a normal basis, if you shoot nine times at a caribou, well it’s gone. But it just so happens that this caribou came back and I shot it.

The caribou really are connected to communities that they go through. You know somehow it knew, that caribou just knew... and it’s just like this gathering that’s happening. The first day, the caribou showed up, and I talk to some of the elders and they say, “they know, they know exactly what’s going on here. There is a celebration happening here and they come to be with us.” They, the elders, look at us and the caribou as one… cause we roam this land together. That’s the way it was in the old days too.

That is one particular story that always stick with me, I always think about. I never seen a moose or caribou or anything come back to me like that, and just at that particular time that elder pass away.

For thousands of years, the caribou took care of people here. And then all of sudden in ’98 when they want to develop oil, well the caribou needed help. And that’s what all these Gwichi’in communities did, they got together here so they can do the best they can to help the caribou. That first Gwich’in Gathering, that’s how it started… because if they drill up there in their calving grounds, there is going to be a disaster.”

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On the way to the Gwich’in Gathering.

In 2015, I did a month-long ski expedition with a good friend in late winter to photograph the caribou on their way to their calving grounds.

The trip started out in Old Crow, a small fly-in Gwichi’n community above the Arctic Circle in Northern Canada. In Old Crow, we heard from the people how the caribou hadn’t come in the fall or during the winter and it was really hard on the people.

During the ski trip, thousands of caribou were travelling North, far above Old Crow and into our path. One day the bull caribou suddenly separated from the cows, and those bulls went hundreds of kilometres out of their way and straight down to Old Crow. The people were happy, and they got lots of caribou. It was like the caribou bulls gave themselves to the Gwich’in.

After they passed by Old Crow, the bulls looped back North and headed straight to the calving grounds. On a map, it looks like a 100-kilometre horseshoe detour to visit Old Crow.

In November 2017, the U.S. government opened the calving and nursing grounds of the Porcupine Caribou herd to Oil and Gas Development. The Gwich’in call this place Izhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit, meaning the Sacred Place Where Life Begins.

The story is from Peter Mather’s upcoming book Caribou People.

Youth from across Yukon and Alaska gather around a fire after advocating for the protection of the calving grounds during the Gwich’in Gathering in Arctic Village in 2016.

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ᐃᓄᐃᑦ ᐅᖃᐅᓯᖏᓐᓂᒃ ᑕᐃᒎᓯᓕᐅᖅᑏᑦ Inuit Uqausinginnik Taiguusiliuqtiit Inuit Language Authority Office de la langue inuite ᐃᓕᓴᕆᔭᐅᓯᒪᔪᑦ ᐅᖃᐅᓰᑦ ᐱᖁᔭᑦ ᓇᓗᓇᐃᖅᓯᑦᑎᐊᖅᖢᓂ ᐃᒫᒃ ᑕᒪᓐᓇ ᖃᐅᔨᒪᓇᖅᑎᓪᓗᒍ ᐃᓄᖏᑦ ᓄᓇᕗᑦ ᐱᔪᓐᓇᐅᑎᖃᕐᒪᑕ ᐊᑐᕈᓐᓇᕐᓂᕐᒥᒃ ᐃᓄᐃᑦ ᐅᖃᐅᓯᖓᓂᒃ • ᑲᑎᖅᓱᐃᔩᑦ ᐊᒻᒪᓗ ᓴᖅᑭᑎᑦᑎᓲᑦ ᑐᑭᓯᐅᒪᖃᑎᒌᒍᑕᐅᓂᐊᖅᑐᓂᒃ ᐅᖃᐅᓯᕐᓂᒃ, ᐊᑐᖅᑕᐅᓂᖏᓐᓂᒃ ᐊᒻᒪ ᑎᑎᕋᐅᓯᖏᓐᓂᒃ; • ᐋᖅᑭᒃᓱᐃᓲᑦ ᐅᖃᐅᓯᕐᒥᒃ ᐊᑐᕈᓐᓇᑦᑎᐊᕐᓂᕐᒧᑦ ᖃᐅᔨᓴᕈᑎᓂᒃ ᐊᒻᒪ ᖃᐅᔨᓴᕐᓂᕐᒥᒃ; • ᐃᑲᔪᓲᑦ ᓇᒻᒥᓂᖃᖅᑐᓂᒃ ᐊᓯᖏᓐᓂᓪᓗ ᑕᒻᒪᖅᓯᒪᙱᑦᑐᓂᒃ ᑎᑎᕋᖅᓯᒪᔭᕆᐊᓕᖕᓂᒃ; • ᑲᒪᒋᔭᖃᓲᑦ ᐊᒻᒪ ᑐᑭᒧᐊᒃᑎᑦᑎᔨᐅᓲᑦ ᖃᐅᔨᓴᕐᓂᐅᔪᓂᒃ ᐃᓄᒃᑐᑦ ᐅᖃᐅᓯᖏᓐᓂᒃ; • ᑎᑎᖅᑲᒃᑯᑦ ᐊᓯᐅᔾᔭᐃᖅᓯᓲᑦ ᐃᓄᐃᑦ ᐅᖃᐅᓯᑐᖃᖏᓐᓂᒃ ᐊᒻᒪ ᓄᓇᓖᑦ ᐅᖃᐅᓯᖏᓐᓂᒃ; • ᑐᒃᓯᕋᕐᕕᐅᓲᑦ/ᑲᑐᔾᔨᖃᑎᖃᓲᑦ ᑎᒥᖁᑎᒋᔭᐅᔪᓂᒃ ᓄᓇᕗᒻᒥ ᓯᓚᑖᓂᓗ ᐃᓄᐃᑦ ᐅᖃᐅᓯᖏᑕ ᒥᒃᓵᓄᑦ

