https://www.thewayhome.world/photography daily 0.75 2021-12-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1639674453359-GOAYRTBHNUKGJHZ7IT4Y/Last+Days+of+the+Great+Ice.jpg Last Days of The Great Ice - Cover Photograph https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1458396388389-YX8IBLQVFIN56VKDC2OP/Dartmouth+Original+File-31.jpg Last Days of The Great Ice - Cover Photograph https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1639674453359-GOAYRTBHNUKGJHZ7IT4Y/Last+Days+of+the+Great+Ice.jpg Last Days of The Great Ice - Cover Photograph https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1639597231458-SU82A16Y8LSI3IJ37YGV/Cover%252BPhotograph.jpg Last Days of The Great Ice - Cover Photograph https://www.thewayhome.world/vanishing-point daily 0.75 2023-05-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1639674190569-2EJQOS0FT7R1STU6X3V7/Qeqertarsuq+Iceberg.jpg Last Days of the Great Ice https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1639674190569-2EJQOS0FT7R1STU6X3V7/Qeqertarsuq+Iceberg.jpg Last Days of the Great Ice https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1639674564421-L90XP0WLK6XN4A6DL98R/Last+Days+of+the+Great+Ice.jpg Last Days of the Great Ice - Last Days of the Great Ice Disko Bay, Greenland, 2014 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1459707992471-NWOMHWM18HO8Y0WYYCCW/Vanishing+Point+Gallery-48.jpg Last Days of the Great Ice https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1639598716129-LQNJZRJD9I3WPTM113QH/Vanishing%2BPoint%2BGallery-13.jpg Last Days of the Great Ice - Meltwater River, Greenland Ice sheet Greenland Ice Sheet, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1639591541059-R5EIEFQZ1U0IB7EYTQ0I/Vanishing%2BPoint%2BGallery-48.jpg Last Days of the Great Ice - Dead Glacier Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic A vast scree field marks the quick retreat of a receding glacier on Baffin Island. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1452202797772-HALBS8QI1XC0CFR8MJQE/Arctic+Dreams+-+Nunavut%2C+Canadian+Arctic.jpg Last Days of the Great Ice - Arctic Dreams - Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1459709787185-8BHKCU481PPH56ZOM0T1/Vanishing+Point+Gallery-1.jpg Last Days of the Great Ice https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1452202816690-KVM2AYDWWGKWMNU90PGN/Iceberg+at+Midnight+-+Nunavut%2C+Canadian+Arctic.jpg Last Days of the Great Ice - Glacier Silhouette at Midnight - Hudson Strait, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1452779097404-JQ1FNWDXN4AIBSNGPV1E/Last+Days+of+the+Great+Ice+-+Book+Cover.jpg Last Days of the Great Ice - Last Days of the Great Ice - Disko Bay, Greenland https://www.thewayhome.world/the-great-wanderer daily 0.75 2021-12-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586541482937-QC3GMDWS2T7SSLOKBB79/Three%2BBears%2Band%2BNowhere%2Bto%2BGo.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - No Ice, Nowhere to Go Bellot Strait, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586541482937-QC3GMDWS2T7SSLOKBB79/Three%2BBears%2Band%2BNowhere%2Bto%2BGo.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - No Ice, Nowhere to Go Bellot Strait, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586541272811-KYDHR0WCK9GA8D3YCETU/Great%2BWanderer-31.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - Stranded Polar Bear and Waterfall Akpatok Island, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic A polar bear walks the beach of Akpatok Island in Ungava Bay, where a magnificent 800 foot waterfall pours straight down from the limestone cliffs above. At their apex the cliffs reach a height of 1,000 feet. These cliffs host a nesting colony of hundreds of thousands of birds, and the bears wander back and forth beneath the cliffs, searching for eggs and fledglings fallen from the heights. If you look closely at this photograph, about halfway up the frame near the right edge you will see a small dark arch dug into the green vegetation. This is a summer den where females and cubs can rest in the cool shade. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586540625029-2MYCTXO5M8P38VOENUKA/Great%2BWanderer-2.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - The Ice Bear Baffin Bay, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic A polar bear wanders the sea ice searching for seals at the floe edge off the east coast of Bylot Island in Baffin Bay, some 450 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Beyond, a massive iceberg stands immobile, locked in the firm grasp of the sea ice. The polar bear, or nanuq - the great wanderer - has shared the sea ice with the Inuit for thousands of years. Both the people and the bears are perfectly adapted to the ice environment, and they share the same challenges to their survival as the Arctic climate changes. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1460671348585-6VY1G320T9FKY6TE5TQR/Great+Wanderer-52.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - The Polar Gaze Hudson Bay, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic The Inuit call the polar bear nanuq "the great wanderer." The iconic symbol of the Arctic ecosystem, the polar bear is dependent upon the sea ice for survival. Like the Inuit who inhabit the same environment, the bears depend upon the solid ice surface for hunting seals and for traveling. And like the Inuit many bears are adapting to the changing Arctic environment.     https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1460668400198-LSVOM95FJ9I9VTNJYRT7/Great+Wanderer-2.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - The Ice Bear Baffin Bay, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic A polar bear wanders the sea ice searching for seals at the floe edge off the east coast of Bylot Island in Baffin Bay, some 450 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Beyond, a massive iceberg stands immobile, locked in the firm grasp of the sea ice. The polar bear, or nanuq, has shared the sea ice with the Inuit for thousands of years. Both the men and the bears are perfectly adapted to the ice environment, and they share the same challenges to their survival as the Arctic climate changes. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586542023150-PC2PTEFSOKRDMZSR8MBS/The%2BGreat%2BWanderer-53.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - The New Normal Akpatok Island, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic A mother polar bear and her cub stroll past ocean waves crashing against the shoreline of Akpatok Island. As the ice diminishes, the bears must spend increasing amounts of time on shore waiting for the sea to freeze over. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586541677439-UVW3IHQ0WZ7B0HWTG5P7/Great%2BWanderer-42.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - The Face of Climate Change Lower Savage Islands, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic A starving, exhausted polar bear watches a seal rise just offshore and out of reach. I could feel the bear's resignation as there was nothing he could do. He was trapped, and freeze-up was still weeks away. A few moments later the bear closed his eyes and did I did not see him reopen them. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586541976593-HY08MNEDA26G8YB0TBMD/Great%2BWanderer-51.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - Bear Waiting at the Edge of the Sea Akpatok Island, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic A stranded polar bear stands staring out to sea from the edge of the island where he will spend the summer until solid ice forms in autumn. The warming climate and thinning ice pose a challenge to the bears, who must endure a significantly longer ice-free season than they did just a few decades ago. For some bears this means an additional three weeks of fasting until they can get out upon the ice to hunt seals.   https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586541903082-KMAEVVEO7QIB7R0YV4AM/Great%2BWanderer-24.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - Polar Bear Family at Sea Ungava Bay, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic The polar bear is the iconic symbol of the arctic, and perhaps nothing symbolizes the great changes that are occurring at the top of the world more than an image of a polar bear family at sea, dozens of miles from shore, without an ice floe in sight. When I came across this family of bears in the middle of Ungava Bay I wondered if the cubs would survive. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586541160196-RBOYN480Y3ZAX2XW84V6/Great%2BWanderer-25.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - Polar Bear Cubs at Sea Ungava Bay, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic Two young polar bear cubs hold onto their mother's back during a long open ocean swim. Polar bears are very strong swimmers. They use their large front paws, which are slightly webbed, to paddle; and they use their rear paws as rudders to maintain course. Polar bears have been seen swimming hundreds of miles from land, although they may have traveled portions of those great distances by floating on ice floes. