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Andrew Dialla was six or seven when his grandmother passed away. He grew to know her through stories of her deep love for the land — how she would spend hours out on walks, collecting “pretty things” in her pail.

“The main thing I always heard about her was her collecting stuff on the ground all the time,” Dialla recalls. 

Dressed in a beige camouflage jacket and carrying a magnifying glass, Dialla is squatting down to look at the rocks around him. He’s taking part in an introductory prospecting course led by the Nunavut government’s geology department. Along with 10 other people, Dialla has spent a week at the local Franco Centre and Sylvia Grinnell Territorial Park, at the edge of Iqaluit on southern Baffin Island, learning about a lot more than just rocks.

As an industry, mining is already the largest private-sector employer of Indigenous Peoples, both in Nunavut and across Canada. Many Inuit receive some compensation from the industry through the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, which defines Inuit-owned parcels of land — on which the three mines currently operating in the territory are located.

Yet few Nunavummiut prospect and explore themselves, and there are no Inuit-owned private exploration companies in Nunavut at this time.

Now in its 25th year, the Nunavut Prospectors Program aims to engage more Inuit in the business of mining. With the courses held in at least three communities, the hope is to train, certify and fund Nunavummiut to go out to explore, prospect and stake claims on their land safely, effectively and as ethically as possible. 

On the cool day in August, in Sylvia Grinnell park at the shore of Frobisher Bay, Dialla is brushing up on some well-practiced skills in prospecting.

Just last summer, he went out with his nephew around their hometown of Pangnirtung to double check areas he had visited in the past for gold or diamonds. 

“I spent a few days climbing mountains and basically suffering because the land where I was is like walking on a mattress,” Dialla says.

“You really have to be passionate if you want to do this, because it’s hard work. It’s not just walking around and touring around. You can bend over a lot and you grab a lot of things. And you’re out on the land so you have to be careful,” he says. “It’s always better to call a partner. When I’m looking through the magnifier, my partner can be looking around for polar bears.” 

A licenced prospector since the ’90s, Dialla took the course to refresh his memory — and it also revived those of his grandmother. A lot has changed in the years since. 

In general, the mining industry has seen massive growth across the North and is considered to be the largest private sector contributor to each territory’s economy, according to a 2024 report by the Mining Association of Canada. 

In 2022, mining contributed 41 per cent to Nunavut’s gross domestic product. And yet, according to Maryam Abdullahi, a geologist and currently the senior petroleum advisor for the territorial geology department, Nunavut is considered by industry and government to be one of the most underexplored places in Canada, for mining purposes. She is teaching the prospecting course in Iqaluit this year and says, shorter field seasons, the lack of road access and sheer expense influence both the interest in mining in the territory and the market’s appetite for it.

“Here, even in summer, you’re at the mercy of the weather. You have two months to work and you have to fly everything in, which is why in terms of competitiveness and the amount of companies that will come in, it is difficult,” Abdullahi says. 

“Any company that comes in will be a company that has a lot of money, will be a company that has a lot of investors that have very high confidence in Nunavut, and will be a company that probably has a strategic reason to be here.” 

“In terms of how much potential Nunavut has, I can’t quantify that because to be able to quantify potential you need to have a lot of exploration done,” Abdullahi says.

The fact that Nunavut is heavily under-explored affects how much we understand about it, she says. Whoever can gather that information also has the power to use it. And that presents an opportunity for Inuit to have more control.

It may be yet-unquantified, but “we have a lot of potential,” she says.

Nunavut is already known for gold exploration and a vibrant base-metal inventory that includes lead, zinc, copper, silver, critical minerals and rare earth elements, Abdullahi says. Some of these are necessary components in key technologies for the shift to clean energy, including batteries.

“Nunavut has 22 of the 31 critical minerals that have been listed by the Government of Canada and the United States as the minerals there are significant in order for the energy transition and decarbonization to happen,” Abdullahi says. 

The introductory prospecting course aims to equip participants with a base knowledge of the geology of Nunavut, as well as the necessary steps to take once an exploration site has been discovered or established. 

Over the course of the week-long program, this means recognizing igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks and knowing how to differentiate them based on how they look, smell and feel. 

As well, participants learn how to use field equipment such as a compass, a GPS and local maps to identify and confirm locations. The program also includes instruction on the groundwork and paperwork required to stake a claim through an online portal.

In the past five years alone, 103 Nunavummiut — both Inuit and non-Inuit — across 15 communities have received their prospecting certificate. 

Since 2019, 16 people have also applied for $8,000 grants from the Government of Nunavut to secure prospecting claims. 

The program helps Inuit help industry by engaging in exploration in their backyard, Abdullahi says. 

And yet, long-term exploration is expensive and time consuming, which means it is easier carried out by a company than it is by an individual. 

“All it takes is one guy to find something good and get a mining company interested in it,” Dialla says. He keeps that in mind when he explores in his home community, where many Inuit continue to live off the land but don’t necessarily make a living from it. 

“The reason why I’m trying my efforts in the Pangnirtung area is because it’s my hometown and, talking to a bunch of people there, I really found that Pangnirtung needs something else other than fishing,” he says.

“If there could be a mine opened up nearby, or kind of nearby, that would create a lot of jobs.” 

It is also a way to apply age-old skills and knowledge of the land in newer ways. 

“[It’s about] looking at the land and not looking for animals on the land, and that takes a lot of getting used to,” Dialla says. 

“I realized a few times looking through the binoculars that I’m not supposed to be looking for caribou here, but I’m looking for caribou,” he says. At the same time, he adds, most hunters have a story about being out on the land and seeing a particularly interesting rock.

For William Rowsell, a first-timer in the prospecting course in Iqaluit, it’s a full-circle moment following a childhood of collecting rocks. 

Rowsell was raised in Kinngait, formerly called Cape Dorset and hailed as the “most artistic community in Canada” and the “capital of Inuit art.” Rowsell remembers going out on the land with his father to collect soapstone for others to carve. 

These days, Rowsell’s son comes along to collect rocks in Iqaluit, where they now live. It is one of the reasons Rowsell took the course, “to regain the knowledge” and have more to teach his son.  

“I honestly had forgotten about everything that I learned in geology in high school, and not only in high school but in life when my father was teaching me about rocks,” Rowsell says.

The course roused other memories from his childhood: of a giant patch of orange rock in Kinngait on which he and his friends would play. 

“Some Elders had expressed to us that we shouldn’t be playing there, in case lightning ever strikes it again. At the time we thought about how we don’t have lightning or thunder [in Kinngait],” he says. Then he learned about gossans, a type of highly oxidized rock that’s often the weathered top of an iron or other mineral deposit. He realized, “this looks very familiar to what I used to play on with my friends.” 

Scientifically speaking, metals do conduct lightning.

“Those Elders could have been spot on with their stories,” he says. “They knew it and they told stories in order to deter curious kids like we were away from spots they’re not supposed to be in.” 

Should that orange rock be unclaimed, Rowsell says he is unsure if he would stake it because claiming that land may not align with Inuit values and his community’s interests. “I love geology but it’s not like that passion to a point where I’m going to focus my entire life to mine something, especially when it’s also not in line with my culture,” Rowsell says.

“I understand that it would be great for the economy in Kinngait, considering it would create jobs and it would create that spark. But I also believe it would take away from the fact that Kinngait is still known for its art. Instead, it would be known for a giant mine right in the middle of town.” 

But putting mining operations in the hands of Inuit could help steer the project by those values. While such ownership doesn’t yet exist in Nunavut, over its border in the Northwest Territories, DEMCo Ltd. is a fully Dene-owned exploration and mining company. In the Yukon, Selkirk First Nation recently purchased the abandoned Minto mine, and may seek to reopen it. 

The recently signed Nunavut Devolution Agreement will come into effect in 2027, and will transfer responsibility for lands and resources from the federal government to the territory. In that context, both Abdullahi and Nunavut’s Minister of Economic Development and Transportation, as well as Mines, David Akeeagok say more Inuit need to have the necessary education and training to get involved in mining and make decisions for the industry moving forward. 

“If you know big mining companies, when they need those minerals, they’re going to start looking for them,” Akeeagok adds. In Nunavut, the proper training can allow Inuit to take the lead. 

“As Inuit, we’ve always advocated that you need to balance the stewardship of the environment and the extraction,” he says. “But when you’re not able to make decisions about the extraction process, then that balance is off.”

For Dialla, from Pangnirtung, his grandmother’s legacy is a part of what brings him out to the prospecting course.

Back when his family was still moving between camps with the seasons, one story goes that his grandmother was walking around one day and found rocks “that looked like broken glass and some of them were round,” Dialla recalls. She picked them up and put them in her pail. 

When Dialla’s grandmother tried to rinse them later, the transparent rocks nearly disappeared under the water. She told her husband or another family member about it. They took some of the rocks and scratched them against a mirror in the sod house. 

The mirror broke right away, shocking everyone there. 

“Grandma didn’t know anything about diamonds … she’d never heard of them,” Dialla says. “But listening to her description of the clear rocks that she collected, we always thought they had to have been diamonds.” 

The family believes their spring camping spot, so many years ago, was nearby the current Chidliak diamond exploration site, owned by De Beers.

The family has looked for those rocks in the years since. Dialla says his sisters even tried returning to the spring camp and the qammaq, or sod house, northeast of Iqaluit, where his grandmother had left them when the family migrated again for the summer. But after so much time passing and so many changes to the land, they have had no luck finding it. 