Ilitariyauhimayut Uqauhiinni Maligaq Nunavut Kavamatkunnit nalunairutauyuq Inuit Nunavunmiut pilaarutiqaqtut aturiamikku uqauhiqtik Inuinnaqtun • Havaktut ilitturipkaiyullu nalaumayunik taidjutinik, atuqpauhiinik, titirauhiiniinullu; • Havaktut uqauhiit ayunnginnikhaagut, uuktuutikhaagullu; • Ikayuqhugit nanmiuyut havagviit aallallu ihuaqtunik atuqpauhikhaagut; • Havaariliqhugu tiliuqhugit ihivriuqhiyut uqauhikkut; • Titraqhugit ilitturipkatigiblugit taimani atuqtauvakut tainiit aallatqillu uqauhiit inuktut; • Tuhaqtittivaktut/ havaqatigivagait katimayiuyut Nunavunmi ahinilu Inuit uqauhiannut.

Official language Act within the Government of Nunavut affirming that the Inuit of Nunavut have an inherent right to the use of the Inuit Language • Develops and promotes standard terminology, usage & orthography; • Develops language competency levels & testing; • Assists businesses and others with correct usage; • Undertakes or supervises research about the Inuit Language; • Documents and promotes traditional terminology and dialects; • Shares & collaborates with organizations in Nunavut and abroad on Inuit Language Issues.

Loi sur les langues officielles du gouvernement du Nunavut affirmant le droit inhérent des Inuit à l’utilisation de le langue inuite • Élabore la terminologie, les usages et les expressions normalisés, et en assure la promotion; • Élabore les niveaux de compétences et les tests permettant de mesurer ces niveaux; • Aide les entreprises et d’autres organismes à offrir des services de qualité en langue inuite; • Entreprend ou supervise des recherches au sujet de la langue inuite; • Consigne et fait la promotion des expressions et des dialectes traditionnels; • Partage et collabore avec des organismes au Nunavut et ailleurs vis-à-vis les enjeux ayant trait à la langue inuite. ᐃᑲᔪᖅᑕᐅᔪᒪᒍᕕᑦ ᐱᓕᕆᕝᕕᒋᔭᐃᑦ ᐃᓄᒃᑐᑦ ᐊᑎᖅᑖᖁᒍᖕᓂ ᐅᕙᑦᑎᓐᓄᑦ ᐅᖃᕈᓐᓇᖅᑐᑎᑦ Ikayuqtiqariaqaqqata nanminiit havagviit atiliuriarni Inuinnaqtun uqarvigittaaqtaptigut If you need help with creating your business name in Inuktitut contact us Si vous avez besoin de l’aide pour traduire le nom de votre entreprise en inuktitut, veuillez prendre contact avec nous

www.taiguusiliuqtiit.ca ᑐᕌᕈᑖ ᐸᕐᓇᐃᕕᒃ ᑎᑎᖅᑲᒃᑯᕕᒃ 1000, ᑐᕌᕈᑎᖓ 810, ᐃᖃᓗᐃᑦ, ᓄᓇᕗᑦ X0A 0H0 Parnaivik Bldg 2nd floor P.O. Box 1000 Station 810, Iqaluit, NU X0A 0H0 (: 1 855 232 1852 | 867 975 5539

