Coming in from the Cold
Can the Inuit hold on as their home heats up?
Words Neil Arun
Illustration Cajsa Holgersson
The hunt was over, but danger stalked the hunters returning with their kill. Under their convoy of snowmobiles, the ice of the Canadian Arctic — normally rock-solid — suddenly gave way. Freezing water burst through the surface. Three men tumbled into the sea, along with rifles, vehicles, and the carcasses of the caribou they had killed.
Riding behind them, Adami Mangiuk sprang into action. Adapting a technique he had learned from his father, a skilled fisherman, he roped two of the men to safety. The third man, swept further out, was rescued by boat.
“It’s the way I was born,” says Mangiuk, of the instincts that kicked in when the ice collapsed some six years ago.
The Inuit elder from northern Quebec may credit tradition for his reflexes, but he sees nothing traditional in the crisis that tested them. Mangiuk blames global warming for the weakness of the ice. Nowadays, he says, it is often treacherously thin — barely a foot deep where it used to measure 15-feet-thick. As a result, the caribou hunters no longer use the route where they almost lost their lives.
“People outside look at us as though we are living testament to the past world — that’s not the way we understand it. We are not living in a past world. We are struggling to feed ourselves.”
It is hard to overstate the importance of the hunt to the Inuit, or to exaggerate the deep, existential threat they sense in its disruption.
“Hunting is part of our life,” says Aqqaluk Lynge, head of the Inuit human rights centre in Greenland. “For a whole family to engage in seasonal hunting… has been the core of the family, the core of the economy.
“People outside look at us as though we are living testament to the past world — that’s not the way we understand it,” he says. “We are not living in a past world. We are struggling to feed ourselves.”
Lynge is a former chairman of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC), a non- governmental body that represents the world’s approximately 150,000 Inuit, scattered across four countries.
Almost 60,000 of that total live in Canada, with a similar number in Greenland, where they form the majority population. Most of the remainder are in Alaska, where they are known as Eskimos (a term deemed derogatory in other communities). Only a few thousand are left in northeastern Russia, from where the Inuit’s ancestors are thought to have come.
For most of their history, the Inuit have been alone in the Arctic. In the last few decades however, they have been joined by business and political interests, jockeying for advantage.
The melting of the polar ice caps, perhaps the most dramatic consequence so far of climate change, is luring military and commercial shipping into uncharted waters. The global scramble for untapped mineral and petrochemical reserves has also intensified, pushing steadily northwards. Ships, pipelines and roads are cutting across a pristine expanse where animals have roamed, bred, and been killed by the Inuit.
These developments can seem terribly ironic. For thousands of years, the Arctic has provided the Inuit with vital biological resources, in the wildlife that they hunt. Now they must find new routes to access those resources, just as other natural resources – of greater global value but less immediate use – have become more accessible.
“We have fought colonisation,” he says. “We still have to fight the colonial way of thinking.”
In their dealings with outsiders from the ‘south’, the Inuit do not necessarily speak as one. While oil exploration has been welcomed in parts of Alaska, the prospect of uranium mining has divided communities in Greenland, and conservationists in Canada have found opponents as well as allies among the local Inuit.
Even on issues such as climate change, there are differing views. This is to be expected among populations living thousands of miles apart, separated by half the earth’s longitudes. However, bodies such as the ICC have provided the Inuit with a forum for debating differences, sharing experience and reaching accord on some of the big questions.
Marianne Stenbaek, a broadcaster and expert on Inuit culture at McGill University in Montreal, believes the Inuit’s management of their affairs serves as a model to other indigenous groups.
“They have come out better, more organised, more powerful, more together, in spite of all their local problems,” she says. “They learn from each other, and they see how it can be done.”
For instance, she says, communities that negotiate with oil and mining companies now expect to be treated as partners, extracting guarantees of training and long- term employment.
The stakes are high. If the growing activity in the Arctic is not managed, it carries a risk of conflict for the Inuit, echoing older struggles against — and amongst — European colonists in the area.
“Whatever plans you have for the Arctic, indigenous people have to be part of the decision-making,” explains Lynge, insisting that this has not been the case so far.
“We have fought colonisation,” he says. “We still have to fight the colonial way of thinking.”
Lynge says he does not oppose extractive industries, as long as they bring development and spare the environment. He is particularly wary of oil companies. Give them your little finger and they will have your arm, he warns, repeating a Greenlandic adage.
In his book, The Inconvenient Indian, Canadian writer Thomas King wonders why we keep asking what native people want.
It’s the wrong question, he says. Instead, we should ask, “What do Whites want?” The answer, according to King, ought to be obvious: Whites want land.
“The issue has always been land,” he says. “It will always be land, until there isn’t a square foot of land left in North America that is controlled by Native people.”
Many Inuit communities now have their own territory, and enjoy some measure of self-government. Inconvenient or not, their right to the land is an inescapable reality for the corporations and governments chasing a stake in the Arctic.
The Inuit have survived an inhospitable environment because of their ingenuity, best expressed through hunting and fishing. These activities are at the heart of their identity. Without them, the Inuit would not be who they are, and the Arctic would be more like its ghostly reflection, the Antarctic.
“We should ask “What do Whites want?” The answer, according to King, ought to be obvious: Whites want land.”
Many of the world’s indigenous people have lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers. But the inhabitants of the barren polar landscape had scant vegetation to gather — they relied almost exclusively on hunting and fishing. Among the Inuit, skills honed and handed down through the generations allowed their culture to outlast rivals in the region.
