History
Throwback Thursday: Nunavut up and running
On April 1, 1999, Canada’s youngest population took control of its largest territory. Here’s how Canadian Geographic covered the story.
- 2880 words
- 12 minutes
People & Culture
Nunavut’s hunt for healthy food
Across Nunavut, food insecurity continues to affect daily life. For many Inuit, the answer lies not in the grocery store, but on the land.
Advertisement
Advertisement
With winter retreating and warm temperatures returning, hunters in communities across the North ready their rifles for the season of the nesting geese. As the sea warms further, nets are laid in anticipation of the season of the running char. Soon after, the midnight sun coaxes bloomed tundra flowers into setting fruit, marking the season of the berries. And when migrating hooves begin to beat the Earth once more, ATVs are mounted and rifles slung over backs for the season of the caribou hunt.
Rather than by months, communities across the North have long broken down their years into seasons that once dictated where a group would live geographically to make the most of the available resources. Hunting, fishing and gathering were the traditional mainstays of a healthy diet but also, more broadly, of daily life. They still are, but as of 2020 about three- quarters of Nunavut’s Inuit households are considered food insecure. These cultures, long adapted to exist amid the challenges of Arctic living, are losing secure access to the diet that their ways of life had long sustained.
Food insecurity might just be another way to say that an individual, family or group doesn’t have enough food. But on a more nuanced level, what does that actually mean? Or perhaps simpler yet, why are people in the North unsure where their next meal will come from? Questions like these led Yellowknife-based photographer Pat Kane down the proverbial rabbit hole. “Is it like people can’t afford food? Or it’s just not available? Or people can’t hunt? Or what is it?”
Of course, for someone who thinks visually like Kane, the other issue with jargon such as “food insecurity” in the North is the imagery that often accompanies it. “Every time I did research, it was always just pictures of grocery store shelves and the price,” he says. “That’s one part of it, I think, but what does this look like on a real daily-life level?”
Over two years, Kane visited communities across the North, asking those questions and taking photos. He started at home in Yellowknife, then worked his way across the Northwest Territories and eventually into Nunavut. “What I found out is that it’s super complicated,” says Kane. “It’s the cost. It’s transportation. It’s logistics. It’s getting healthy food.”
For most Canadians, getting healthy food involves a visit to the local grocery store, where fresh fruits, vegetables and meats are always available regardless of the season. In Nunavut, similar stores have nearly all the same products, but a cancelled flight to any of the territory’s fly-in-only communities can quickly mean bare shelves in the produce, dairy or meat aisles.
What’s left over is usually processed, high-sodium or sugary products that are significantly more expensive than their southern counterparts — a bottle of orange juice can cost $24, a can of Chunky soup $10 — even with federal subsidies like the Nutrition North program. Meant to make groceries more affordable, much of the subsidies end up in the pockets of southern-owned grocery stores instead of being passed on to northern consumers.
For Kane, the issue took root many decades ago. When colonialism forced the North’s semi-nomadic groups, such as the Inuit, to settle in predetermined communities, trading posts — the ancestor of the modern grocery store — introduced things like canned goods, sugars, preservatives and other southern (meaning the rest of Canada) staples.
“Eating canned and boxed food that’s totally foreign at one point [but] is suddenly dropped in your lap creates this kind of dependency: you’re suddenly dependent on the government — you’re dependent on people to bring you stuff,” says Kane. When combined with limits on where hunting was permitted, forced relocations, residential schools and the rest of the colonial onslaught, it’s not hard to guess how profound the impacts were and why they continue to be felt.
Despite these challenges, the strength and tenacity of Inuit and other Indigenous groups have nurtured the cultural practice of harvesting so that it lives on in younger generations today in Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and elsewhere, often through school “land programs” like the one that’s been running for more than 30 years in the Nunavut hamlet of Pangnirtung. But challenges remain.
“In communities where a lot of people hunt and harvest their food, it’s more difficult now than ever,” says Kane, pointing to the high costs of going out on the land, including the price of fuel, boats, ATVs, snowmobiles, ammo and other gear, along with the role climate change has had in making sea ice more unpredictable.