“Grandma’s diamonds were never found,” Dialla says. “They’re still there.”

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Few social networking platforms are known for inspiring positive social change these days, but an Inuit-developed app is helping Indigenous communities from Alaska to Greenland advance their self-determination. Named SIKU after the Inuktitut word for “sea ice,” the app allows communities in the North to pull together traditional knowledge and scientific data to track changes in the environment, keep tabs on local wild foods and make decisions about how to manage wildlife — all while controlling how the information is shared.

A group of Inuit Elders and hunters from Sanikiluaq, Nvt., came up with the idea for SIKU more than a decade ago to document and understand the changing sea ice they were witnessing in southeastern Hudson Bay. The group turned to the local nonprofit Arctic Eider Society to develop a web-based platform where hunters in nearby coastal communities could upload photos and videos and share knowledge. Contributors began using the portal in 2015 to log water temperature and salinity data, note observations of important wildlife species — such as beluga and common eider ducks — and track the flow of contaminants through the food web.

Over the years, SIKU has evolved, and recently, the Elders saw that the platform could help address a familiar challenge: sharing knowledge with younger people who often have their noses in their phones. In 2019, SIKU relaunched as a full-fledged social network — a platform where members can post photos and notes about wildlife sightings, hunts, sea ice conditions and more. The app operates in multiple languages, such as Inuktitut, Cree, Innu and Greenlandic, and includes maps with traditional place names. Since early 2024, over 25,000 people from at least 120 communities have made more than 75,000 posts on SIKU.

Members’ photos demonstrate the breadth and bounty of northern foods: they show plump bags of berries sitting on the tundra, clusters of sea urchins nestled on smooth gray stones and boxes of fresh Arctic char placed in the snow. They depict harp seals, ringed seals, ptarmigan, beluga, common eider and neat rows of colorful eggs laid out next to smiling kids. The posts tell stories of hunting and traveling, the impacts of climate change and industrial activity, and the migrations, diets and illnesses of local animals. In effect, SIKU captures everyday Indigenous life in a rapidly changing landscape.

Traditionally, Inuit communities shared this information orally. “We have lived in the environment for centuries. We know about the wildlife,” says Lucassie Arragutainaq, a manager at the Sanikiluaq Hunters and Trappers Association and cofounder of the Arctic Eider Society. Yet industry representatives and government scientists have a long history of dismissing Indigenous knowledge and making decisions based on sparse environmental data collected during irregular, short-term studies. Now armed with SIKU, northerners are documenting information “in a way that [other] people will understand,” Arragutainaq says.

The app is also equipped with useful tools for life on the ice, including weather reports, sea ice forecasts and other critical safety information. Hunters and harvesters can use their phones’ GPS to track their routes and geolocate each post and photo. “When I go out on the land with family, we go a long distance, and the SIKU app can show which area we are in. It’s precise,” says Karen Nanook, who lives in Taloyoak, Nvt.

In June 2023, for instance, Nanook was heading home across the frozen ocean after an ice fishing trip when a rift appeared to open in the ice beneath one of her sled’s runners. “I thought the sled was going to fall in,” she says. But clear ice was covering the crack, and the sled stayed upright. After her close call, Nanook snapped a photo, tagged it as a “dangerous ice observation,” and posted it to SIKU to warn others.

The data held in SIKU is robust and up to date, and communities are already using the app to inform important decisions. In 2021, for example, Elders in Sanikiluaq were worried the local reindeer population had thinned, so the Hunters and Trappers Association used SIKU to survey hunters and look at recent reported harvest rates. The analysis led the association to temporarily close the hunt to relieve pressure on the population and to reintroduce hunting slowly once the number of reindeer increased. This decision shows how Inuit can use the technology in combination with traditional wildlife management, says Arragutainaq. Today, the community is also using SIKU data to guide the development of the Qikiqtait Protected Area around the Belcher Islands, where Sanikiluaq is located.

SIKU has become the main tool for other research projects, too. “Having the people who are already the eyes and ears of the land use the platform to share that information will revolutionize the way we make decisions,” says Stephanie Varty, a wildlife management biologist at the Eeyou Marine Region Wildlife Board in the traditional territory of the Crees of Eeyou Istchee, in James Bay, Que.

Varty says trappers and land users from Eeyou Istchee’s five coastal communities — Waskaganish, Eastmain, Wemindji, Chisasibi and Whapmagoostui — will soon use SIKU to document climate change in their region. They’ll also log observations and hunting stories, which will help the communities assess the environmental impacts of future development projects, including a proposed deep-sea port that would allow mining companies to access lithium and other minerals in the region.

Northern Indigenous communities are showing southerners that Traditional Knowledge should be taken seriously. “When Inuit knowledge is mobilized into graphs and diagrams, that [information] can’t be ignored and written off as anecdotal stories,” says Joel Heath, the executive director and cofounder of the Arctic Eider Society.

The ingenuity of SIKU is how it weaves together all kinds of insights about life in the North and supports community-driven research. “It’s part science and part Inuit knowledge,” says Arragutainaq. “It can work both ways, instead of one dominating the other.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

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In the wilderness north of Great Slave Lake, in Canada’s Northwest Territories, mining companies are eyeing a potential treasure trove of critical minerals as demand for lithium, nickel, graphite and copper has risen sharply to meet the needs of the burgeoning electric vehicle and solar power industries.

The cost of mining in this and many other roadless parts of northern Canada used to be prohibitive. That changed last December, when the Canadian government announced its highly anticipated critical minerals strategy, which offers mining companies generous tax breaks, $3 billion in additional funding incentives, and a promise to fast-track the federal environmental impact review process.

While the strategy is being touted as a way of helping the world transition to a post-carbon economy, some environmentalists fear that it will result in drained wetlands, diverted streams and the disturbance of carbon-rich peatlands. Over the past three decades, the mining industry has walked away from these and many other environmental liabilities, leaving Canadian taxpayers with cleanup bills amounting to more than $10 billion.

Will benefits of mining outweigh costs to biodiversity and Indigenous people who live there?

“In this transition to renewables, two clear storylines have emerged,” says Teresa Kramarz, a professor and co-director of the Environmental Governance Lab at the University of Toronto and co-chair of the United Nations Development Programme’s Advisory Group on Energy Governance. The first, she says, is the political urgency to rapidly decarbonize, while the second is the enormous business opportunity presented by mining for critical minerals needed for a clean energy revolution.

The blending of these storylines concerns Kramarz, as well as many other scientists and environmentalists, because the overall benefits of mining might not outweigh its costs to biodiversity and to Indigenous people who live in mineral-rich regions.

Nor is there any guarantee that reserves of minerals like lithium are large and accessible enough for Canada to compete with reserves in South America and China, which are much larger and are subject to less environmental oversight.

“The critical minerals strategy is one important step and welcomed, given the need for Canada to strengthen supply chains to support the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources,” says Justina Ray, senior scientist and president of the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada. “But the strategy doesn’t fully appreciate the global [ecological] significance of mining regions such as the Hudson Bay Lowlands, the second largest peatlands in the world.” While peatlands account for only three per cent of the Earth’s land, they store approximately 30 per cent of the planet’s soil carbon. A quarter of the world’s peatlands are found in Canada. What’s needed, says Ray, “is a regional assessment led by federal, provincial and Indigenous leaders to determine whether the trade-offs are worth the cost to biodiversity.”

Most of the critical minerals reserves are located in remote regions of the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and northern Quebec, and in the Hudson Bay Lowlands of northern Manitoba, Ontario and western Quebec.

The mine that Fortune Minerals is exploring in the 3,700-square-mile mineral region north of Great Slave Lake lies within the migratory path of the Bathurst caribou herd, whose numbers have crashed from a high of nearly 470,000 in the 1980s to 6,240 today, due to a number of factors including mining disturbance, overhunting and climate change.

History of mining in northern Canada contains harsh lessons

In the so-called Ring of Fire region, in the 124,000-square-mile Hudson Bay and James Bay Lowlands, mining activity could accelerate the thawing of permafrost that stores nearly 35 gigatons of carbon and degrade the habitat of caribou and the nesting grounds of millions of birds. The Lowlands, according to Jeff Wells, vice-president of boreal conservation for the National Audubon Society, are “astonishingly important.” No other place on the planet has as many red knots, semipalmated sandpipers, dunlins and other nesting shorebird species. The Lowlands also are possibly the most important refuge for woodland caribou, which are now functionally extinct in the United States and disappearing quickly across Canada.

Politically, the critical minerals strategy is a win-win for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government. It speaks to the Conservative Party’s demand for more mining jobs and regional economic development while addressing the left-wing New Democratic Party’s demand for climate action.

If the past history of mining in northern Canada says anything about the future, there are plenty of reasons to be concerned, especially with the Ontario, Manitoba and Northwest Territories governments signalling their desire to speed up mining for critical minerals.

Just a few dozen miles from Fortune’s play in the Northwest Territories, the Colomac gold mine’s tailings ponds once overflowed with cyanide and ammonia, triggering a mining inspector to complain of burning eyes and a sore throat just minutes after arriving at the site. After low gold prices finally shut the mine in 1997, Colomac’s $1.5-million security deposit, posted to cover environmental liabilities, didn’t come close to covering the $135-million cleanup that was performed at taxpayer expense.