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586541943415-K5WRYB3HFRLKEZB7YQJS/Great%2BWanderer-26.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - The Spy Hopper Ungava Bay, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic I was traveling in a small skiff off the coast of a remote island in the Canadian Arctic when I saw what looked like an ice chunk rise up out of the water. It was a polar bear rising above the surface like a spy-hopping killer whale, taking a quick look around before swimming to shore. In the United States, polar bears (ursus maritimus) are classified as a marine mammals because they spend most of their lives at sea on the ice, and they are capable of tremendous long-distance swims.   https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586541818315-7FP8YK7B7D0P1XKBZ05R/Great%2BWanderer-27.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - Ursus Maritimus Davis Strait, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic Traveling in a small skiff along the coast of an island in the Canadian Arctic on a cold, misty day, I looked to my left and watched as a chunk of ice rose like a submarine from beneath the choppy wavelets. Then, the ice started moving forward and turned into a polar bear, swimming stealthily alongside me right at the surface. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586541206324-D025AG2VVE2VKQ7R5ZW4/Great%2BWanderer-30.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - Polar Bear in the Polar Desert Beechey Island, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic A stranded polar bear sits on the bleak, barren, lifeless plain of the Polar Desert on Beechey Island in the Canadian High Arctic, just a few yards away from the frozen graves of three 19th century sailors who died here in the winter of 1845. That year the British explorer Sir John Franklin commanded an ill-fated search for the Northwest Passage aboard HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. Franklin chose to overwinter here aboard the ships, which were frozen into the ice of the protected harbor. The following year when the ice went out, the ships sailed away into the unknown. What is known is that no one survived the expedition.   https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1460668443055-OJVS19K2BEFZ0O699CC6/Great+Wanderer-29.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - Bear on the Rocks Monumental Island, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic A surprised polar bear stranded on Monumental Island in Davis Strait peers down at me as I pass by his resting place in a small skiff just a few yards away. I was circumnavigating this small rocky islet some thirty miles off the coast of Baffin Island when I apparently woke this bear from his nap. During the ice-free summer, bears save their energy and move as little as possible to keep from overheating as they wait for winter to return.   https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586541392850-ZLA5D1VM5V1L6U3RZC2S/Great%2BWanderer-32.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - Stranded Polar Bear at the Shoreline Akpatok Island, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586541321924-KQDJ5Q42DB6FK49WNU2P/Great%2BWanderer-28.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - Bear Emerging From the Sea Davis Strait, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic A polar bear looks over his shoulder as he emerges from the sea. For thousands of years polar bears have been the dominant marine mammal in the Arctic. However, the loss of sea ice is encouraging killer whales to move north into polar bear habitat where they may compete directly with the bears for seals, and ultimately challenge the bears for domination.   https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586541364523-VU4LXEIH6PXOAVAAGEYD/Great%2BWanderer-34.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - Stranded Polar Bear Beneath Massive Limestone Cliffs Akpatok Island, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1460668449961-DR6HSCWQ2X5UY2MHCCJ7/Great+Wanderer-33.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - Walrus and Stranded Bear Akpatok Island, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic A walrus surfaces just offshore of the arctic island where a polar bear is stranded for the ice-free season. Polar bears will prey upon walrus, but due to the walrus' great size and tusks, walrus do not constitute a major part of the bear's diet. Bears will prey upon walrus calves, and they will attempt to take down injured walrus, but direct attacks upon healthy adult walrus are rare.   https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1460668453205-6FH68LZA3FKJAOEQN68J/Great+Wanderer-35.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - Foraging Akpatok Island, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic Exhibiting behavior adapting to climate change, a polar bear stranded on Akpatok island in the Canadian Arctic stands on hind paws to graze upon a leafy plant called scurvy grass. Polar bears are exceptionally resourceful animals, and they will take advantage of practically any food source. Scurvy grass was eaten by 19th century sailors suffering from scurvy during long arctic sea voyages. Scurvy is a deficiency disease caused by a lack of fresh food, and the leaves of scurvy grass, rich in vitamins, provide a cure. Just like polar bears, humans still forage for scurvy grass leaves. They have a strong peppery taste similar to watercress, and are frequently used in salads in the far north https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586541449984-PGCP4GXPUIC7KPL9PR07/Great%2BWanderer-36.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - Females and Cub Avoid a Predatory Male Akpatok Island, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic Two female polar bears and a cub take a wide detour around a male polar bear marching down the beach of Akpatok Island. Many bears in the Ungava Bay area are stranded here during the ice-free season. When they share the same limited space and limited food sources, the females must be extra vigilant guarding the cubs from cannibalistic male bears. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586541505851-TTWSNJNPCUTMFZ7WIW71/Polar%2BBear%2BAmong%2BIce%2BFloes%2B-%2BNunavik.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - Polar Bear Among The Ice Floes Akpatok Island, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586541544040-79LWMS2TG7WS84O6F4O8/Great%2BWanderer-37.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - Wounded Bear Akpatok Island, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic Traveling along the shoreline of an Arctic island through the fog in a small boat, I came upon a stranded polar bear lying wounded --probably mortally-- on the beach he shares in close quarters during the ice-free season with other bears. Food stress, and competition for food with other bears, probably led to the battle that wounded and most likely killed this bear.   https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1460668458601-T21YIKH848XQNBWZTNSP/Great+Wanderer-38.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - Starving Bear Lower Savage Islands, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic Traveling in a small boat, threading my way through a chain of small, barren Arctic islands, I came across a heartbreaking scene. On the beach of one small island I saw a stranded polar bear that was clearly starving and close to death. With freeze-up still a month in the future, this bear was trapped on these rocky outcrops with no way of finding food.   https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586541597177-EAJW9P95V93RC50RF8KQ/Great%2BWanderer-39.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - Starving Polar Bear Searching For a Place to Rest Lower Savage Islands, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586541632813-6OBHKA6CIRPJPN0682FG/Great%2BWanderer-40.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - Starving Bear Spotting a Seal From Shore Lower Savage Islands, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1452622337343-IJ4LL5QROAHES82ZY6I6/PolarBearAmongIcebergs-2.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - Polar Bear and Giant Iceberg - Nunavut, Canadian Arctic A polar bear wanders the sea ice searching for seals at the floe edge off the east coast of Bylot Island in Baffin Bay, some 450 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Beyond, a massive iceberg stands immobile, locked in the firm grasp of the sea ice. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1460668465475-2HNHX2IMB8CG9HXQJGLS/Great+Wanderer-43.