The more Kane spoke with community members, the more a solution became clear. “They don’t really want funding to be able to go buy a bunch of stuff at the grocery store. They want funding to be able to go buy fuel so that they can go harvest.”
Kane describes that realization as a “lightbulb moment” for him and the project: “I was like, okay, well, that’s what my project is about. It’s about the ways that people are trying to get back to at least part of a traditional lifestyle.”
Bare feet stepping delicately around seal skins laid out on the floor of a home; a hand clenching a sack of just-harvested clams. More than food insecurity, Kane’s images show the power of food sovereignty — the right of a people to stake claim on how and where their food is sourced.
IQALUIT (photography below)
In this series of photos, Pat Kane took to the shoreline to record a group of Iqaluit residents harvesting clams at nearby Aupalajaaq, meaning “island of reddish colour.” Elders and youth worked together to ensure the harvest was a success. In the warmer open-water months, harvesters head out in their boats and wait for the water to recede until they are able to walk out on the exposed sand, then move quickly to gather clams in a race against the returning tide. Inuktitut place names across Nunavut often either describe what a location looks like or a prominent feature there, or they describe what can be found there. Iqaluit, Nunavut’s capital, means “place of many fish” in Inuktitut.
PANGNIRTUNG (photography below):
Pangnirtung, meaning “place of the bull caribou,” is a hamlet of roughly 1,500 residents one hour’s flight northwest of Iqaluit. “Pang,” as it is locally known, is surrounded by fiords and the rich waters of Cumberland Sound, which was frequented by commercial whalers in the mid-1800s. It’s also home to Pangnirtung Fisheries, a community-owned business that commercially processes Arctic char and turbot caught by community members. Across Nunavut, interest is increasing in small-scale artisanal fisheries that could both create local jobs and help fill local food security gaps.
GJOA HAVEN (photography below)
As the ice retreats around Gjoa Haven (Uqsuqtuuq in Inuktitut, meaning “place of plenty of blubber”), residents still set out across the melt to catch fish, hunt caribou and muskox or bring supplies to nearby camps using snowmobiles and qamutiks. Although this spring ice is still suitable for travel, ice conditions are becoming increasingly unpredictable due to climate change. Fall ice forms later and spring ice melts sooner, both of which pose a danger to hunters who travel, sometimes long distances, on the ice. Climate change also affects the animals Inuit rely on for food and other forms of sustenance, such as caribou. Warmer temperatures can result in habitat loss or change, more disease and increased competition from other animals whose range is expanding northward.
KIMMIRUT (photography below):
The benefits of spending time on the land or the water extend beyond food, as little, if any, part of an animal typically goes to waste. The skins of animals such as seals are as important as the food they provide and can be used for parkas, mitts, kamiit (boots made of caribou skin or sealskin) or other craft items. The skins are stretched and drawn out on the floor in preparation for making clothing. In the North, homes, rather than primarily being reprieves from working life, are used equally as workspaces. Work that would normally be done outside can be brought inside where it’s warm, where family are gathered and where the radio is playing.
Advertisement
Related Content
People & Culture
With old traditions and new tech, young Inuit chart their changing landscape
For generations, hunting, and the deep connection to the land it creates, has been a mainstay of Inuit culture. As the coastline changes rapidly—reshaping the marine landscape and jeopardizing the hunt—Inuit youth are charting ways to preserve the hunt, and their identity.
- 5346 words
- 22 minutes
People & Culture
The truth about polar bears
Depending on whom you ask, the North’s sentinel species is either on the edge of extinction or an environmental success story. An in-depth look at the complicated, contradictory and controversial science behind the sound bites
- 4600 words
- 19 minutes
People & Culture
The Inuit future
Natan Obed, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, on the idea of a Inuit-Crown relationship, Canada’s Inuit homelands and the role of Inuit in the world
- 1597 words
- 7 minutes
Advertisement
Advertisement