The final cost of the remediation at Colomac, whose initial phase included construction of a five-mile fence to keep caribou out of contaminated areas, is dwarfed by the resources that continue to be poured into two ongoing remediations.

The Faro zinc mine, which operated in the central Yukon between 1969 and 1998, was once the largest open-pit lead-zinc mine in the world. Today, it is one of the most complex abandoned-mine remediation projects in the country, if not the world. Its 77 million tons of tailings and 353 million tons of waste rock contain high levels of heavy metals, which authorities fear could potentially leach into the mountainous headwaters of many fish-bearing streams. The remediation, which began in the early 2000s, is expected to take between 10 and 15 years at an estimated cost of $500 million or more.

The remediation of the Giant gold mine, on the shores of Great Slave Lake in Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, will cost an estimated $4.38 billion and won’t be completed until 2038. Even then, storing the gold mine’s 261,000 tons of highly toxic, virtually indestructible arsenic trioxide — in frozen underground mine chambers — is anticipated to require perpetual maintenance because groundwater that flows into the mine and rapidly thawing permafrost are undermining its stability. The mine may have to be refrigerated permanently, according to engineers working on remediation options. Since 2016, all 20,000 Yellowknife residents have been warned by the government to avoid drinking water, swimming, fishing and harvesting plants and berries in and around several lakes due to their high arsenic levels.

Since 2002, when the Auditor General of Canada issued a scathing report on 30 abandoned mines in the north, federal, territorial and provincial governments have become more diligent in reviewing mining plans and demanding security deposits to cover the cost of cleanups. But the liabilities continue.

Plans for battery plants in Ontario bolster Canada’s critical minerals strategy

This past May, for example, the Yukon government took over the Minto copper and gold mine on Selkirk First Nation territory after mining inspectors repeatedly warned of the potential for contaminated water to flow into the salmon-bearing Yukon River system. The action was taken less than a year after the owners of the Wolverine Mine, which contains reserves of gold, silver, zinc and copper in the southeast corner of the territory, reneged on paying $19 million in security costs. By then, the Yukon government had already poured millions of dollars into environmental mitigation efforts after an underground portion of the mine flooded in 2017.

Tom Hoefer, executive director of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut Chamber of Mines, says that abandoned mines in the Canadian North “should be a thing of the past” thanks to legislative changes that have addressed the issue of security deposits and created oversight boards that oversee land-use planning, wildlife management, environmental assessment and review, and land and water regulations.

“The driver, of course, was that Indigenous groups also didn’t want to see repeats of environmental messes on their traditional lands,” he said, noting that the law requires that half of the review board members in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut come from an Indigenous community.

Canada’s critical minerals strategy has already attracted a lot of interest and is bound to attract more now that several battery plants, including one proposed by Volkswagen, are in the planning stages in Ontario. The Volkswagen plant will receive a package of subsidies amounting to as much as $10 billion over the next decade.

In addition to fast-tracking the regulatory review process, the federal strategy will give mining companies a generous tax credit, equal to 30 per cent of the capital costs associated with establishing a mine. Priority will be given to mines that produce lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, copper and other critical metals. To entice companies to invest and explore, the government has earmarked $60 million for geoscience and exploration aimed at discovering potential new deposits.

The Canadian government has funded this kind of geo-mapping before, in the hopes of encouraging oil and gas companies to develop energy and mineral reserves in the northern regions of the country. Between 2008 and 2017, more than $75 million was spent helping private companies find new sources of fossil fuels and minerals, but not a barrel of oil or a gigajoule of gas found its way to market. What northerners got instead was tens of thousands of miles of seismic lines — narrow corridors cleared of vegetation — running through formerly frozen peatland that are now releasing untold volumes of greenhouse gases as they thaw.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford pledges to mine in the Ring of Fire, even if he has to “hop on a bulldozer myself”

Provincial leaders tend to be supportive of the new mining projects. Ontario Premier Doug Ford said, “If I have to hop on a bulldozer myself, we’re going to start building roads in the Ring of Fire.” Based on the increased value of critical minerals already established to be in the ground, George Pirie, Ontario’s minister of mines, estimates the mining value of this area at a trillion dollars.

But according to Jamie Kneen, the national program co-lead of Mining Watch Canada, there is little data to back up such claims. He fears that Canada will be left with a lot of holes in the ground and many more environmental liabilities if technological developments come into play and make the critical minerals strategy obsolete.

Charles Kazaz, a Montreal-based lawyer for a firm that advises clients in the mining sector, concedes that demand could drop, but he considers the critical minerals strategy unique for addressing both economic development and climate-change targets. “Canada needs to be aggressive and act fast in order to catch up with the rest of the world,” he says.

Without the strategy, he says, Canada might miss an opportunity because of foreign investment restrictions that prevent countries like China from partnering in critical-mineral development in Canada, and by the constitutional requirement that the government and industry consult with and accommodate Indigenous communities before mines or access roads can proceed.

Indigenous communities are divided over whether to support development of resources within their territories. The recent federal decision to greenlight Nemaska Lithium’s project in northern Quebec is a case in point. The Nemaska Cree band council embraced the mine on the basis that it would provide the community with jobs and royalties. But some Cree, including Thomas Jolly, a former Nemaska chief, don’t think it is worth the risk of contaminating the Rupert River watershed. Neither does Jolly accept the argument that the Cree should agree to the mine to help the world deal with climate change.

“Who is responsible for the climate crisis?” he asked. “Is it up to us to pay and suffer for what they [southerners] have done?”

The Cree communities that live in and around the Ring of Fire, where several mines are already in operation and where at least 15 other companies have more than 26,000 mining claims, are working with conservation groups like the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, the Wildlands League and MiningWatch Canada to make sure that no environmental shortcuts are taken, as federal Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson has promised.

Kramarz, at the University of Toronto, remains skeptical. Like other scientists, she isn’t downplaying the need to aggressively deal with climate change. But she believes that enthusiasm for exploiting critical minerals to speed a transition to carbon neutrality ignores significant costs.

“If that’s the narrative,” she says, referring to industry exuberance, “then it would be good to not forget that there are environmental concerns that need to be thoroughly understood and mitigated.”

Updated on Oct. 10, 2023, at 1:32 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct the cost of cleaning up the Colomac mine in the Northwest Territories from $53 million to $135 million. The starting operational date of the Faro mine has also been revised from 1968 to 1969.

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This article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com

Perched like a figurehead on the bow of the boat, the girl hoists the harpoon. She scans the waves for a streak of white, a plume of red, guiding her to her target below. Around her, a chorus of outboard motors screams into the brisk breeze. Flocks of gulls keep raucous watch from above, while polar bears patrol silently on distant shoals. All are after the same quarry — a pod of beluga whales swimming along the coast of Hudson Bay in Nunavut, part of the Inuit homeland in northernmost Canada.

“There, over there,” come excited yells, arms waving toward a circle of roiling water about 20 metres ahead. A young beluga, wounded by gunshot, is thrashing. A fin stabs the surface. Then a patch of belly flashes toward the sky. Now it’s up to Rolanda Uquuyuq Tiktaq, a young Inuk out on her first hunt, to plant the harpoon and claim her first kill.

Tall and slender, the middle schooler from Arviat — a 2,900-some, predominantly Inuit hamlet on Hudson Bay’s west shore—may not fit your classic hunter stereotype. She rocks a diva headwrap, glam rhinestone sunglasses, and a stylish maroon parka. Her favorite subject in school is math. She wants to be a cosmetologist when she grows up. But she also wants to learn the life skills of her ancestors and gain the environmental wisdom passed from generation to generation of Inuit hunters.

As Rolanda, a native Inuktitut speaker, puts it in her shy English: “I want to learn about the land.”

It’s a chilly, gray evening on this vast inland sea some 600 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle in August 2021. We’re here with the Ujjiqsuiniq Young Hunters, an Arviat program schooling youngsters in Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, or IQ — the systematic “way of knowing” that has guided life here for millennia. Aimed at propagating the culture’s deep roots in the landscape, passing along time-honored practices in monitoring — ujjiqsuiniq is a process of keen observation — and sustaining their ancestral hunting grounds, the program is preparing today’s youth to become the Inuit land stewards of the future.

“Being respectful of the environment … living with the land in mind … these traditional principles and how strongly they were followed are things we try to pass on to youth today,” says Shirley Tagalik, board chair of the nonprofit community wellness group Aqqiumavvik Society, the parent organization of the Young Hunters program. The nomadic peoples who inhabited this coastal tundra for some 5,000 years relied on the land and sea for all their resources. “So, of course they had to be not just respectful,” Tagalik says, “but they had to be good stewards, good conservers of those resources.”

The Young Hunters are part of a growing global recognition of Indigenous environmental knowledge and stewardship. The project is supported by the Canadian government’s Indigenous Guardians Pilot Program, a recent initiative promoting Indigenous leadership in preserving their ancestral lands and resources.

For Inuit, that’s the traditional responsibility of hunters. Life here depended on hunters knowing the ways of animals such as caribou, whales, and seals. Elders taught new hunters how to safeguard the ecosystem and harvest sustainably so the animals would be there for the next generation. Even after the Canadian relocation programs of the mid-1900s forced Inuit to leave their seasonal camps and settle permanently in often-distant places, hunting remains central to their descendants’ identity and way of life. And “country food,” such as maktaaq — raw whale skin and blubber — is a nutritious staple in a place where other options are limited and expensive.