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - Polar Bear Summering in a Seabird Coloy Coburg Island, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic Exhibiting behavior that never been documented before, a stranded polar bear spends the ice-free season feeding upon hundreds of thousands of nesting seabirds and their eggs on Coburg Island in the Canadian High Arctic. This rare sighting demonstrates the intelligence of the polar bears and their ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions. Not all polar bears will survive the dramatic changes occurring in the Arctic, but some - like this one -will.   https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1460668468909-C3LUORPI760JRCTVP97S/Great+Wanderer-45.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - Adapting to Climate Change Coburg Island, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1460668472553-BU6MMAZ07H9CJZTG97GY/Great+Wanderer-47.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - When Seals Are No Longer on the Menu... Coburg Island, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586541709030-Q1OYQ2PEC3JK9CU1FI2V/Great%2BWanderer-48.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - ...Then Eat Seabirds Coburg Island, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1460668477489-D27HNN7OP3VTNLKWWMXI/Great+Wanderer-50.jpg A the Edge of an Ice-Free Sea - This Bear Will Make It Coburg Island, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://www.thewayhome.world/where-men-and-bears-dance daily 0.75 2020-04-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586537420791-A02SOTQ8JYXTQYV6CSTK/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-1.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Where Men and Bears Dance Puvirnituq, Nunavik, Canadian Arctic Golden evening light shines through an ice sculpture of a polar bear and an Inuk dancing together at sunset. For thousands of years the people and the bears have shared the sea ice environment, traveling upon its surface and using it as a platform for hunting seals. Both the Inuit and the bears are perfectly adapted to the ice, and both are equally affected by its' disappearance. The work of the artist who carved this sculpture perfectly captures this essential relationship between the people, the bears, and the ice. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586537420791-A02SOTQ8JYXTQYV6CSTK/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-1.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Where Men and Bears Dance Puvirnituq, Nunavik, Canadian Arctic Golden evening light shines through an ice sculpture of a polar bear and an Inuk dancing together at sunset. For thousands of years the people and the bears have shared the sea ice environment, traveling upon its surface and using it as a platform for hunting seals. Both the Inuit and the bears are perfectly adapted to the ice, and both are equally affected by its' disappearance. The work of the artist who carved this sculpture perfectly captures this essential relationship between the people, the bears, and the ice. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586538417573-8Y1S8X8Q7GKFVXMZPQSX/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-2.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Standing Bear and Inuit Hunting Camp Baffin Bay, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic A polar bear stands tall on hind legs to scan the surface of the sea ice near an Inuit hunting camp. Both the men and the bear are out on the ice hunting seals. Of all the animals the Inuit hunt, Nanuq, the polar bear, is the most respected and most prized. Hunters consider Nanuq to be wise, powerful, and almost human. For the hunters, taking a polar bear is a source of prestige, accomplishment, and pride – but the hunt is always conducted with deep respect for the bear. Polar bears have become the living symbols of climate change, and with good reason. As the planet warms, the sea ice that the bears use as a hunting platform is melting, putting the animals at risk. The same is true for the Inuit, who share the ice, and the risks associated with warming, with the bear. Because the bears are threatened by climate change, some environmental organizations are calling for a complete ban on polar bear hunting. The Inuit disagree. They have shared the ice with the bears for thousands of years, and they carefully monitor the bear populations. Moreover, no one knows more about Nanuq than they do, and they feel that their culture is endangered by these well-intentioned but misguided outsiders. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586537497942-0FZL6K967DYZXVJDF9US/Inuit%2BLife%2Bin%2BQaanaaq-4.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - An Inuit Hunter Back From a Day of Hunting on the Sea Ice Qaanaaq, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539613242-LVTPUK7J20TOO0ULMSBQ/Dog%2BTeams%2BTraveling%2BBeneath%2BCliffs.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Inuit Hunters Traveling Over The Sea Ice Thule, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539672964-X69NJR3MBUWL877EH8TR/Thomas%2BScanning%2BSea%2BIce%2BFor%2BSeals%2B-%2BThule%252C%2BGreenland.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Tomas Scanning The Sea Ice For Seals Thule, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539644822-HUPLLW5U6HSHZSNING87/Siorapaluk.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Arriving at Siorapaluk Thule, Greenland An Inuit dog sled travelling over the sea ice arrives at Siorapaluk, Greenland. Siorapaluk is the northernmost village on the planet. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539504813-4HIWNCV3PPRR5DJVO20C/Twelve%2BDogs%2BRunning.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Twelve Dogs Running Thule, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586538265741-Q5F070IZI9MHWUW3FWKK/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-27.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Inside the Snowhouse Puvirnituq, Nunavik, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539537561-YSI1O4XAE5RRGIQ6ELW9/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-28.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Snowhouse at Night Puvirnituq, Nunavik, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539466657-2HSY94U2EVGF3A6KG7KH/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-4.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Polar Bear Skull Gjoa Haven, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic Just like the polar bear, the Inuit are hunters, and the polar bear and the polar bear hunt are central to their culture. The bear hunt is a traditional activity that ensures cultural cohesion and provides sustenance for the community. Traditional knowledge dictates that no part of the bear is wasted. The meat is shared with the community, and the best parts are offered to the elders. The bones are made into tools and handicrafts; the hide is fashioned into clothing; and various other parts are used to make traditional implements. In keeping with long-held cultural traditions, Inuit still hunt polar bears as part of their subsistence lifestyle. Hunters pay respect to Nanuq's spirit by hanging the skin in an honored place. In the past, if the bear was male, the hunter offered the bear's spirit tools such as knives and bow-drills; if the bear was female, the hunter offered knives, skin-scrapers, and needle cases. Today in Nunavut there is a lottery for hunting tags. In each village, names are drawn randomly out of a box, and the winners have 48 hours to successfully kill a polar bear. If they fail their tag goes to another hunter. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1494274710601-7G07H2M84Y34S1IMFJZN/Putlaq+-+Thule%2C+Greenland.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Putlaq Thule, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586538207612-6NH6BP9K4J3IICYRGJSV/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-11.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Look to the Future, Remember the Past Kangiqsujuaq, Nunavik, Canadian Arctic An Inuit elder looks towards the waters of Hudson Strait as his dog snoozes at his feet. To thrive in their challenging Arctic environment, the Inuit rely upon the wisdom and guidance of traditional knowledge passed down for millennia. This traditional ecological and adaptive knowledge, called Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit in Inuktitut, includes not only a road map for navigating the physical landscape, but also guidance for safely negotiating the spiritual landscape as well. For Inuit the two are the same, encompassed by a sentient, animate, mystic power permeating all of existence they call Sila. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539437837-CY3LOLTBIBKGAQ7NCJ2P/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-57.