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IUT@gov.nu.ca

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ADVENTURE

To the “top of the world” with Google Street View

Parks Canada

Canada’s national parks are gateways to nature, adventure and discovery and Quttinirpaaq is no exception.

Quttinirpaaq National Park is the northernmost destination in Parks Canada’s network of protected spaces. It lies roughly 800 kilometres from the North Pole, on Northern Ellesmere Island. Thanks to Google Street View, Parks Canada can now guide you through parts of this third-largest national park in the country.

In the summer of 2016, a few team members threw on the Google Trekker and walked over some of the Park’s incredible terrain.

Wilderness and extreme isolation are the best ways to describe this area, where fewer than 50 people set foot each year. The Park’s name itself translates to “the top of the world” in Inuktitut.

With treks along the ocean shoreline, climbs up to lofty ridges, strolls beside glacial meltwater rivers, and scrambles at the foot of monumental glaciers, the resulting imagery is truly spectacular — a digital reflection of one of the world’s most remote locations.

After reaching out to the nearby hamlets about the opportunity to be captured on

Google Street View, the team took a short trip to Grise Fiord, Canada’s northernmost community. Resolute Bay, the gateway to most High Arctic adventures, was also brought to Street View with the help of ATVs. Internet access and bandwidth can be challenging given the remoteness of these locations. The local communities graciously

A Parks Canada team member at the foot of Air Force Glacier, capturing Google Street View content with the Google Trekker. © Parks Canada/Ryan Bray

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hosted the team at an event to watch the Street View imagery of their homes and the Park in an offline, highlight reel presentation.

The team shared behind-the-scenes stories of what it was like to capture the imagery and the amount of effort required to capture images of these communities and make them available online.

On October 12, 2017, all the content that was produced to support the launch — YouTube video of the capture, digital animations, stunning photography, blog posts, and a “best of Street View” gallery — was released to the world through the media. The response has been undeniably positive.

Parks Canada arranges scheduled charter flights from Resolute Bay during the summer taking visitors to Tanquary Fiord. Single seats are available on the charter flight for experienced and independent travellers. Parks Canada has also partnered with Black Feather, The Wilderness Adventure Company, to offer a two-week, guided backcountry experience in the Park. Black Feather offers two different

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trips while in Quttinirpaaq — the Ad Astra Trek and Ellesmere Basecamp and Photography.

Limited seats are available for these iconic experiences.

For two weeks in the summer you could also be the camp cook. If you’re interested in volunteering with Quttinirpaaq National Park, Parks Canada offers an exciting opportunity to

be a Chef at the Top of World! Charter flight costs are covered from Resolute to the Park and there is, of course, free time to explore the area while you are there. Each spring, Parks Canada accepts applications for this chance of a lifetime. We hope you enjoy your visit to the top of the world in Quttinirpaaq National Park.

Left: Two Parks Canada team members take a break in the MacDonald River Valley with the Google Trekker. © Parks Canada/Lamare Robinson Below: Walking the streets of Grise Fiord, a Parks Canada team member captures the hamlet with the Google Trekker. © Parks Canada/Ryan Bray

For more information, follow us at:

Street View Gallery: https://www.google.com/streetview/#quttinirpaaq-national-park-nunavut-canada Blog: https://www.blog.google/products/maps/street-view-goes-top-world/ Parks Canada: http://pc.gc.ca/en/pn-np/nu/quttinirpaaq

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCX-JpIIvrQ&t=2s, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NwWEv5eVKQ

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ParksCanadaNunavut/

Twitter: @ParksCanNunavut, @googlecanada

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2018 | 01

The Journey Forward, A Novella on Reconciliation:

E D U C AT I O N - E X C E R P T S

When We Play Our Drums, They Sing!