But the world around Hudson Bay Inuit is rapidly transforming. Straddling the Arctic Circle, the region is in one of the fastest-warming places on the planet. Hunters today face conditions their ancestors never could have imagined, including thinning sea ice, disrupted seasons, and disturbed animal behaviors. What’s more, due to a geological phenomenon known as glacial isostatic adjustment, the land here is rising as it rebounds from the crush of ice sheets that vanished thousands of years ago. Paradoxically, this means that while most of the world’s coasts in our warming climate face an encroaching ocean, the sea level here is actually plunging. Shoals and reefs, once deep underwater, are emerging as new, unmarked hazards for boaters on the shallowing bay. To maintain access to crucial community resources, the Young Hunters have followed the IQ principle of qanuqtururangniq — finding innovative and resourceful solutions—and are using pioneering technology to survey the bay’s largely uncharted floor. The nautical data will be shared with government hydrographers and made available to the public. Photographer Shanna Baker and I have come here to see how these young Indigenous scientists are deploying next-generation tools with past generations’ guidance to help make navigating this changing seascape safer for everyone.

When we arrive in Arviat, though, we find all other activities have been preempted by whales. The annual beluga migration from their summer breeding grounds near Churchill, Manitoba, north to their winter territory in Hudson Strait was at least two weeks overdue this year. Then, this morning, came the news. A pod of these small, torpedo-shaped cetaceans — around the length of a Mini Cooper, but packing a dense, nutritious layer of blubber — has finally been seen heading this way. Along with three boys and two girls from this summer’s group of Young Hunters, plus instructors, drivers, and helpers, we hop into a trio of motorboats and spend the day racing around Hudson Bay.

We’re not alone — it seems like all of Arviat is out chasing the pod. All day the CB radio on our boat growls with a mix of Inuktitut and English, reporting sightings that have so far fizzled out. But late in the afternoon, the radio chatter suddenly reaches a new, frantic pitch. Whales to the south, come the excited reports. This time for sure!

We take off, zigzagging full tilt through an obstacle course of nearly invisible obstacles. It’s a heart-pounding demonstration of the rising land below.

“There’s a bunch of low areas that weren’t here a couple years back,” Aupaa Irkok, a Young Hunters instructor, tells me, pointing toward a stretch of rocky fingers riffling the waterline off starboard. Irkok peers out from under a black cap pulled down to eyebrow level, emblazoned with a pair of the traditional sealskin boots known as kamiit. Those are just the visible hazards, I’m reminded. As the land pushes upward, a battery of moraines, scarps, and other features on the seabed beneath us is pushing ever closer to the surface.

“The world is moving itself, like redrawing,” Irkok observes in English inflected by the rolling cadence of Inuktitut, concluding with “Ii” (local dialect for “yes”). The kamiit bob as she nods.

It’s evening, but the northern sun is still high when we finally reach the whales. Several boats are already carving circles around the pod. Shots crack across the water. Smoke and the sulfur smell of gunpowder lace the evening air.

Speedboats and rifles have replaced kayaks and spears. But planting the traditional unaaq (harpoon) still marks an Inuit hunter’s first qinalugaq (beluga catch). That’s a major milestone in a young Inuk’s life. A bridge between future and past.

Rolanda is nervous as she waits for the chance to strike. She feels proud and excited and a bit shaky. The long, wooden shaft with a sharp metal tip is heavy and hard to handle as she points it left, then right, trained on the darting whale. With Irkok’s coaching, she watches for the creature to surface, take a breath. Then she will hurl the harpoon.

Stacked stone inuksuit stand sentinel over the tundra, where Joe Karetak patrols with a rifle as his wife and sister-in-law pick cloudberries on a blustery afternoon a few days later. Crouch-crawling along the marshy ground, gathering the small, salmon-colored fruit they call aqpiq for jams and pies, the women are in no position to watch out for polar bears.

Arviat, on the western Hudson Bay migration route known as Polar Bear Alley, is a favourite haunt for bears waiting for the winter sea ice to return. The bay here generally used to freeze solid enough for bears to hunt seals, their dietary mainstay, by November. These days, freeze-up often doesn’t come until December. That means these massive marine mammals are hungrier and on land for longer — to the detriment of both ursine and human populations. It’s one of the ways the disturbed climate is upsetting the precarious balance of life in these northern lands. Says Karetak, a burly hunter with a philosophical air, “some of the seasons in the year are changing time.”

Karetak, who teaches traditional Inuit knowledge for the Aqqiumavvik Society, has seen a lot of changes around Arviat since he was born here in a blizzard six decades ago. The hamlet’s name, for instance. It was called Eskimo Point when he was a child, a handle bestowed by foreign whalers in a past era. In 1989, residents voted to change it to a name based on arviq, Inuktitut for bowhead whale. Ten years later, Arviat, along with a vast swath of land stretching from the Manitoba border to the Arctic Ocean, changed from being part of the Northwest Territories to being in the new Inuit territory of Nunavut: Inuktitut for Our Land. It was the first of what are now four regions in northern Canada that make up the Inuit homeland called Inuit Nunangat.

But as the people regain control of their ancestral homeland, powerful forces are reshaping the environment. Due largely to the greenhouse gas emissions of societies far to the south, Hudson Bay air temperatures have climbed more than 2 °C since the late 1980s. Waters have warmed nearly as much in some parts. Permafrost is thawing. Sea ice — crucial for winter hunting and travel and a vital habitat for marine life — is not only forming later, it’s breaking up earlier, and becoming perilously thin. And as emissions continue essentially unabated, a recently released Climate Atlas of Canada projects that during the next 30 years, Arviat will be nearly 3 °C warmer on average than it was around the turn of the century.

The off-kilter climate is hobbling the country food harvest. Weather has turned unpredictable, putting hunters out on the land and water at risk of sudden, life-threatening storms. Animal habitats and behaviours are changing, undermining generations-long knowledge of when and where to hunt. The tundra is greening, with normally calf-high Arctic willows shooting up to shrub height in places, impeding travel. And previously rare foreign invaders such as killer whales are moving in.

On top of this “new” and dramatic climate upheaval, environmental change set in motion nearly 20,000 years ago — the wane of the last ice age — is dealing a double whammy to the Hudson Bay Inuit way of life. As the climate warmed toward the end of the late Pleistocene, the Laurentide Ice Sheet that had buried the region more than three kilometres deep began to melt. By the dawn of the Holocene some 8,000 years later, the Earth’s crust, liberated from the icy weight that had pushed it down several hundred metres here, had started to spring back. Glacial isostatic adjustment, also known as postglacial rebound, has been rearranging the landscape ever since.

While land is readjusting across the previously glacier-covered north, the Hudson Bay region, former home to some of the planet’s thickest and most-persistent ice, is experiencing some of the greatest uplift, says Karen Simon, a geoscientist at the Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, who has studied the rebound around Arviat. The west bay was near the ice sheet’s bullseye. According to Erik Ivins, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, GPS observations and models indicate a current rise rate of 10 to 15 millimetres a year.

That’s more than double the rate of most other rebounding parts of the north. And in today’s warming climate, the accelerating loss of the planet’s remaining ice is boosting the uplift by as much as another millimetre per year. What’s more, the crust and mantle below are slowly creeping sideways as the balance of weight on the Earth’s surface moves from land to sea.

Arviat long-timers are well aware of the shifting topography.

The earth beneath Nunavut has moved, Elder Louis Angalik tells me through a translator. Seated at his breakfast table in his cozy house in Arviat, the octogenarian tents his hands to show how the terrain has pitched since the days when he and his family spent most of the year out on the land. He speaks of following the caribou herds, hunting seals, trapping foxes, and selling the pelts to the Hudson’s Bay Company trading post that used to stand nearby.

“The sky is different now,” Angalik says. “The sun is higher. The sea is getting shallower.”

Indeed, while the global ocean is rising an average 3.6 millimetres a year due to expanding water and melting land ice, up here, that ocean rise is outpaced by land rise — resulting in a sea level plunge. The height of the bay at nearby Churchill, Manitoba, dropped nearly three-quarters of a metre over the past 80 years, long-term measurements by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show.

For Hudson Bay, that adds up to a serious scoop out of this already-shallow body of water. Although it’s the second-largest bay in the world — surpassed only by the Bay of Bengal — thousands of years of incremental rebound have left it unusually shallow for a bay of this size. And the sea level along Hudson Bay’s west coast could drop some three-quarters of a metre farther by century’s end.

The stretch marks on the distending land are visible from the sky. Ridges of shoreline extend like tree rings along Nunavut’s coast, marking the beaches’ growth. The flight path to Arviat’s tiny airport crosses what used to be an island — Qikiqtaarjuk — with a historic site linked to the legendary Inuit voyager Kivioq. Today it’s a peninsula, tightly stitched to land.

“The landscape is growing,” says Leo Ikakhik, astride his ATV on the spit of land east of town where the original settlement sprang up around a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post built in the 1920s. Nothing remains today but some rock outlines of long-gone buildings and the beached skeleton of a York boat that once served the post. Now it’s a hangout for polar bears, and Ikakhik is one of Arviat’s official polar bear patrollers. From August to freeze-up, he rides up and down the shoreline, armed with binoculars and a rifle, calling the town hotline when he spots bears coming in from the bay. He has just given me a stern warning for wandering too close to the water for his liking. Then he settles back in his seat, squints into the biting wind, and points toward the bay.

