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October 2008 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Grise Fiord Feature: Norway Carbon Tax The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations À la carte

Cold warriors (Page 1 of 6)
Fifty years ago, Inuit landed on the southern shore of Ellesmere Island and settled Canada’s northernmost community. Now the changing climate is forcing them to adapt once again.
By Lisa Gregoire, photography by Patrice Halley

FEATURE Grise Fiord: Cold warriors Map: Ellesmere Island Sidebar: The bear facts CLIMATE CHANGE Slumping, sinkholes ... Low-carbon diet Ellesmere Island Ice Shelves Geoengineering Reviews & resources

“You lean when I lean,” yells Marty Kuluguktuk over the engine’s shrieking. We’re careening sideways on a snowmobile around boulders and frozen tundra, approaching the foot of a glacier just east of Grise Fiord (pop. 141), Canada’s most northern community. Bare-faced in the cutting May wind, Kuluguktuk knows only two positions on the throttle: full and idle.

He shouts back his trademark reply: “Nothing serious.” Halfway up the glacier’s smooth white tongue, he pulls over to a pair of aluminum poles poking out of the ice and cuts the engine. One of the poles is attached to a white metal box and a solar panel — a remote weather monitor. “This is where we measure the glacier,” says Kuluguktuk, Grise Fiord’s assistant senior administrative officer. “Last year, it shrank 1.5 metres.” We continue northward up the slope, pull a U-turn at the top and head south along a rocky ridge dusted with snow. He points to a hill leading to town. “That was all glacier just 10 years ago,” he says. “It’s gone.”

The glacier is Grise Fiord’s main water supply. Fragmentation is accelerating its retreat into the hills, and last summer, the runoff didn’t fill the reservoir. In spring, when the hamlet ran out of water, officials dispatched a front-end loader to chip off chunks of an iceberg just offshore.

In the wink of one generation, nomadic children raised with dog teams in the 1950s wound up in sedentary nine-to-five jobs, many disconnected from the land, their elders and their P. Diddy-and-Facebook offspring. The consequences of this wholesale cultural shift are well documented: violent crime and suicide rates are climbing; life expectancy is falling. Surviving on the land taught Inuit patience, persistence, courage — skills that could ground them, and their children, during this modern tumult. But the vast landscape they navigated for centuries by reading its subtle signs is becoming warmer, softer and unpredictable because of the changing climate. “It’s the very thing we’re going to need as we go into the second wave of change,” says Watt-Cloutier, whose book in progress, The Right to Be Cold, frames the climate-change debate around human rights and indigenous self-determination. “It’s ironic, the very thing we’re reaching out to is under threat.”

The creation of Grise Fiord and Resolute, on southern Cornwallis Island, established at the same time, was a social experiment perpetrated on a handful of ill-prepared families from northern Quebec and northern Baffin Island in what many believe was an attempt by the federal government to assert its ownership of the Arctic islands within what it considered its northern boundaries. Most of the relocated Inuit had never experienced 24-hour darkness or seen a muskox before. The first few years were extremely difficult. Some families eventually returned home. Others made a life here despite being tethered to the air supply and government assistance common to almost any remote fly-in community. Those who stayed adapted to a new climate and a new environment and it appears they’ll have to do so again.

Meanwhile, their leaders are lobbying governments at home and abroad. Mary Simon, president of Canada’s Inuit organization Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, is urging governments to help her people prepare for the future by selecting an Inuit model community to address building and engineering challenges related to slumping permafrost and to experiment with culturally sensitive design and sustainability. Watt- Cloutier, who was instrumental in helping to push through the 2001 Stockholm Convention banning Persistent Organic Pollutants, which were turning up in the flesh of marine mammals that are a critical part of the Inuit diet, is unflinching before world leaders and international forums. She insists that the time to mitigate global warming has nearly expired. “We can’t stop it entirely,” she says, “but we can maybe slow down the process.”

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Online exclusive: Canadian Geographic Photo Club
Join us for an interview with photographer Patrice Halley and get a behind-the-scenes look into a photo shoot for Canadian Geographic.
By Michela Rosano