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Inuit Sila Puvirnituq, Nunavik, Canadian Arctic I have heard Sila described this way: “Sila is our concept for the weather, the climate, the mind, consciousness. It is the universal order where man is in unity with nature. Sila is the shared life that the sea, wind, mountains, animals, and humans possess. When you share consciousness with nature you treat nature with respect.”   https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539574496-G7PJ6PQRPJHIHXM7N2HQ/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-40.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Berry Picking North Greenland In Inuit culture, elders are revered for their wisdom acquired over many years. Young people look to them to learn about the interrelationships between all living things and how to navigate the physical and spiritual worlds. By contrast, in modern industrial society, elders are not seen as sources of wisdom. As columnist Ruth Marcus writes in The Washington Post, "the explosion and primacy of technology have served to reduce the value, both real and perceived, of experience." https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539379302-UKLLQZYITMI5ASJU1F5T/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-5.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Komatic on Thinning Ice Baffin Bay, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic An Inuit komatic, or sled, sits atop thinning sea ice. Decades ago Inuit hunters reported environmental changes to the scientific community, noting the thinning sea ice, warmer summers and shorter winters, changing animal migrations, melting permafrost, and eroding shorelines. Harvesting game and traveling “on the land” became increasingly dangerous, forcing the Inuit to adapt their traditional way of life to the shifting conditions. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539406117-VMYPY3BANLEUYU3FIQDZ/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-20.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Hunters on the Winter Trail Coast of Nunatsiavut, Canadian Arctic Inuit caribou hunters head back to camp after a successful hunt. As they face the challenges posed by climate change, the Inuit must adapt once again to changes forced upon them from the outside. But they are confident they will succeed, for they have shown amazing resilience and adaptability in the past. The changes faced by the Inuit have been rapid and much more recent than most people realize. In many of the communities I visit, the elders were born and raised in nomadic hunting camps “out on the land,” living in skin tents and snow houses as their families moved with the game and the seasons. Many lived a mostly nomadic existence well into the 1960s and 1970s. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586538343655-TEDGAJB5ZV5CYN3CSAL8/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-17.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - The Fan Hitch Puvirnituq, Nunavik, Canadian Arctic In the Canadian and Greenland arctic regions, the traditional way to harness sled dogs is with the fan hitch. Each dog is tethered to the sled by an individual tugline so that when they run they spread out in a fan shape in front of the sled. The fan hitch gives the dogs plenty of room to maneuver around rough ice, cracks, open water, and any other obstacles on the sea ice and tundra. During the 1950s and 1960s, Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Quebec government officials slaughtered thousands of sled dogs in what is now Nunavik, the Inuit homeland in northern Quebec. Both federal and provincial government policy was to move the Inuit from their nomadic hunting camps to permanent settlements. In order to speed their assimilation, the government agencies destroyed the Inuit people's main form of transportation. By the early 1970s the Inuit sled dog was nearly wiped out in Nunavik. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539760922-TPMC8ZCOUDWQUM6HM7P2/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-9.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Traditional Inuit Kayaker Ilimanaq, Greenland Throughout the Arctic the Inuit are adept at picking and choosing technologies that best suit their needs, and often traditional clothing and equipment is still used by choice. Seals and walrus are sometimes hunted from dogsleds in winter; narwhal from kayaks in summer. Some hunters choose to wear polar bear fur pants and sealskin mittens and boots rather than store-bought items. The equipment they use comes down to personal choice, but their fundamental knowledge of the environment, their survival skills, and the way they find and harvest their food has not changed in a thousand years. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539317796-4O1EADU5GZ71FONROUQO/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-56.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Aayu Peter - Hunter, Lawyer, Sealskin Fashion Designer, Member of the Order of Canada Ilulissat, Greenland Aayu Peter models one of her own sealskin parkas in Ilulissat, Greenland. Aayu is a member of the Order of Canada, an honor bestowed upon her by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in recognition of her outstanding achievement, dedication to the community, and service to the nation. As hunters of the northern ice, the Inuit are experiencing the effects of changes in Sila, and the cultural impact is significant. Most Inuit see themselves as part of a thriving modern hunting society, and they form their self-perceptions in terms of their relationship to Sila. As Sila becomes unpredictable it is cause for concern. A large proportion of the Inuit diet comes from the land and sea, and these “country foods” provide more than healthy nutrition; they are the foundation of Inuit cultural identity. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1461091285242-VVL6MSW9A8QO2FSPCMEQ/Where+Men+and+Bears+Dance-23.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - A Winter's Night in Puvirnituq Puvirnituq, Nunavik, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539707411-7HOOX26X3VW71F6HJNUC/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-13.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Old and New Resolute, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539347231-C4YHY51I7LGDJU1YVQKK/Inuit%2BLife%2Bin%2BQaanaaq%2BThule%252C%2BGreenland-8.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Inuit Sled Dog Team on the Sea Ice, Pulling Hard Thule, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539237596-TW4ZHEG69UB2EHVBND2N/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-14.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - The Drum Dancer Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539733283-9P0YQYB62X947IYJ1OYB/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-15.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - The Country Music Singer Puvirnituq, Nunavik, Canadian Arctic Scotch-Irish American country music and traditional folk music from the British Isles were introduced to the Inuit by whalers and traders in the late 1800s. At the same time, the Inuit adopted new instruments such as squeeze-box accordions, fiddles, and guitars. Today these new musical styles and instruments are considered part of traditional Inuit culture. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539794079-M38ONL2GMSGI7RG5R2GM/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-16.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - The Sled Masters Puvirnituq, Nunavik, Canadian Arctic Inuit hunters stand with their teams on the sea ice of northeastern Hudson Bay at a community event celebrating the return of the sled dog to Nunavik. Many elders remember being left with no means of transport after their sled dogs were destroyed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Quebec officials in the mid-20th century. Not only did the dogs provide transportation, they were the hunter's partners. When hunting polar bears the dogs would be released to chase the bear down and distract it as the hunter approached. The dogs could find their way home in whiteouts and blizzards, saving hunter's lives. Today many Inuit feel strongly about retaining their cultural traditions, and dog teams are once again are common in the villages.   https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586538466076-0NUDBWUYOTTM56LAD9D5/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-22.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - The Winner Puvirnituq, Nunavik, Canadian Arctic Many hands lift up the winner of a community festival sled dog race. These community festivals promote the culture of dog team travel, honor the elders who grew up living out on the land, and stimulate young people's interest in sled dogs and in Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit - traditional Inuit ecological knowledge. For the Inuit, the sled dog was the key to survival. For hundreds of years the people depended upon the dogs to locate seal breathing holes and birthing lairs under the ice; to track and catch wounded prey; to alert the people to the presence of polar bears; for keeping bears away from camp; and for carrying belongings on their backs in summer and hauling heavily laden sleds over the snow and ice in winter. Without their partners the sled dogs, life for the people in the far north would have been very difficult indeed. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586538503452-HGDYLY74M3J5NEPW36ZL/A%2BStroll%2BInto%2BTown.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - A Stroll Into Town Disko Fjord, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1461091292359-YUN56PU4MNHSEDJ5LAU7/Where+Men+and+Bears+Dance-25.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Traditional Wood and Sod House Pond Inlet, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1461091295221-41J3Z6HTZN5UUEOQWWOP/Where+Men+and+Bears+Dance-26.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Building the Snowhouse Puvirnituq, Nunavik, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539185493-FBAXXHS286XC17F4CEYP/Where%2BMen%2BPano%2B2.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Inuit Hunting Camp at the Floe Edge Baffin Bay, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586538545065-AFMBK86PLS8VSDLZ3586/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-30.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Inuit Hunting Camp on the Sea Ice Baffin Bay, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1502815567463-2K9USFK1VSBL5EEFC8QN/Qalaseq.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Qalaseq Thule, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539135486-RQQRWY0B5A18CSZG7C1E/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-32.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Just Being Kids Pangnirtung, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1461182671139-EQGMBBHPXYSH4YBW19MW/Where+Men+and+Bears+Dance-55.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Young Hunter Abloviak Fjord, Nunavik, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539068222-MA8GE37QAEU9ANPU3M6D/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-31.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Chiseling For Fresh Water Puvirnituq, Nunavik, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539092372-3PJQOATT08TYGTQ02HJQ/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-36.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Searching For Seal Holes Baffin Bay, Nunavik, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539023806-44JLNYQPKFHWW03AD962/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-43.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Community Feast Kuujjuaq, Nunavik, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586538589359-E28PDIEFCSBXF0B99FVK/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-44.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Inuit Girl Puvirnituq, Nunavik, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1502729216285-FURKDZ6J3TYAR2L5V81Q/Nukapiajuak.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Nukapiajuak Thule, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586538960484-ML7CYZB02OOYENCGVOAB/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-45.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Sea Ice Meltwater at Midnight Eclipse Sound, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586538986510-6SEZ5DFUJNQ3D4PD2KDC/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-46.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Siblings and Future Sled Dogs Qiqiktarjuaq, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic These puppies taking turns gnawing on a caribou skull will grow up to be muscular Inuit sled dogs. The Inuit sled dogs are generally high-spirited and friendly, but they also have an aggressive side and fight amongst themselves to establish dominance. A team organizes itself much the way a wolf pack does, with an alpha male and an alpha female at the top. The rest of the dogs in the team take their places somewhere in the hierarchy. The future of the Inuit sled dog in the Canadian Arctic is secure for now, but as the ice becomes less stable and more dangerous, the need for the dogs may diminish. In parts of Greenland where the ice is no longer trustworthy some hunters have been forced to destroy their teams. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539838919-HGNQZQHGNIRGBBYOT08E/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-47.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - With Her Hands Full Gjoa Haven, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586538621281-8MJQGYSFE3KRQWW3PU6Z/Sled%252BDogs%252Bon%252Bthe%252BTrail.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Sled Dogs at Work Thule, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539277958-TKZR45R4DH6ZOJLF24BC/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-48.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - In The Amauti Puvirnituq, Nunavik, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586538928232-Z6JRHVGG1C7D7OFEOH3R/Where%2BMen%2Band%2BBears%2BDance-49.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Netsilik Inuit Girl Gjoa Haven, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1494274972657-CDIU2MDX64Z1AXQRH9IY/Tomas+-+Thule%2C+Greenland.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Tomas Thule, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1485284712338-725T2XVKF6ER5OY69SWJ/Dog+Team+Running+in+Snow+-+Puvirnituq%2C+Quebec.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Dog Team Running on the Sea Ice Puvirnituq, Nunavik, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586538660247-ROOVINWDW6RYMRPI1KFN/Inuit%2BLife-5.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Hunting The Sea Ice 1 Eclipse Sound, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539869208-WEKYRSJWYO9SI4AHTVQ5/Inuit%2BLife-2.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Hunting The Sea Ice 3 Eclipse Sound, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1493829874501-YAN24879H2I7RI1PI9BM/Inuit+Life+in+Qaanaaq+Thule%2C+Greenland-7.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Inuit Dogsleds Traveling the Sea Ice Thule, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586537614936-9UQUR6Z53JKBCRXZCJSA/Qalaseq%2BPulling%2Ba%2BCaribou%2BOut%2Bof%2BThe%2BMountains%2B-%2BThule%252C%2BGreenland.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Qalaseq Pulling a Caribou Out of The Mountains Above Inglefield Fjord Thule, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1485287957199-08Z4E30OZ2SM3C6VQZTF/Fresh+Catch+-+Sissimiut%2C+Greenland.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Fresh Catch Sisimiut, Greenland As the sea ice becomes less reliable as a hunting platform, many Greenland Inuit are spending more time catching fish for food security. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1497026732342-NZTF12RUEFLHQYLO66H7/The+Fast+Runner.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - The Fast Runner Puvirnituq, Nunavik, Canadian Arctic A young Inuk wins a footrace over the sea ice at a community festival celebrating Inuit culture. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1493825013909-7IEPRH10PVFMYTYSQQCW/Inuit+Sled+Dogs+Sound+The+Alarm+-+Baffin+Island+Floe+Edge%2C+Nunavut.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Sharing the Sea Ice Baffin Island Floe Edge, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1493828893737-0CKULY82CSRGMIYRQJFP/Inuit+Life+in+Qaanaaq-1.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Girls Sledding Qaanaaq, Thule, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586537647019-4GS6W3JEOY3A6FLO5XS9/Inuit%2BLife%2Bin%2BQaanaaq-3.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Greenland Sled Dog Qaanaaq, Thule, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1493829748687-IUT6LHNNCR6D45WA9WXA/Inuit+Life+in+Qaanaaq+Thule%2C+Greenland-5.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Mural in the Church Siorapaluk, Thule, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1493829817399-THDN0PY2UGDK4CC6QPTV/Inuit+Life+in+Qaanaaq+Thule%2C+Greenland-6.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Inuit Hunter Leading His Dogsled Onto The Ice Qaanaaq, Thule, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1493830013780-2IOMTR984Q49CHOVJMUF/Inuit+Life+in+Qaanaaq+Thule%2C+Greenland-10.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Inuit Sled Driver Traveling Through Rough Sea Ice Thule, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586537679661-XL6B5FD1NU0M2X0NSA9T/Putlaq%2BButchers%2Ba%2BCaribou%2BWhile%2BThe%2BSled%2BDogs%2BWatch%2B-%2BInglefield%2BFjord%252C%2BGreenland.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Putlaq Butchering Caribou Inglefield Fjord, Thule, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1496945582932-K4XN54YV8WNPIER3QXJF/Hunter+on+%26+Islands+Bay.