“All of this you see here is the land rising,” Ikakhik tells me. We gaze at the rocky flats stretching half a kilometre out from shore and smell the seaweed rotting in shallow pools where once there was navigable water. “None of this used to be here,” he says.

That spells trouble for Arviat, where life revolves around the bay. Boats clutter the rocky shoreline, clatter on trailers towed by ATVs over the town’s unpaved streets, clang on the water at all hours as hunters and fishers ply the long northern summer days.

Lately, those boats have been running into shoals that never posed a problem before.

Karetak, who has navigated these waters for decades, hit one on his first trip out on the bay this summer. “I was going in a direction that I never hit anything before. I never hit anything in that line,” he says, his quiet voice rising with vehemence. “And all of a sudden, I looked down, I was like, ‘Wow, this is really shallow!’” But it was too late to avoid a run-in that dinged his brand-new propeller.

Lots of other Arviat boaters have similar stories. One of them is Andrew Muckpah, who coordinates seabed mapping for the Young Hunters program. A couple of years ago, he hit a submerged rock, causing major damage to his motor.

“We went on top,” Muckpah says with a sheepish smile. “Crashed down. Had to jump in the water to get the boat off.” The cost for repairs added up to $1,500, which he can’t afford. And even if he could, it would take a long time. There’s no boat shop in Arviat, so parts must be found elsewhere and shipped.

Unmarked hazards are a widespread problem for mariners off Canada’s north coast, where the lay of the sea bottom is woefully unknown. Only around 14 percent of the region’s waters have been adequately surveyed, according to the Canadian Hydrographic Service (CHS), the branch of Fisheries and Oceans Canada responsible for this task. Not only are updated charts vital to Indigenous communities like Arviat that rely on marine resources for subsistence, they’re also critical for commercial traffic — which has tripled across the Canadian Arctic in recent decades — and continues to climb as waning sea ice opens up new routes. For large vessels, an accident in these waters could unleash a dangerous and difficult-to-clean spill. And passenger rescues are challenging and costly, as at least two cruise ships that have run aground here in recent years show. But the expanse is enormous — the Canadian Arctic waters cover more than two million square kilometres, an area larger than Mexico — and mapping resources are thin.

“We will never have enough resources to cover the Arctic,” says Mathieu Rondeau, a CHS engineering project supervisor. Most methods of seabed mapping, such as with multibeam echo sounders and water-penetrating lidar, require expensive equipment and extensive training. High-traffic shipping and commercial fishing zones get top priority, leaving few resources for other areas — especially remote and relatively untraveled reaches of Hudson Bay. And with the seafloor steadily rising, charts here do grow out of date.

The only way this vast region can be fully mapped, Rondeau says, is with the help of citizen scientists. That’s where the Young Hunters come in.

As Muckpah and I speak, he’s piloting the Young Hunters’ motorboat in a grid pattern just off Arviat’s southern shore, following lines on a computer screen in front of him. It’s like pacing on water. A kilometre up, turn, 10 metres across, turn, a kilometre down, turn again. Repeat.

As he drives, sensors on a pole clamped to the side of the boat mark the precise position, gauge bottom depth, adjust for instrument-tilt from waves, and send the readings to a data logger. Instructor Irkok and Young Hunters helpers Lucas Owlijoot, Jacque John Mikiyungiak, and Joe Shamee keep an eye on the equipment and watch out for rocks. It’s the last day of August, and I’ve already left Arviat, but I tag along virtually, by smartphone.

The surveying system, called HydroBlock, is designed to collect high-quality bathymetric data while being affordable and easy to use. The goal is to eventually enable coastal communities to create their own nautical charts, says Julien Desrochers, who is on board today as chief operating officer of M2Ocean, the Quebec company marketing the system.

Summer 2021 is the Young Hunters’ second year profiling Arviat’s underwater terrain with the HydroBlock. Desrochers is teaching them how to operate and maintain the equipment, decide where to survey, plan out their route, and gather data. In 2020, they surveyed 2.4 square kilometres, about half of the inlet near Arviat. The results were used to produce a bathymetric chart with shallow areas highlighted in bright red; it was posted for the public in the organization’s office and on its Facebook page. The data was submitted to the CHS, says Desrochers, who hopes the Young Hunters will go on to teach the techniques to other Indigenous coastal communities.

The project grew out of earlier research Aqqiumavvik Society board chair Tagalik had participated in, called Arctic Corridors and Northern Voices. That University of Ottawa–led study gathered Inuit knowledge on marine areas with cultural or ecological significance, to help design low-impact shipping routes for the increasing Arctic traffic. The findings showed the need for data on Arviat’s changing underwater landscape.

“It was increasingly unsafe to navigate those waters,” Tagalik says. But since Arviat is not on any core shipping routes, she realized that mapping the seabed here was a low priority for the government and maritime industry. The community would have to do it on its own.

Tagalik found her way to Desrochers, who was looking to test the community-geared hydrography system he was involved in developing with the Interdisciplinary Centre for the Development of Ocean Mapping. The Young Hunters’ first try, in 2019 with a precursor to the HydroBlock, didn’t go well, because Arviat’s waters were usually too choppy for the equipment to work properly. After trying the new system the following year, the program bought it. The government and charitable foundation grants that provide the organization’s main source of funds covered a small part of the cost, but the $36,000 total price tag for the equipment and training took a lot of extra fundraising, Tagalik says. The program hopes to acquire a second unit and expand its mapping efforts in the future.

Arviat’s project is a showcase for crowdsourced bathymetry: citizen scientist–boaters using their own navigational equipment to help fill in the missing details of the ocean floor, says Rondeau. At present, less than one-quarter of the global ocean has been surveyed, according to Seabed 2030, an international project aiming to map the entire ocean by the end of this decade. In addition to navigation, expanding knowledge of the subsea terrain is important for conservation, managing fisheries, and improving the accuracy of future climate models.

Mapping the bay is just one of the ways Inuit youth in Arviat are bridging Western and traditional knowledge systems to chart their changing world. In the winter, they contribute to SmartICE, a sea-ice-monitoring project conducted by Inuit communities along Canada’s northern coasts. Its high-tech guidance is needed as climate change disrupts long-standing experience of how to gauge ice safety. In a shed on a cotton grass–covered meadow, a qamutik (wooden sled) fitted with ice-thickness sensors waits for winter. When the bay freezes, the device will be towed over it with a snowmobile, mapping real-time ice conditions for a public app named SIKU. The Young Hunters also work with scientists to monitor wildlife health, analyze water quality, and collect other data on the changing environment.

The tools are cutting edge but the skill — ujjiqsuiniq — is the timeless core of Inuit knowledge, says Kukik Baker, executive director of the Aqqiumavvik Society.

Baker, a youth outreach specialist, founded the Young Hunters program in 2012. She doesn’t like taking credit for it: “We [Inuit] are traditionally humble. We don’t boast about things that we do.” But Baker is a dynamo. As we speak in the small Aqqiumavvik Society office cluttered with papers and books, she fields a steady stream of visitors and phone calls, while two laptops whir in front of her. She handles it all with a patient smile.

In eight-week sessions held throughout the year, groups of middle schoolers, high schoolers, and young adults practice both high-tech and traditional ways of knowing, Baker tells me. While they’re in the boat mapping, for instance, they’re also observing wind and water, watching animal behaviour, and reading the weather. “We want our kids to grow up to have skills to be able to use the best of both worlds,” she says. Around 200 Arviat youth have gone through the Young Hunters program as of summer 2021.

But charting this northern coast is challenging. The work can only be done during the brief summer window when there’s no ice. That’s the windy season, however, and conditions are often too rough for boats. Even on “good” days in the cold, blustery bay, equipment and operators can take a beating.

For the Young Hunters, tacking back and forth in a boat for hours collecting data is tedious. “It’s kind of boring, but fun,” middle schooler Don Don Ikakhik tells me one stormy Friday, as the group hangs out in the hamlet’s library, playing games on their phones and waiting to go home for lunch. It’s late August, the month named Akullirurvik, or Middle Season Moon, according to the calendar on the wall. The new school year is about to start.

“What’s the fun part?” I ask. “Going back,” Don Don replies. To shore, that is. The others nod and laugh.

They do understand why it’s important. “So people will know where all the rocks and shoals are,” Rolanda says. But they’d much rather be out hunting. Hunting trumps everything when belugas are around.

Despite the challenges, these young Indigenous scientists are steadily building knowledge through research conducted at their own pace, on their own terms. They eventually go out 12 days in the summer of 2021, surveying another roughly three square kilometres. Another colour-coded chart is posted on Facebook. The data is again shared with the CHS.

This summer, another group of novice Inuit hunters will pace the water in boats. And after freeze-up, they’ll haul high-tech qamutiks over the ice. They’ll not only be plotting safe routes to resources for their community and charting better navigation in the north, they’ll be mapping tomorrow’s Inuit identity onto the new face of their homeland.

Tea and conversation with Tagalik help me see how the wisdom of the Inuit ancestors sustains the environment today. As we sit in her cheery blue house overlooking the bay, she tells me the story of an Elder who is walking in the countryside and sees a fox skeleton on the ground.

