While the camp watched, the speck multiplied into a blur of a dozen bounding objects. As the distance continued to melt away, a team of 12 qimmiit (dogs) pulled a darkly clad figure with a white pinny emblazoned with a bold, blue number two into view. It was David Oyukuluk from Ikpiarjuk, the first of the qimuksiqtiit (mushers) to cross the finish line in the first of six legs of the 2022 Nunavut Quest, the territory’s preeminent dogsled race.

By the time the sun had set and the quickly cooling landscape had been draped in hues of purple and blue, all 13 racers had crossed the finish line. Terry Uyarak, who crossed third, was happy with his results and finally having Day 1 in the books for the first time since the pandemic, three years earlier.

Although Uyarak, who was born and raised in Iglulik (Igloolik), grew up going on dogsled rides with his father, he didn’t have his own team until six years before, when a friend on his hockey team was looking for someone to take on six dogs.

One of his first challenges as a dog team owner was simply trying to get them to go. “They kept going to me, loving me, and I was trying to tell them to run, [but] they couldn’t,” recalls Uyarak with a laugh. “They were just really happy; they didn’t know what to do.”

It was, and continues to be, a lot of work, says Uyarak, who is also a Juno-nominated musician. He feeds the dogs every two days when he’s not running them and every day when he is. Their food is mostly what he hunts, whether that’s seal, walrus or whatever is in season. He doesn’t run his team during the summer, but once there’s enough snow, typically in November, he’ll run them until June or July. To keep them active, Uyarak tries to run them at least 10 kilometres three days a week, which he tracks using a fitness app intended for running, hiking or skiing.

It has been a long learning process, involving getting advice from community Elders and his father — and a lot of practice. For the longest time, Uyarak didn’t feel quite right calling himself a qimuksiqti (singular of qimuksiqtiit), a title he accepted only after being called it by one of the community Elders.

Over time, his team has grown to 15 dogs and two puppies, whose names are given to them when they’re born based on their appearance or how he’d like them to act. It’s a bond no different, he says, than that of dog owners who love their pets so much they consider them a part of the family. “We just keep them outside.”

But unlike dogs kept as pets, qimmiit are working dogs, and they’re treated as such. “We try to keep them a little bit wild,” says Uyarak.

The Canadian Inuit Dog has remained relatively unchanged over the last 2,000 years. As one of the continent’s oldest Indigenous dogs, they dispersed east across the North American Arctic alongside Inuit, a bond that was passed on to and spanned countless generations until the middle of the 20th century.

Content warning: The next section includes testimony about the killing of qimmiit (dogs).

The path ahead on Day 3 was obscured by a wall of wind and snow. Near-whiteout conditions had replaced the sun that had brightened the first two days of the race. The race was postponed for the day.

With no teardown or setup, the pace of the camp slowed to a crawl. A group of youth seized the moment to fly a kite through the swirls of wind, an optimistic but shortlived endeavour. Others used the hiatus to stop at the tents with generators to catch up, warm up and charge their phones. For many, this is the essence of the Quest: an opportunity to see friends and family. Similar opportunities present themselves in the time spent before and after the race, among people from neighbouring communities that may be only a 45-minute flight apart but, given limited airline schedules, might involve a flight through the territory’s capital at a cost of more than $3,000.

In a clearing between tents, a group of qimuksiqtiit and support team members huddled around a snowmobile that had sprung a coolant leak; among them was Uyarak, who watched them carefully pour ground pepper into the coolant, a quick fix for a tiny leak. While the Nunavut Quest, like any race, is an opportunity to earn bragging rights, for Uyarak, it’s much more.

“The bigger part for me is to get together with all the guys who are mushers and Elders and organizers who will be telling stories of how they used to have dog teams and how they used to live,” he says. “Of course, I won’t get to live exactly like them, but at least I’ll get to understand where I come from.”

Whether racing or just out for a day trip, Uyarak admits he thinks about the events of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s pretty often. “I remind myself it’s a part of our past,” he says.

It wasn’t until August 19, 2019, that Carolyn Bennett, then Canada’s minister of Crown-Indigenous relations and northern affairs, took to a podium inside Iqaluit’s Frobisher Inn and apologized to the Qikiqtani Inuit for the two-and-a-half decades of colonial policies and practices that profoundly changed their way of life. It was testimonies like Moses Oyukuluk’s, and hundreds of others as part of the Qikiqtani Truth Commission, that ultimately culminated in the federal government’s formal 2019 apology on that grey August day.

As part of the apology, Qikiqtani Inuit Association received $20 million, with nearly $3 million of that going to qimmiit revitalization work, including $100,000 each year, for the next six years, earmarked for the Nunavut Quest.

Like the territory it helped usher in, the Quest has grown and changed over the last 22 years. Four rules have turned into 23, and the event has become both a celebration of traditional dogsledding and an outlet for its revitalization.