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - On The Labrador Sea in Winter Nunatsiavut, Canadian Arctic An Inuit hunter travels over the sea ice of Seven Islands Bay off the northern coast of Nunatsiavut, Labrador, in ferocious sub-zero winds. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1497025492838-1IJZCPG6SJ3WTJDSLN52/POlar+Bear+and+Sled+Dog.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - A Polar Face Off Baffin Island Floe Edge, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586538725313-VJ4VW759GNXAYECSTJHK/Ilonguok%2BJumping%2Bon%2Bthe%2BSled.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Ilonguok Jumps on the Sled Thule, Greenland Inuit dogsleds do not have brakes, and so the dogs must be extremely well trained to stay put when told to do so, and to go when given the command. Once the command to go is given, the dogs take off rapidly, and the driver must be ready to jump on the sled as it passes him or else he will be walking for a long way. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586539916748-82CHUUWX7HX7Q08WUM0W/Traveling%2BOver%2BTrackless%2BSea%2BIce.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Traveling Over Trackless Sea Ice Thule, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586537716988-MM4F45UXJ2WPYXWJ2P0K/Tobias%2Band%2BCaribou.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Tobias and Caribou Thule, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1505155917601-BK1XNXMWOX4N5P1M1NH0/Old+Inuit+Tent+Ring+-+Hudson+Strait%2C+Nunavut.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Inuit Tent Ring Hudson Strait, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586538043378-G0L8OKPDUMAOLMQ5FYBJ/LastDaysAdditional-32.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Inuit Fishing Boat and Iceberg Uummannaq, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1497365747862-KN6P0QKQS87OY2LLF0HY/Ancient+Alaskans.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Ancient Alaskans Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska The remains of ancient Inupiat houses protrude from the tundra of the coastal plain at the edge of the Beaufort Sea in Arctic Alaska. These ruins are in the contested 1002 Area - the portion of the refuge that pro and anti oil development groups have fought over for years. In the distance, the high peaks of the Brooks Range rise over the coastal plain. Historically the Inupiat have utilized the entire region, from the sea to the mountain headwaters. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1505936631629-ISS3XQYT64VAQB7U0HZR/Ancient+Thule+Whalebone+House.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance - Ancient Thule Whalebone House Resolute, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586538804591-2X9B4C6NY7TYPO44DM82/Aayu%2BDriving%2BZodiac.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586538761567-NQZ5LTLDENHFOOTOVAII/Boy%2Band%2BPuppy.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586538838626-QDJGDBH9HC3D9N38R1DS/Flying%2Ba%2BKite.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1586538866638-YUXKXJU39L1Q558PSQPU/Hunter%2BSitting%2Bon%2BSled.jpg Where Men and Bears Dance https://www.thewayhome.world/home-3 daily 0.75 2023-05-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/57338c9c04426238cff162e3/1468875849236-2BB2XP56SQ33393K7HRE/test-2.jpg Home https://www.thewayhome.world/alaskas-climate-refugees daily 0.75 2017-12-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859740656-XAOUK13KIORXRA5GS434/Kaktovik+Bears+-1.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees - Bear at the Bone Pile Kaktovik, Alaska Each autumn polar bears flee the receding pack ice and reap the bounty of the Inupiat fall whaling season. The village of kaktovik is allowed to harvest three bowhead whales during the season, and the bears congregate here to feed off of what the Inupiat don't use. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859740656-XAOUK13KIORXRA5GS434/Kaktovik+Bears+-1.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees - Bear at the Bone Pile Kaktovik, Alaska Each autumn polar bears flee the receding pack ice and reap the bounty of the Inupiat fall whaling season. The village of kaktovik is allowed to harvest three bowhead whales during the season, and the bears congregate here to feed off of what the Inupiat don't use. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859739806-PVZKXUX6OT0G4C0E81CH/Kaktovik+Bears+-2.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1513803382595-U0KHZLGD9IAZVLELWD8T/Kaktovik+Bears-25.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees - A Fragile Sanctuary Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 1002 Area, Kaktovik, Alaska A family of polar bears swims in formation in the 1002 Area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - the portion of the refuge that the oild and gas industry and its allies in government have tried to develop for nearly four decades. These bears are heading towards the remains of three bowhead whale carcasses harvested by the Inupiat during the traditional fall whale hunt. Both the bears and the Inupiat depend upon the whale hunt for their survival. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859746825-R81JV7RF0FL6E4USQ2EV/Kaktovik+Bears+-3.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508952928316-VFXTNIHL953AHYL0JSC8/Kaktovik+Bears+-33.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859749361-6O1EI40HO5ZR7DP5O2XQ/Kaktovik+Bears+-4.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859754833-XHYDU7ZKLFH8Q9HD13BM/Kaktovik+Bears+-5.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859754909-3RL9A8PK1BBAA7IDS25N/Kaktovik+Bears+-6.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859761114-44V7EDHCNN27CW7BATLA/Kaktovik+Bears+-7.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859760200-OLEKQULBQY2JQ8D01T9A/Kaktovik+Bears+-8.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859768599-PWAEZAXW335ZWTCJHVF6/Kaktovik+Bears+-9.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859767633-G2AH5RJZFB2O342RWFEJ/Kaktovik+Bears+-10.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859772933-XF3U3WI8EB1M176BC38V/Kaktovik+Bears+-11.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859774441-KJ46KT7IVPP2JA50CXSK/Kaktovik+Bears+-12.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859777960-JSGAZN3L3D6TD7B0QJAF/Kaktovik+Bears+-13.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508952945869-8QFUI8IFLN9XE5APU955/Kaktovik+Bears+-34.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508953014154-46YRIDCR5IOYYTRA6G0B/Kaktovik+Bears+-36.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859780626-XFTKFK9EE9U329TSVJJX/Kaktovik+Bears+-14.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859786992-DLAQWQV9VUBG7E92UMXE/Kaktovik+Bears+-15.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1510764661255-3T5BHH92EWKE27NNQI4X/Kaktovik+Bears+-16.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees - The Animals Need Ice to exist "The animals need ice to exist," says Inupiat hunter and guide Robert Thompson. "It's sad that an animal that has been here thousands of years may die out in my lifetime." https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859789462-I45FMIQN3CB5SKIK411X/Kaktovik+Bears+-17.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859795179-5F5X7FXQM2DQ0ROWRRZC/Kaktovik+Bears+-18.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859797421-S53B3S8F1R89BFGZ3J49/Kaktovik+Bears+-19.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508952979865-2QK51PWHLHARK86922I9/Kaktovik+Bears+-35.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859797375-45LRCA83NF9XRPR2SL89/Kaktovik+Bears+-20.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859801021-WXK48AOTL0MALHA9B0GO/Kaktovik+Bears+-21.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859804210-JTF07UTUOGVUQN0O1I1Y/Kaktovik+Bears+-22.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508867858283-YTAWUA3V5RWAOEQ4MU1Z/Kaktovik+Bears+-23.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859810774-O704ZSWAHN5J9OO6RZ2O/Kaktovik+Bears+-24.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859817476-1HUO2TF0CL71HM9BOAOC/Kaktovik+Bears+-26.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859820149-42ULXN8YWFVWTTB4B012/Kaktovik+Bears+-27.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859824659-4CINJ07IHYEE4TJ8DMMU/Kaktovik+Bears+-28.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859824986-3AN9D40ZMQVRK1R1CZNM/Kaktovik+Bears+-29.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859830767-LYXE2S3FSSGR8D7ZC9S5/Kaktovik+Bears+-30.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859832024-CMRNSP2NH2DEYWWYLK3H/Kaktovik+Bears+-31.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508859833116-LKEA2BJY9K6WXCLAZEUG/Kaktovik+Bears+-32.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508953037345-BOGM1A8EPC0WANWQMWW9/Kaktovik+Bears+-37.