“‘Oh, you must be tired lying on that side all the time,’” she says, quoting the Elder’s words to the fox. “And he turns it over.”

Scientifically, Tagalik says, that action helps break down the bones and return their nutrients to the land. But to the Elder, it’s a way of respecting the animal, as Inuit traditions direct.

Tagalik, a native of Quebec, is a longtime scholar of Inuit knowledge and culture. She moved to the hamlet as a young schoolteacher in the 1970s, intending to stay two years. Then she married an Inuk, embracing the language and way of life, and more than 45 years later, she’s still here. Over a bowl of cloudberries, we discuss Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, and how it can inform the future guardians of this warming, transforming world.

“Being a good steward is almost self-serving in a way,” Tagalik continues. “Because what you put out in the world is what will come back to you. That’s a core belief.” In addition to respecting nature, she says, Inuit traditions emphasize paying close attention to the environment and carefully monitoring changes. And using innovative pirqutiit — tools and technology — to devise solutions or ways to adapt. The Young Hunters, she says, are learning to build all those principles into their lives.

Karetak also talks about respect when I ask him what Qallunaat — non-Inuit “southerners” in a place where almost everything is to the south — can learn from the guardians of this far-northern coast to help protect our natural world.

“You have to have a proper relationship with the land, as you would with another person that you respect,” he replies. “You don’t do things you think would offend the land.”

Traditional Inuit laws treat the land as a living entity with the same legal standing as humans, says Karetak, who has spent years researching the unwritten directives that were lost to colonialism. A strict set of location-specific rules governed land use, such as how long people could stay in one place before they had to move on and let the land recover. While most of those laws applied to a nomadic lifestyle that is no longer possible, he says, the core environmental stewardship principle remains.

“It’s simply based on what the land and water can provide,” says Karetak. “You let the land and water take care of itself. So you take only what you need and can handle well.”

Irkok teaches the Young Hunters much the same.

“One of the duties of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit is respecting your surroundings,” she tells me. “We try and teach them Inuit ways. For example, if we find six eggs [in a nest], we’ll take three.”

Respect your surroundings. Treat the land as a kindred being. Read and respond to the environment’s needs. Place-based principles and practices like these have guided Indigenous land stewards for generations. Long disregarded by Western scientists and land managers, appreciation of this deep well of ecological knowledge is growing. New national initiatives, such as Canada’s Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas — one of which is being created in the Seal River watershed just south of Arviat — are giving Indigenous communities new agency to manage their ancestral lands and waters. Traditional knowledge is being incorporated into scientific research, and the concept of nature having legal personhood and rights is now finding its way into Western law.

But for the next generation of Indigenous land stewards, the challenge is to keep that venerable wisdom alive.

Like young people everywhere, Inuit youth today are tethered to the internet, glued to their mobile phones. “They do have more of the Western culture than they do our traditional one,” says Baker. They are adept with technology and quick to catch on to the latest gear. But to gain Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, she says, they need to reconnect to the land.

That means following the path of their ancestors to become Inuit hunters. It means learning traditional Inuktitut place names, and the place-based knowledge those names convey. It means making their own pana, or snow knife, and knowing how to use it to build a life-saving shelter in a winter storm. It means knowing the rhythms of the ecosystem like they know their family’s habits, being as familiar with the landscape as with their own skin. Above all, it means spending time with elders and hearing the stories teaching Inuit wisdom and ways.

“It’s helping them to come back to the beginning,” Baker says. “Going back over the bridge backwards.”

Up here, where the world is redrawing itself, the bridge to the past provides hope for the future.

Hunter Gordy Kidlapic sits at his kitchen table with his young grandson in his lap. Over an immense fresh Arctic char splayed across the tabletop between us, we discuss how the impacts of old and new climate change — one driven by nature, the other largely by the actions of Qallunaat — are combining. Already Kidlapic sees signs of a one-two punch on life around Arviat. Animals are changing “big time,” he tells me. Some fish, like the one in front of him, seem to be growing larger in the shallowing, warming bay, while other local marine life is being driven out. He’s seen a pod of around 50 killer whales causing seals and other sea mammals to “kind of run away.” On the tundra, a once-reliable hunting spot sports more plants and fewer caribou these days. And he’s worried by the polar bears that now roam the coastlands for months.

Still, his grandson is eager to hunt, and Kidlapic is beginning to teach him. “I think he’ll be all right,” he says.

Back on deck, Rolanda hears shouts and cheers. Don Don, who’s on another boat, has just gotten his first qinalugaq. Now it’s her turn. She watches the water. The long line of Inuit hunters in her family stands behind her.

Now there’s a bulging wave. An arc of gray. A spout.

Rolanda hurls the harpoon.

Reporting for this article was made possible by an award from the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources. Aupaa Irkok, Wendy Shamee, and Stacey Kritaqliluk provided translation assistance.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine, and is republished here with permission.

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Hilu Tagoona was six years old when her mother brought her on a caribou hunt along Baker Lake, just south of their community of the same name. They walked up a hill together and spotted a caribou resting on the ground. Her mother instructed Tagoona to crouch down and they crept around the animal to get upwind. They could tell the caribou noticed their presence, but it didn’t move. Just curious. Tagoona’s mother quietly told her to cover her ears. Then she shot the caribou with her rifle. 

Tagoona started to cry, and her mother told her she shouldn’t mourn this as a loss, but rather see it as a gift. We need the caribou to survive, she said, and we’ve had a respectful relationship for thousands of years. 

“It’s always stayed with me that we must respect them and make sure that we care for them, so that we can continue to have this gift of being able to sustain ourselves and have food sovereignty,” Tagoona says. 

Since Baker Lake is Nunavut’s only inland community, the Beverly and Qamanirjuaq caribou herds that pass through the area are especially important to residents — there are no marine mammals to rely on. 

Just as Tagoona learned this at a young age, she learned of the mineral potential near her community and the desire to mine it. Her mother has been outspoken about the need to protect caribou habitat and Tagoona followed her lead. She’s a MiningWatch Canada board member, and a member of the non-profit Nunavummiut Makitagunarningit, which has advocated against uranium mining near Baker Lake.

“I think a lot of Nunavut has been safe from many things due to the remoteness, the extreme temperatures and that has created a safe haven for a wonderful ecosystem including caribou, which is very much a northern species and very much a symbol of Canada,” she says. “We feel a big responsibility to protect those areas.”

Today, the Amaruq gold mine operates 125 kilometres north of Baker Lake, part of Agnico Eagle’s Meadowbank Complex. Three more mines — extracting gold and iron ore — are in operation in other parts of the territory. According to a November 2020 overview, there are nearly 2,500 mineral claims in Nunavut, about 500 leases and 130 prospecting permits, targeting copper, diamonds, gold and iron ore.  

Tagoona’s focus now is the Nunavut land use plan, which will create a framework for the future of the territory, determining which types of development can happen and where, and outlining where environmental protection is a priority above all. Across Canada, land use plans tend to be developed on a regional basis, rather than province or territory-wide — making Nunavut’s all the more sprawling.

The document has been years in the making, with the latest — and potentially final — draft released last summer. It’s a massive undertaking, and not only because Nunavut comprises one-fifth of Canada’s land mass. 

The region is where many competing issues overlap — where Inuit value culture, tradition and the health of the landscape and its wildlife. Where unemployment is high and the ground holds mineral and oil and gas deposits. Where barren-ground caribou populations are declining dramatically and climate change is being felt most acutely, causing sea ice to disappear and affecting humans and wildlife alike. Where fewer than 40,000 Nunavummiut live in 25 communities, only accessible by air or sea.

“The geographic coverage and the range of issues addressed is without precedent, not just within Canada but internationally,” the Nunavut Planning Commission wrote in a 2021 backgrounder on the land use plan. Canada is also one of the few countries that still has large, relatively intact landscapes.

“I would say there’s a large responsibility not just to Nunavut, to Canada, but to the whole planet to get this right and to support these Indigenous-led efforts,” says Paul Crowley, a lawyer and consultant in Iqaluit who’s involved with Friends of Land Use Planning, a group that supports Indigenous-led land use planning in Canada. “If this comes to pass, it will be, I’m told, the largest regional land use plan in the world.”

Back in 1993, the Canadian and Northwest Territories governments and what was then called the Tungavik Federation of Nunavut — representing Inuit of the Canadian eastern Arctic — signed the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement. Now simply referred to as the Nunavut Agreement, it’s the largest land claim in the country, covering 2.1 million square kilometres that fell within the borders of the Northwest Territories at the time. It gave Inuit a role in co-managing the environment, harvesting rights, a portion of government revenues from resource development and federal money transfers in order to establish a territorial government. 

In 1999, Nunavut was officially created, separate from the Northwest Territories. By 2025, Nunavut’s devolution is expected to take place, with the federal government handing responsibility over land, water and resources to the territory. 

The Nunavut Agreement established institutions to oversee resource development and any impacts on the land and water, including the Nunavut Planning Commission, which operates independently of government but receives federal funding. Under the agreement, a land use plan for the territory is a legal requirement.

Paul Quassa was sitting next to then-prime minister Brian Mulroney back in ’93 when they both signed the Nunavut Agreement. Quassa was chief Inuit negotiator and president of Tungavik Federation of Nunavut, which now goes by Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. and operates independently of the territorial government; he went on to chair the Nunavut Planning Commission from 2006 to 2013. Now he is a senior advisor for Baffinland Iron Mines Corp., which operates the Mary River mine on north Baffin Island. The ultimate goal of the land use plan, he says, is to protect the environment and wildlife, while allowing for economic development. 