“Y

Richard Van Camp Cover photograph by Tessa Macintosh McKellar & Martin Publishing Group, Ltd. February 2018

ou’d think that in all those years when my mom and dad and all of their brothers and sisters were in residential schools, you’d think their parents would come and get them. How could you let go of your kids?”

“We trusted,” he said. “We were told education was going to make their lives easier.”

“Did you have kids?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “but I knew a lot of people who did.”

“So why didn’t you do anything? Why didn’t you try and rescue them?”

“I left,” Snowbird said. “I was a young man then and I went to Ts’oòkweè — Dreaming Mountain — to learn. I left for a year. When I came back, the villages and camps were quiet. Too quiet. I thought that the world had ended while I was away.”

I looked at him. He was thinking of something. Or remembering.

“What?”

He leaned forward and looked my way, “There were no kids.”

I turned cold with the way he said it.

“There were no nieces and no nephews. No sons. No daughters. No dads being dads. No moms being moms. Grandparents didn’t know what to do with themselves.

Nobody did. But I remember the crying. The nights were filled with it. And then the days. Enemies sat crying together. All of the children were gone.”

I closed my eyes. I almost heard it: a deep sorrow that sliced the earth in half.

“The world was crying with us. Even the dogs. Oh, we all cried together. I remember that. The birds, well… it rained for months. The coldest winters. That’s when the drinking started. That’s when we became half a people. I promise you we all tried in our own ways to save our families, our future. But it was the law: you could not see your children until they came home for the summer.”

I felt my blood boil, “Why aren’t they teaching this in my school and every school in the world? I didn’t even know this.”

He nodded, “Bring me to your school. I’ll tell them.”

“You will?” I thought about Friday. I would go home, get tobacco with my mom and ask her to come back with me to thank Snowbird for Dad’s drum and also ask him to present with me and, hopefully, my mom on Friday.

He nodded again, “Promise. It’s time we talk and it’s time to heal.”

© Tessa Macintosh

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Richard Van Camp is a proud member of the Tłı̨chǫ Dene from Fort Smith, Northwest Territories.

He is the author of two children’s picture books with the Cree artist George Littlechild: A Man Called Raven and What’s the Most Beautiful © Mark Mushet Thing You Know About Horses?

Richard is also the author of four board books for babies and young children: Welcome Song for Baby: A Lullaby for Newborns; Nighty Night: A Bedtime Song for Babies, Little You (now translated into Cree, Dene and South Slavey), and We Sang You Home.

Richard’s collections of short fiction include Angel Wing Splash Pattern, The Moon of Letting Go and Other Stories, Godless But Loyal to Heaven, and Night Moves.

His award-winning novel The Lesser Blessed is a feature film with First Generation Films, and his latest novel, Whistle, is about mental health and asking for forgiveness.

Richard’s first graphic novel, Three Feathers, with artist Krystal Mateus, explores restorative justice while his second, The Blue Raven, with artist Steve Sanderson, deals with mental health. His Eisner-Award-Nominated graphic novel with artist Scott Henderson, A Blanket of Butterflies, is about peacemaking and its hero is a grandmother. His most-recent graphic novel, Spirit, with artist Emily Brown, is about suicide prevention.

Richard has two comic books published by the Healthy Aboriginal Network: Kiss Me Deadly, with artist Chris Auchter, and Path of the Warrior, with artist Steve Sanderson.

You can visit Richard on Facebook, Twitter, or on his website: www.richardvancamp.com.

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E D U C AT I O N - E X C E R P T S

The Journey Forward, A Novella on Reconciliation:

Lucy & Lola

Monique Gray Smith Illustrations by Julie Flett McKellar & Martin Publishing Group, Ltd. February 2018

A

s they walked into City Hall, Lucy whispered to Lola, “Are you nervous? Like

me?”

Lola nodded, “My heart is racing.”

“Me, too. If we feel like this, I can only imagine how Mom and Kohkum feel.”

The girls paused and waited for Kohkum and their mom to catch up to them. They

entered as three generations. Each impacted in their own way by the legacy of Indian Residential Schools.