Their communities depended, to varying degrees, on birds, polar bear, caribou, seals, walrus, beluga and Arctic char — a salmon-like fish. The animals provided food as well as essential material for fuel, shelter, clothing and tools. In other words, the animal products that were not a source of nutrition were nonetheless a fundamental resource for the Inuit.
These products were essential for the traditional Arctic community in a way that is very hard to grasp in the 21st century, except perhaps by a comparison with the fossil fuels without which there would no cars, plastics or electricity.
Of course, few Inuit today live in the manner of their ancestors. Most are not nomadic, and do not use animal products where modern technology will do the trick. Yet through a diet that still features food caught or killed in the Arctic, the Inuit maintain a powerful link to their pre-colonial heritage.
Under Danish rule, a lot of Greenlanders forgot their language and their indigenous roots, says Lene Kielsen Holm, an Inuit anthropologist and expert on climate change based in Nuuk.
“Hunting and fishing is the power that makes us able to deal with our past,” she says.
Yet the legacy of that past is mixed. Like other indigenous communities, the Inuit seem to have more than their share of woes. Social workers speak of poor literacy scores, high poverty and unemployment, widespread drug and alcohol abuse, and worrying rates of mental illness and suicide — a web of problems in which causes and effects have become entangled.
In Inuit-majority Greenland, one- third of children are said to have had a troublesome upbringing, and around seven per cent have had to be relocated because of neglect — higher rates than in the former colonial power, Denmark.
Among the Inuit in Canada, the United Nations has given a stark warning — many families cannot afford to provide a nutritious diet for their children. The young are going hungry, or developing health problems from eating cheap junk food.
The Canadian government has dismissed the criticism, despite protests from the Inuit, who point repeatedly to the exorbitant cost of groceries at local supermarkets — in the northern territory of Nunavut, where fresh food has to be flown in daily, a head of cabbage can cost as much as $28 Canadian dollars (US$25; £16).
“Hunting and fishing is the power that makes us able to deal with our past.”
Many of the Inuit’s troubles can be traced to the disruptive legacy of European conquest.
Their traditional rights to the land have often been re-established through treaties and negotiations. Traditional forms of knowledge — the techniques for living off the land — have often had to be re-learned.
Until recently, they have not had a strong voice in government. They have been excluded from decision-making, and alienated by attempts to assimilate them.
But the Inuit’s woes cannot be blamed on colonialism alone. Modern policymakers are also responsible.
“We have had the capacity and the mandate to solve these problems,” says Aaja Chemnitz Larsen, Greenland’s ombudsman for children and chair of its human rights council. The island territory, technically part of Denmark, has enjoyed partial autonomy for more than 30 years.
Larsen says Greenland’s rapid modernisation, and the recent migration from remote settlements to larger towns, has contributed to its troubles. In leaving behind the wilderness, families and communities have also lost many of the values that held them together.
Inuit activists say the traditional hunt is a solution to social ills. It kills at least two birds with one stone — nourishing the belly and the collective identity. But of course, the hunt is not quite what it was. Economic disparities that afflict the community are also apparent here; the hunting ground is not a level playing field.
Wealthier Inuit can kit themselves out with powerful rifles, snowmobiles and boats, says Tony Gaston, a wildlife scientist who has worked in the Arctic for 35 years with the Canadian environment agency.
“So you may end up being just as successful at hunting as a guy who doesn’t have a job, someone who spends a lot of time on the land but maybe doesn’t have the good equipment you’ve got,” he says.
As climate change threatens to shake up the Arctic ecosystem, Inuit hunting practices have become the subject of quotas and closer scrutiny. Animal welfare activists have criticised the Inuit for continuing to kill endangered species, such as the polar bear. However, the Inuit say they hunt in a sustainable way, relying on a combination of scientific and traditional knowledge. Above all, they insist they have a right to their biological resources, as well as a stake in ensuring that they are not depleted.
“Even if you see 20 seals on your hunting trip, you won’t shoot them all,” says Kielsen Holm, the anthropologist in Nuuk. “You will shoot those you can transport back to your community.”
She says scientists who visit the Arctic should spend longer learning from the Inuit, instead of just telling them what to do. The Inuit language, she suggests, is a neglected resource. For instance, its vast vocabulary for describing varieties of sea ice ought to be useful to scientists.
“Even researchers — they don’t have that detailed knowledge of sea ice,” she says.
Many Inuit believe that the conflict over hunting is simply a continuation of older conflicts with governments and settlers. Yet again, they say, outsiders are trying to control them, instructing them to update traditions that appear frozen in time. But in reality, it is the outsiders’ view of them that is frozen.
Inuit customs today can be as dynamic as the sea ice. And, says Lynge of the ICC, they should be allowed to evolve on their own terms.
“People… look at us and say — ‘Oh, you don’t live in the traditional way!” he says. “Well, who does today? But there is a basic question, of using our resources as we are able to, that is so important.”
Back in northern Quebec, Mangiuk, the Inuit elder, chuckles at the eating habits of the Europeans: “Why do you eat pigs? They have no hair, they’re ugly! They have no nose!”
He prefers the meat of the polar bear, or the Arctic tern. The walrus is okay too, though not as easy to prepare. “Their skin is so very, very hard,” he sighs. “It takes hours to skin a walrus.”
This article is taken from Weapons of Reason’s first issue: The Arctic. Read the next article: Arctic Inc.
Weapons of Reason is a publishing project to understand and articulate the global challenges shaping our world by Human After All design agency.
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