“The Nunavut Planning Commission’s role is to ensure that they listen to all,” Quassa says. “It’s also very clear in the Nunavut land claims agreement that special consideration has to be [given to] Inuit, Inuit culture, and I think that’s a very important provision in there.”

The road to a land use plan for Nunavut has seen its share of bumps. Regional land use plans were already well underway in 2005, when the federal government said they’d no longer be considered. Once work on the territory-wide plan began in 2007, public hearings and meetings across Nunavut followed, which then came to another halt when former prime minister Stephen Harper’s federal government refused to fund the final round of hearings. In 2014, the commission sued the Harper government for interfering with its process but dropped the lawsuit the following year in hopes of coming to an agreement.

The federal government has provided an average of $5.5 million per year for the planning process, including the cost of holding community hearings, plus an additional $10.9 million between 2016 and 2021 under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government. There’s been hundreds of filed written comments and four draft plans in all.

Once the three signatories — the federal and Nunavut governments and Nunavut Tunngavik — approve the plan, it becomes legally binding. It’s a living document, though, not intended to be set in stone. It will be reviewed regularly by the commission.

This latest draft sets out three main land designations: limited use, conditional use and mixed use. Limited use makes up 22 per cent of land; there are year-round prohibitions “on one or more types of land use.” Conditional use areas make up nine per cent, and have requirements, like seasonal prohibitions on certain activities. Mixed use comprises 65 per cent, with no prohibited uses or conformity requirements. Aside from specific projects that would be grandfathered into limited-use areas, mining and other industrial development is only permitted in conditional use and mixed use areas.

The plan designates caribou calving and post-calving grounds, key access corridors and some freshwater crossings as limited use. 

Caribou in Nunavut are in trouble. Most of the territory’s herds have seen steep declines in recent years. The Bathurst and Baffin herds, for instance, have each decreased by 98 per cent over the last 30 years. In some communities, Inuit are shouldering hunting restrictions.

At previous community consultations, an overwhelming majority of attendees said they wanted these areas off-limits to industrial activity year-round to minimize disruption to caribou. 

“If you travel to communities, which I’ve done extensively, you hear that this plan is reflective of what people want to see,” says Brandon Laforest, senior specialist of Arctic species and ecosystems at World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Canada. “So I land in a place that this is a good plan.”

Not everyone thinks so. Some parties have taken issue with the amount of land designated as limited use — up from 15 per cent in the 2016 draft, due to a push from communities. 

“The increase in prohibitions is an unacceptable risk to Nunavut’s economic opportunities,” wrote the Nunavut government in its October submission to the planning commission. 

Agnico Eagle, who extracted nearly 530,000 ounces of gold from its two Nunavut mines in 2020 and acquired a third mine in 2021, suggested that the assumption that protecting caribou habitat “will support continued levels of abundance and aid in the recovery of declined herds” was “erroneous.”

“There is a view (which we believe is unsupported) in the 2021 [land use plan] that development is detrimental to migratory caribou abundance to the exclusion of other factors,” the mining company wrote in its submission to the planning commission. “This view is derived from southern Canadian experiences and evidence associated with non-migratory Boreal caribou.”

Instead of broad geographic-based prohibitions, the mine’s submission posited that mitigation measures that “travel with the caribou” and kick in once they’re present would be enough, such as closing the road to the mine when caribou approach it or suspending outdoor operations like drilling, blasting and use of helicopters when more than 50 caribou are within five kilometres of the mine site. Agnico Eagle declined an interview request for this story.

Laforest disagrees. 

“I would flip that and say if you don’t protect the calving grounds, then you’re almost guaranteeing they’re not going to come back,” he says. “It is an industry tactic to undermine the importance of habitat protection.”

Laforest points to the fragmentation of boreal caribou habitat — and the decimated populations — in the provinces. “Every approach to caribou conservation is anchored in habitat protection for critical areas,” he says. “From a barren-ground caribou perspective, this is a chance to get it right and a chance to avoid the problems we’ve seen in the south.”

He adds that mobile protections are unproven and unfeasible, given the amount of monitoring that would be required. The measures could be tested along migration routes, he says, but they just aren’t appropriate in critical calving areas.

Ross Thompson, executive director of the Beverly and Qamanirjuaq Caribou Management Board, adds that no one’s saying industrial activity is solely responsible for herd decline — the problem is cumulative effects.

“The herds are being assailed from everywhere, all points of the compass,” he says, listing industrial disturbance, harvesting, predation and climate change as a few examples. “If the habitat is not healthy and vigorous and extensive, then that will impact the ability for a population to rebound.” 

Another subject of disagreement has been what to do with existing mineral rights in critical caribou habitat. The latest draft plan grandfathers in certain rights in limited-use areas, ​​though if these projects seek to expand or modify operations, they must be reviewed by the commission to ensure that the changes are in keeping with the plan. 

Both the federal government — which holds most of the territory’s subsurface rights and thus receives mine royalties — and the NWT & Nunavut Chamber of Mines have recommended the plan recognize all existing mineral rights. Yet many people remain concerned about any industrial activity in areas designated limited use.

“Our argument is why not protect those areas altogether, because even if exploration is occurring during those times [when caribou aren’t present], exploration is only in hopes to find development opportunities,” says Hilu Tagoona in Baker Lake. To her, and others, economic development and habitat protection can co-exist — but caribou are the top priority.

“There’s two million square kilometres of land,” says Paul Okalik, a former Nunavut premier who also helped negotiate the Nunavut Agreement and is now Arctic specialist at WWF-Canada. “There’s plenty of land for everybody. Just those areas where we feel the caribou should be protected are what we’re focusing on.”

This is why having a finalized plan should benefit everyone. For industry, it will provide clarity around which areas are open for development and which are not — a road map to avoid conflict with communities. It is, after all, a land use plan, not solely a conservation plan.

A signed plan could also be an opportunity for Nunavut to contribute even more to Canada’s international commitment to protect 30 per cent of its land and water by 2030 — on the territory’s terms. Already, Tallurutiup Imanga and Tuvaijuittuq, two marine protected areas, make up more than half of the 14 per cent of Canada’s oceans that have some form of protection. In 2020, then-Nunavut premier Joe Savikataaq said his government wouldn’t support any more federally protected areas in the territory until a devolution agreement is reached. He accused Canada of using the territory to meet federal conservation goals while undermining Nunavut’s ability to make decisions about its own lands and resources.

Based on the criteria that outlines what areas qualify under Canada’s conservation target, it seems that some of Nunavut’s limited-use areas — which total 440,000 square kilometres (altogether a little less than the area of Baffin Island) — would count towards the federal target.

At the end of 2020, Canada had protected 12.5 per cent of its land and freshwater — about 1.1 million square kilometres (or nearly the equivalent of the entire province of Ontario). The country still has a long way to go to meet its conservation targets and the potential addition of Nunavut’s limited-use areas would nudge that number up to about 17 per cent. But it’s not clear that the entirety of these areas would qualify. For one thing, the land use plan will be amendable, which suggests that its protections would be as well, and a key part of the conservation criteria is longevity.   

Residents of Taloyoak have a vision. They want to create an Inuit Protected and Conserved Area around their community on the edge of the Boothia Peninsula. Called Aviqtuuq, the area is home to caribou, muskox, bowhead whales, seals, narwhals and migratory birds. 

In addition to protecting the wildlife that use the area, the Spence Bay Hunters and Trappers Association wants to explore sustainable, Inuit-led activities like small-scale fisheries, outfitting camps and tourism. Over the years, the association has made it clear to the planning commission that Aviqtuuq should be off-limits to industrial development — the latest draft designates it limited use. 

“We’re happy with the new plan,” says Jimmy Oleekatalik, the association’s manager. “The Elders in the past always wanted [that area] protected.”

But in February 2021, Laforest, who’s been working with the association to advocate for Aviqtuuq’s protection, learned the federal government had issued two new mineral claims there that month. He says people in Taloyoak were upset, but since the plan is still in draft form, the land is technically open. WWF-Canada has called for Ottawa to stop issuing claims in areas set for protection, Laforest says, but to no avail. 

As it stands, it seems these two claims won’t be grandfathered into the land use plan — they’re not listed in the draft’s appendix of exempted projects. But Laforest is concerned about a statement in the draft that the commission may amend the appendix from time to time, “as it is expected that proponents will refine the areas in which they expect to undertake mining activities and abandon rights to other areas … ”

In an email, Jonathan Savoy, the commission’s director of policy and planning, wrote that commissioners — eight community members appointed by the federal and territorial governments, Nunavut Tunngavik and the three regional Inuit associations — would decide whether to revise the appendix to include additional mineral rights after the next round of community hearings, scheduled for March 2022. 

Next year will be the 15th in the planning process. There’s a sense of urgency among people on the ground in Nunavut, a feeling that, until the plan is approved, it’s open season for mining companies and the future of the caribou is even more tenuous. Okalik, for one, is frustrated there’s no plan yet in place.

“I would have thought that we would’ve had this plan 25 years ago,” he says. “This is a treaty that should be honoured by all parties and it should be implemented already.” 

He doesn’t want to speculate about whether that will happen in 2022.