Lucy, Lola, Kohkum, and the girls’ mom, Mary, each took their time looking at the

panels that made up The Witness Blanket. Some panels were divided into sections

and had pieces from schools. One had a door handle, one a light fixture, and many had photographs of children.

The girls continued on while their mom and Kohkum stopped in front of a piece

of the blanket. Mom reached up and ran her hand over a photograph. It was a picture of three girls. Each looked to be about eleven-years-old. The two women stood staring at the photo.

In a whisper, Mom said, “That’s about how old I was my last year in school. I was

just a little girl. There. Was. So. Much. Hurt.”

Kohkum put her arm around her daughter and kissed her temple. Mary turned in

for a hug. After a few moments, Mary stepped back, wiped the tears from her cheeks, took a deep breath, and looked at Kohkum, “Thank you for loving me.”

“Oh, my girl,” Kohkum took her daughter’s face in her hands, “loving you and my

grandbabies, well you are the best part of my life.” She hugged her daughter again.

This time when they pulled apart, it was Mary who said, “We’d better find the

girls.”

Kohkum scanned the room. “They’re over there,” she motioned with her head.

© Centric Photography

Monique Gray Smith is a mixed-heritage woman of Cree, Lakota, and Scottish descent and is the proud mom of twins.

She is an award-winning author, international speaker, and sought-after consultant.

Monique’s first published novel, Tilly: A Story of Hope and Resilience, won the 2014 Burt Award for First Nation, Métis, and Inuit Literature. Her other titles include My Heart Fills with Happiness, winner of the 2017 Christie Harris BC Book Award for Children’s Literature, Speaking our Truth: A Journey of Reconciliation, and You Hold Me Up. Monique is well known for her storytelling, spirit of generosity, and focus on resilience.

The Journey Forward, A Novella on Reconciliation: Lucy & Lola is Monique’s first title with McKellar & Martin Publishing Group.

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As they approached the girls, their mom noticed the girls were holding hands.

She looked to see what they were staring at on the blanket. It was a small square —

about a foot-by-foot — that displayed two sets of children’s moccasins. Girls’ moccasins.

Mom stepped forward and placed an arm around the shoulders of each girl. Her

girls.

After a while, Lucy pointed to the moccasins located in the upper-right of the

panel, “Those moccasins are like the ones I had a couple years ago.” She looked up at her mom,

“Does that mean I could have gone to Residential School?”

“No, my girl.” Mom leaned down and kissed Lucy’s forehead. “The last school

closed in 1996.”

Lola did the math in her head, “But that’s only seven years before we were born.”

Mom’s response was a whisper, “I know, Lola. I know.” 

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E D U C AT I O N - E X C E R P T S

Later, as she watched Kohkum, Lucy, and Lola drive away and head back to Gabriola, Mary reflected on how being with her girls and her mom was just what she needed.

Their love was the medicine that fuelled her, and The Witness Blanket was exactly what Mary needed to push through the last couple weeks of studying and preparing to write her bar exam.

Lucy, Lola, and Kohkum drove the entire first hour of the trip back to Gabriola in silence. Lola began to speak after they’d stopped in Duncan for a snack. Now they were back on the road.

“Why didn’t anyone do anything about those schools? Somebody had to have known what was happening there. Somebody must’ve tried to do something.” Lola couldn’t imagine people knew what was happening to the children and did nothing.

“Yes, there were people who attempted to raise awareness of what was happening and make change. But remember, these schools were a result of government policy.”

Kohkum went on to tell the girls about Doctor Peter Bryce, and how in the early 1900s he was hired by Indian Affairs in Ottawa to visit schools and report on the health conditions. She shared that Dr. Bryce wasn’t prepared for what he found, and when he provided his report back to government, it was never made public.

Illustration by Julie Flett

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Kohkum added, “That was 1907. Doctor Bryce continued to do what he could to raise awareness, but as you girls know, the schools continued for almost 90 more years.”

Lola wanted to know more. She wanted to understand how, in a country like Canada, something like Residential schools could go on for over 150 years. She was mad, and she wanted answers.

“I’m going to go to the library tomorrow to learn more about Residential Schools and Dr. Bryce,” Lola said. She turned to her sister, “Want to come with me?”

“Of course.”

“I have some books at home, too. If you girls want, we can read them together.” Kohkum shared.

The girls nodded.

Change was happening.

Reconciliation was happening.

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An Apology for Reconciliation

INUIT FORUM

© Letia Obed

On November 24, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized to former indigenous residential school students in Newfoundland and Labrador, including Nunatsiavut Inuit.

Recognizing and resolving outstanding human rights abuses is a necessary part of the renewed Inuit to Crown relationship and is instrumental for healing and reconciliation. I am thankful for the leadership shown by the Prime Minister to settle and apologize to litigation claimants.

It is the courageous proponents of the class action lawsuit that deserve full credit for the settlement and apology. Former students, like Jim Tuttauk, Toby Obed, Fred Andersen, Cindy Lyall, and all others who bared their souls by sharing unspeakable personal stories of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, made this case a national issue. I’m also appreciative of the supportive role Inuit regions and Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK) played over the years in demanding restitution for Nunatsiavut. Inuit unity is built upon examples like this issue — Inuit regions defending each other, Inuit regions fighting together for equality for all Inuit.

Sitting in an auditorium in Happy ValleyGoose Bay with many former residential school students, feeling the raw emotion of the moment, I thought back to 2005, when developments in the Indian residential schools class action process excluded Nunatsiavut students due to technicalities regarding federal government culpability for the schools. Through ITK’s board of directors’ processes, Nunatsiavut respectfully supported Nunavik, Nunavut, and Inuvialuit former residential school students by not fighting against a settlement. In light of the Nunatsiavut exclusion, all other Inuit regions directed ITK to lobby the federal government to settle with Nunatsiavut students. Advocating for the settlement of this lawsuit was included in my first meetings with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, and Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett. I felt empowered knowing that all Inuit Nunangat regions supported my pleas for my home region.

During the Prime Minister’s apology in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, my mind was filled with thoughts of the past and its effects on who I am and how

Enoch Obed (second from left, back row), Natan Obed’s late father, in his grade four class at residential school in St. Anthony, Labrador. © ITK

I see the world. I recalled listening to hearings during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process, and how the stories, pain, and cries of anguish made me better understand why Inuit Nunangat needs so much healing. I remembered helping Inuit from Nunavut mobilize to attend TRC national gatherings, gaining perspective on how difficult it can be for former students leading up to and in their moments of reflection, and how incredibly resilient former students are for sharing their stories and continuously fighting for stability and peace. I will always interact with former residential school students with love and understanding, no matter what the circumstances.

I also thought of my own family. My late father, torn away from his homeland through relocation at seven years old, torn away from his family, culture and language at nine, growing up in an orphanage in St. Anthony, Newfoundland.

My late uncle Nicky, younger than my father and subjected to an entire childhood of residential schools in St. Anthony and then Northwest River. And my cousin Toby, whose story is now known across Canada — a personal history of abuse no Canadian would ever believe could happen to a Canadian child. And then my mother, a young and naïve American teacher at the time, unaware of the rampant abuse, who taught in St. Anthony and Northwest River. A person many former students have told me was the only person who showed them love and respect

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Residential School Survivor Toby Obed have a private moment before the Apology in Happy-Valley Goose Bay. © Adam Scotti, PMO

during their residential school years. It is so complicated and so tragic.

The past is filled with moments our personal stories hinge upon. My mother shared the following passage with me describing my father leaving St. Anthony for the last time, as she stood at the airstrip next to his younger brother Nicky. “Nicky was standing as close to the plane as he could get. He was leaning into the wind of the accelerating propeller as the pilot revved the engine and the plane taxied away. He watched the plane as its skis lifted off the pond and headed North. He watched until it became a dark speck above the distant hills. He watched until after it had become sky.”

What we all would have done, each and every one of us, to put Nicky on that plane with his brother. To reunite them with their families.

To apologize to them in that moment, in 1966, and tell them we love them for who they are. I wish this not just for my father, uncle, and cousins, but to every student, every family, and all of us who are their children.

Natan Obed

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National Inuit Leader and President of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami

A B OV E & B E YO N D — C A N A DA’ S A RC T I C J O U R N A L

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