“We’ve waited 30 years — I don’t want to put forward expectations because I don’t know how much time we’ll wait. So I’ll just wait for the day and have a celebration when it takes place.”

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Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) is at odds with Baffinland Iron Mines Corp. over the risk posed by a potentially invasive aquatic worm found nearby the company’s Mary River mine port on north Baffin Island, Nunavut.

According to the department, Baffinland should be developing a response plan to address Marenzelleria, the “high-risk potential aquatic invasive species that has been introduced to Milne Port.” 

This comes from a letter DFO submitted to the Nunavut Impact Review Board on Oct. 18 as part of the board’s assessment of Baffinland’s phase two development proposal, which would double the mine’s iron ore production to be shipped out of Milne Inlet, from six million tonnes per year to 12 million. 

The board fielded many submissions about the project’s impacts on some of the Arctic’s sentinel species such as caribou and narwhal. 

If Baffinland’s expansion is approved, project-related ship traffic will increase substantially. 

Currently, Baffinland’s permits do not limit vessel traffic, but the company proposed to limit vessels received at Milne Port to 84 per year, which allows the mine to ship 6 million tonnes of ore — their current permitted production level.

Under its second phase of development, Baffinland said the number of ore carriers at the Milne Port would be doubled to 168 per year. Iron ore is primarily used in steelmaking. Canada is one of the top-producing iron ore countries in the world, producing 58.8 million tonnes in total in 2019, according to Natural Resources Canada. Nine per cent of Canada’s iron ore is produced at the Mary River mine.

Milne Inlet opens off Eclipse Sound, just west of the community of Pond Inlet, and south of Tallurutiup Imanga National Marine Conservation Area — protected for its biodiversity and the critical role it plays in Arctic ecosystems, and its cultural importance to Inuit. Despite this level of protection, the marine region is not immune to the varying threats that shipping presents.

The final hearing for the expansion is currently underway in Iqaluit, with territorial and federal departments — including DFO — participating, as well as Nunavut community representatives, hunters and trappers organizations and environmental organizations. 

The hearing wraps up on Saturday with the board expected to release its report on the proposed expansion in the coming months. Final approval rests with the federal Minister of Northern Affairs Canada, Dan Vandal.

Increase in Marenzelleria worms since Baffinland’s Mary River operations began

Both the Qikiqtani Inuit Association and the Mittimatalik Hunters and Trappers Organization voiced concerns over invasive species arriving in the ballast water of Baffinland’s ore carriers during a marine monitoring workshop in Pond Inlet in August 2020, according to a letter sent to Baffinland by the review board.

Marenzelleria is a genus of benthic — or bottom-dwelling — worms known to be highly invasive. One or more species of the worms have invaded parts of the Pacific Ocean, North Sea, Baltic Sea, Barents Sea and others. 

Ralf Bastrop, a research associate at the University of Rostock, in Germany, has studied worms like Marenzelleria for nearly 30 years. In the Baltic Sea, where several invasive species of the worms have invaded, Bastrop said that in great enough quantities, Marenzelleria can have an impact on water chemistry. By burrowing through the seafloor, the worms expose sediment to oxygen, releasing various nutrients. Depending on the geographic area, burrowing could also lead to the release of poisons like polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB), highly toxic synthetic chemicals.

Other scientific papers in the field have discussed the possibility that invasive Marenzelleria and changes to the nutrient cycle could potentially alter local food chains.

But as Bastrop is quick to reinforce, what happens in one marine environment, might not happen in another. “It’s very difficult to say what happens in the Baltic will also happen in the Canadian Arctic.”

Marenzelleria was first found through Baffinland’s monitoring efforts at the company’s Milne Port in 2016, after the mine began shipping ore. Although only a single specimen was found that year, and details about where it was found are unknown, two more were identified in 2017 near the existing ore dock.

The following year, 301 specimens of Marenzelleria were found, some around the ore dock, with the majority located in an estuarine area at the mouth of Phillips Creek on the western side of the inlet. The estuary was not tested again in 2019, but 16 specimens were found that year near the existing dock. 

In 2020 the company returned to the western side of the inlet and found 256 specimens, though none were found in the area around the ore dock. 

In an email to The Narwhal, Baffinland clarified that targeted sampling in 2020 at locations where Marenzelleria was found in 2019 yielded no specimens to send for analysis. 

War of the worms: debate over Marenzelleria specimens found near Mary River mine

What sets samples of Marenzelleria found in 2019 and 2020 apart from the previous collections is that they were, at least initially, independently verified by a company called Biologica and the University of Laval as Marenzelleria Viridis — a highly invasive species Baffinland lists as high-risk. Biologica recommended a third expert be consulted to verify the species of the worm.

In an Aug. 17 technical memo, prepared by Golder Associates, Baffinland explained that a third independent reviewer reidentified the marine worms found in Milne Inlet in 2020 as Marenzelleria Arctia —  a species native to the Beaufort Sea in the western Arctic that Baffinland does not consider invasive. 

Baffinland told The Narwhal that while the worm’s reclassification was based on a visual examination, it was supported with other evidence surveyed in Milne Inlet, including a diversity of bottom-dwelling life, no signs of invasive behaviour and environmental conditions such as water temperature and salinity. 

Bastrop agrees that evidence such as temperature and salinity supports the idea that the specimens found are Arctia and not Viridis, though he also acknowledges that visual examinations and a survey of environmental conditions aren’t foolproof.

“The only way to definitely say which species occurs [there] is [through] genetic identification,” Bastrop said.

Baffinland said that samples collected in 2021 are currently being sorted and, should any species of Marenzelleria be found, specimens will be sent to the Canadian Centre for DNA Barcoding at the University of Guelph for analysis. 

In their memo Baffinland also said that they “will treat all identified Marenzelleria specimens as having the potential to be invasive until the classification of [Marenzelleria Arctia] is confirmed through molecular methods.”

But DFO’s position suggests that even if the worms are identified as the Arctia species, there is still reason for concern.

“Regardless of the details concerning the specific species identity, there is clear evidence that all specimens in question are of the Marenzelleria genus. They appeared in close vicinity of the Milne Port ore dock and anchorages, for the first time in 2016, after initiation of project ore-related shipping,” DFO stated in its letter to the board. “Thus, DFO still has concerns about their origins and their potential to become invasive.”

No invasive species identified: Baffinland

Despite ongoing debates about the specimens collected, during a Nunavut Impact Review Board’s community roundtable session earlier this week, Lou Kamermans, Baffinland’s director of sustainable development, doubled-down on the company’s position that the worms found so far are not invasive.

“To date, we’ve not identified invasives in our monitoring program,“ Kamermans said, in response to a question from a community member. 

“There have been times species have been found that we’ve looked at further. But in each case, that’s been ruled out.”

However, DFO notes that Baffinland’s own aquatic invasive species protocol states that “an introduction is considered project-related if a species/taxon was not documented in baseline surveys or if there are no documented occurrences in the Canadian Arctic before the commencement of shipping operations.”

Marenzelleria did not appear in Baffinland’s baseline surveys. But the company explained to The Narwhal that it is not possible for baseline sampling to capture all species living in a given environment, and that the more sampling is conducted, the more are found. As a result, the company said it created and maintains an inventory for Milne Inlet that is updated with newly detected taxa every year and shared with other groups, including DFO.

Without knowing exactly where the Marenzelleria came from, DFO concludes that “as the sole operator at Milne Port, it is reasonable to assume that any new records of Marenzelleria at Milne Port, are attributable to project-related activities.”

Baffinland, however, concludes that “the available evidence suggests that this worm is native to Arctic waters, has a broad Arctic distribution and cannot conclusively be identified as a project-related introduction.”

By the time the second phase would be in operation, Kamermans said new shipping regulations will be in place requiring ballast water exchanges before vessels enter Canadian waters, as well as the treatment of that ballast water.

“For phase two, we have even more confidence that the vessels coming to Milne port won’t be a source of invasives,​​” Kamermans said, during the board’s community roundtable.

According to Baffinland, DFO will be working alongside Transport Canada to monitor those exchanges.

Updated Nov. 9 at 12:34 p.m. ET: this article was updated to clarify that the production increase for Mary River phase two will go from six million tonnes per year to 12 million tonnes per year.Updated Nov. 17 at 11:43 a.m. ET: this article was updated to correct that the species found has been suggested to be Marenzelleria Arctia — not Marenzelleria Arctica.

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Baffinland spokesperson Heather Smiles said the company agrees that there are fewer narwhals, but this could be due to factors other than the mine’s operations, such as an increase in killer whales and underwater pile driving in Pond Inlet.

“These factors may have acted independently or cumulatively,” she said. “All of these factors were either unique in 2020 or more prominent than in 2019.”

The company hasn’t decided whether it will send icebreakers this year, Smiles said. But she said a “precautionary approach” will be taken because of the low number of narwhals last year.

Baffinland has adopted “conservative” measures that are a product of feedback from Inuit groups, Smiles said.

She pointed to the company’s marine wildlife management plan, which includes two adaptive management measures that could be used: changing the ships’ schedule to avoid times when contact with narwhals is more likely to happen, and find alternative routes.

But Ootoovak said in a June 25 letter to Baffinland and the review board that the mitigation measures are unclear.

Baffinland can begin icebreaking around July 15, depending on ice conditions, and end around Oct. 15, Smiles said.

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