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1508867745545-HDLRNNSPWL6UUJX28B42/Kaktovik+Bears+-25.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1513355513475-DBXAPK1NFO5WQVILRBCZ/Kaktovik+Bears+-+reduced-41.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees - A Vulnerable Minority Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, kaktovik, Alaska "Without public outcry for strong federal intervention and support for this small minority, the forces arrayed against the survival of their culture are too blind and too powerful to be deterred." - Peter Matthiessen https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1513803564611-4R4G9WDL0C5X352F7K7O/Kaktovik+Bears-38.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1513803680759-FYJVV0KQ9KJM52TS3E12/Kaktovik+Bears+-+reduced-40.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1513803611955-MGVYKBJSNAPPSET537OT/Kaktovik+Bears-13.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1513803644354-L8H0BPAH5JWLIUOXFDXU/Kaktovik+Bears-23.jpg Epilogue: Alaska's Climate Refugees https://www.thewayhome.world/umijujaq-video-clip daily 0.75 2018-10-28 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/t/5bd5c8134785d302729c9c68/1540736677672/ Umijujaq Video Clip https://static1.squarespace.com/static/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/5bd5c683ec212d4d8806a00e/5bd5c6a5eef1a139a209b267/1540736677672/ Umijujaq Video Clip https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540737030559-BQXXJRPROPHT5K3BNE5C/image-asset.jpeg Umijujaq Video Clip - Umijujaq Video Clip https://www.thewayhome.world/new-gallery daily 0.75 2018-11-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540413315152-QVK3PZ6IXXKTUJ5VLSOU/Umijujaq-1.jpg Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Sustainability, and a New Way Forward - Visiting the Inuit Homeland Umijujaq, Nunavik, Quebec Ecotourists exit the little Twin Otter aircraft that brought them to Umijujaq. Covering over 10,000 square miles, Tursujuq National Park, the largest in the province, is located near the shores of Hudson Bay and the Inuit community of Umiujaq. Traces of human activity dating back 3,000 years have been found in the area, as well as evidence of Inuit and Cree trading posts. The Inuit of Umijujaq assisted in the creation of the park, choosing a sustainable economy based upon traditional culture and a pristine natural environment rather than a short-lived and environmentally destructive economy based on hydropower and mineral extraction. They encourage visitors to experience the captivating beauty of this immense territory and cultural crossroads defined by the spectacular Hudson cuestas, Lac Tasiujaq with its brackish tidal waters (a haven for seal and beluga), and Lac Wiyâshâkimî, a double meteor impact basin and the second largest natural lake in Québec. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540413315152-QVK3PZ6IXXKTUJ5VLSOU/Umijujaq-1.jpg Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Sustainability, and a New Way Forward - Visiting the Inuit Homeland Umijujaq, Nunavik, Quebec Ecotourists exit the little Twin Otter aircraft that brought them to Umijujaq. Covering over 10,000 square miles, Tursujuq National Park, the largest in the province, is located near the shores of Hudson Bay and the Inuit community of Umiujaq. Traces of human activity dating back 3,000 years have been found in the area, as well as evidence of Inuit and Cree trading posts. The Inuit of Umijujaq assisted in the creation of the park, choosing a sustainable economy based upon traditional culture and a pristine natural environment rather than a short-lived and environmentally destructive economy based on hydropower and mineral extraction. They encourage visitors to experience the captivating beauty of this immense territory and cultural crossroads defined by the spectacular Hudson cuestas, Lac Tasiujaq with its brackish tidal waters (a haven for seal and beluga), and Lac Wiyâshâkimî, a double meteor impact basin and the second largest natural lake in Québec. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540413315081-U31QM4VJW91N4CIODW3S/Umijujaq-2.jpg Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Sustainability, and a New Way Forward - Cultural and Environmental Tourism Umijujaq, Nunavik, Quebec Tourists and residents disembark from the Air Inuit Twin Otter aircraft and head towards the little Umijujaq terminal. The people of Umijuaq recognize that their culture and their homeland is the driver and enabler of a sustainable economy. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540413317495-SGF6MA7O8K6SJ9DFDSW8/Umijujaq-3.jpg Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Sustainability, and a New Way Forward - Umijujaq Umijujaq, Nunavik, Quebec Tursujuq National Park is in Umiujaq’s back yard. Established in 1986, this young village was created following the negotiations that led up to the signing of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement in 1975. In the early 1980s, with the Great Whale River hydroelectric project threatening their landscape and culture, the Inuit requested relocation to a new community north of Kujjuarapik. Nearly one third of the Inuit from Kujjuarapik moved 100 miles north to Umiujaq in 1986. Today, some 450 people live in the village, a place where they preserve their traditional way of life in an area where fish and game are not threatened by industrial development. Here, the language is Inuktitut, and subsistence activities are still central to the way of life. Most hunting and fishing takes place in the Tasiujaq Lake area, and the primary catches are marine mammals, caribou, grouse, waterfowl and fish. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540327639477-7GIGG94GQF2KDGUXSKCE/Tursujuq+National+Park%2C+Nunavik-13.jpg Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Sustainability, and a New Way Forward - Assistant Park Wardens Samson Crow (age 16), and Nathan Kettler (age 17) Tursujuq National Park, Nunavik, Quebec When the Inuit from Kujjuarapik moved north and created the village of Umijujaq, they did so out of fear that Hydro-Quebec and industrial development would ruin their ancestral way of life and the environment that supported it. In order to forestall Hydro-Quebec’s plans to develop their new homeland, the Inuit of Umijujaq worked to create a new kind of economy based upon their traditional culture and their pristine environment. They put their influence behind the creation of Tursujuq National Park, protecting the environment they depend upon while creating economic opportunities in the sustainable cultural and environmental tourism industry. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540327462877-UDR25LV44FDF61T1NEN0/Tursujuq+National+Park%2C+Nunavik-1.jpg Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Sustainability, and a New Way Forward - Charlie Qumarluq and Young Hunters Umijujaq, Nunavik, Quebec Charlie Qumarluq (far left) an Inuit elder in Umijujaq, Nunavik, Quebec, prepares to take some young hunters out on the land to hunt narwhal and catch whitefish. A respected elder, Charlie is a font of knowledge about traditional Inuit ways. The Inuit have thrived in what is now Tursujuq National Park for thousands of years. The ancestors of the Inuit and Cree first occupied the region some 3,000 years ago. In the 18th century, hunters explored the area and set up camps near Tasiujaq Lake, Little Whale River, and Great Whale River. Since the Cree and Inuit had such different lifestyles, contact between the two groups was limited; the Inuit preferring to hunt marine animals along the coast and the Cree preffering to remain inland where there was more forest cover. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540327482312-T1ZUC7ZH4I5L6E2F4XX8/Tursujuq+National+Park%2C+Nunavik-2.jpg Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Sustainability, and a New Way Forward - Freighter Canoes Umijujaq, Nunavik, Quebec Charlie Qumarluq and a group of young Inuit hunters prepare to head out onto the waters of Hudson Bay in their Nor-West freighter canoes. Used throughout the arctic and sub-arctic, over many decades these hand-made canvas-covered cedar canoes have become the traditional craft of the North and have largely replaced the skin boats used by the Inuit up until the mid-20th century. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540327498943-AUAAUH4T26ZOE0GVN2F9/Tursujuq+National+Park%2C+Nunavik-3.jpg Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Sustainability, and a New Way Forward - Charlie Qumarluk Umijujaq, Nunavik, Quebec Held in high regard by the by the young people in Unijujaq and other communities in the Hudson Bay region, Charlie is a skilled hunter, the keeper of Inuit traditions, and a strong mentor to Inuit youth. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540327623550-KPVRJGVGYN7ARSHU4PLC/Tursujuq+National+Park%2C+Nunavik-4.jpg Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Sustainability, and a New Way Forward - Heading to Nastapoka Falls Umijujaq Nunavik, Quebec A group of park visitors prepares to board the Tursujuq National Park powerboat for a day trip to the 100 foot high Nastapoka Falls. The trip will take the visitors up the east coast of Hudson Bay and alongside the nearby Nastapoka Islands. Many species of birds, such as common loons, eider ducks and peregrine falcons find summer shelter and nest on the abrupt, rocky cliffs plunging into Nastapoka Sound. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540327623666-B4MI91OCF4EPJR7TE71Q/Tursujuq+National+Park%2C+Nunavik-5.jpg Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Sustainability, and a New Way Forward - Nathan Kettler and Bobby Tooktoo Umijujaq, Nunavik, Quebec Nathan Kettler, assistant park warden, age 17, and Bobby Tooktoo, park warden, age 25, are employees of Tursujuq National Park. The park was created by the Inuit and Cree of northern Quebec to protect their traditional hunting grounds and way of life, to keep large-scale development out, and to build an economy around their traditional culture and spectacular unspoiled natural setting. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540758580390-4I8FH72USS3NXC0AAK7D/Tursujuq+National+Park%2C+Nunavik-6.jpg Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Sustainability, and a New Way Forward - Nathan Kettler at Nastapoka Falls Tursujuq National Park assistant park warden Nathan Kettler stands in front of Nastapoka Falls, a 100-foot-high waterfall plummeting into the waters of Hudson Bay. At age 17, Nathan is a skilled hunter and guide who is proud of his culture and tradtions and enjoys introducing visitors to his people’s culture and landscape. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540758551685-2X1DB1R4B3KWMRAGZ8BV/Tursujuq+National+Park%2C+Nunavik-7.jpg Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Sustainability, and a New Way Forward - Introducing his Homeland Tursujuq national Park, Nunavik, Quebec Inuit Assistant park warden Nathan Kettler shows photographer and filmmaker Robin Tapley the upper reaches of Nastapoka Falls, where the Nastapoka River flows from the Hudson Bay uplands across the tundra to the Hudson Bay coast. Inuit have shaped the identity and history of Northern Québec, as confirmed by the many archaeological sites catalogued throughout the region. These sites provide evidence of traditional knowledge and the ingenuity of many generations to adapt to a rugged environment. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540327632964-X3DR5Q4ZW1KSY96410ST/Tursujuq+National+Park%2C+Nunavik-8.jpg Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Sustainability, and a New Way Forward - Nastapoka Falls - A Hydro-Electric Project Averted Tursujuq National Park, Nunavik, Quebec For many years Hydro-Quebec, a public utility that manages the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity in Quebec, planned to harness the electricity generating power of the Nastapoka River and Nastapoka Falls. Of course, it was precisely because of the threat Hydro-Quebec posed to their environment and way of life that the Inuit of Umijujaq moved north to protect and preserve their land and way of life. In 2012, The Inuit succeeded in creating Tursujuq National Park which encompasses the entire watershed of the Nastapoka River, thereby making it off-limits to hydro-development. Hydro-Quebec was formed by the Government of Quebec in 1944, and the company soon began making massive investments in environmentally damaging hydro-electric projects such as Churchill Falls in Labrador and the James Bay Project in northern Quebec. Today Hydro-Quebec operates 63 hydroelectric power stations. More than 40 percent of Canada’s water resources are in Québec, and Hydro-Québec is the fourth largest hydropower producer in the world. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540758609563-GR0GE6763K5B8Y0C8C0F/Tursujuq+National+Park%2C+Nunavik-9.jpg Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Sustainability, and a New Way Forward - Nathan Kettler and Stephen Loring Tursujuq National Park Inuit assistant park warden Nathan Kettler and Smithsonian Museum arctic archeologist Stephen Loring take a break during a backcountry excursion “out on the land” to explore portions of Tursujuq National Park north of the village of Umijujaq. As with all Nunavik parks, the virtually unchanged natural environment of Tursujuq National Park makes it a rare destination in the modern world. The park offers genuine ecotourism adventures led by local guides who are proud to promote the many distinct features of their homeland and their culture. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540327634486-I2VICOAVEYUNX4KGXRF1/Tursujuq+National+Park%2C+Nunavik-10.jpg Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Sustainability, and a New Way Forward - Fishing Trip Tursujuq National Park, Nunavik, Quebec Suvaki Tooktoo, park administrative technician, age 35 (front), and Putulik Tooktoo, park guide, age 27, cast for whitefish in the pristine waters of Richmond Gulf (called Tasiujaq by the Inuit). Rich in marine life, Tasiujaq supports both saltwater and freshwater fish. Arctic and brook char compete for habitat here, though the brook char dominates most of Tasiujaq’s tributaries. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540327636638-JCN93NOYSA8UIWJ2GEKH/Tursujuq+National+Park%2C+Nunavik-11.jpg Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Sustainability, and a New Way Forward - Traditional Harpoon Tursujuq National Park, Nunavik, Quebec Assistant park warden Nathan Kettler attaches the spear head to a harpoon used for hunting beluga whale. In Nunavik beluga are still hunted in the traditional way - by harpooning the whale with a detachable harpoon head attached to a long line with a float. When the whale is struck by the harpoon, the spear head embeds into the whales flesh, thereby attaching the line and float. The float keeps the whale from submerging, and the whale eventually tires, allowing the Inuit hunter to approach it in his canoe and shoot it with a firearm. This method of hunting is effective, and produces very few if any wounded and escaped animals. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540327638664-WT4I69GFERADVJ0V9I2M/Tursujuq+National+Park%2C+Nunavik-12.jpg Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Sustainability, and a New Way Forward - Preparing for a Beluga Hunt Tursujuq National Park, Nunavik, Quebec The Nastapoka and Little Whale River are two major estuaries where the belugas can be observed from mid-July to late August. Tasiujaq, with its brackish tidal waters, is a haven for seal and beluga. Assistant park warden Samson Crow, age 16, and assistant park warden Nathan Kettler, age 17, prepare their equipment for a beluga hunt on Tasiujaq. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540327643125-EKGT55LC2LF57VR1AR5I/Tursujuq+National+Park%2C+Nunavik-14.jpg Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Sustainability, and a New Way Forward - Kayaking on Tasiujaq Tursujuq National Park, Nunavik, Quebec Inuit park warden Joshua Davidee Sala paddles his kayak across Tasiujaq’s pristine waters the way his ancestors have done for thousands of years. The Inuit of Umijujaq are proud of their natural and cultural heritage, and have taken important steps to preserve both in perpetuity. They know that in order to preserve their distinctive culture, they must preserve the natural environment that has sustained it since time immemorial. And they know that in order to preserve their distinctive environment, they must preserve the culture that has sustained it since time immemorial. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540327643762-ANB3CEC0GHDNUE99LG1C/Tursujuq+National+Park%2C+Nunavik-15.jpg Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Sustainability, and a New Way Forward - Putulik Tooktoo, Park Guide Tursujuq National Park, Nunavik, Quebec https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540327646819-F86J2AR559HO47DODCI2/Tursujuq+National+Park%2C+Nunavik-16.jpg Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Sustainability, and a New Way Forward - Bobby Tooktoo, Park Warden Tursujuq National Park, Nunavik, Quebec https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540327649483-08B9K80OJ1BTOSUQL6S1/Tursujuq+National+Park%2C+Nunavik-17.jpg Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Sustainability, and a New Way Forward - Joshua Davidee Sala, Park Warden Tursujuq National Park, Nunavik, Quebec https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540327649514-V0103U2MM3TCYYXCTWRE/Tursujuq+National+Park%2C+Nunavik-18.jpg Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Sustainability, and a New Way Forward - Samson Crow, Assistant Park Warden Tursujuq National Park, Nunavik, Quebec https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540327654164-1ODF8ZPRHIJXAGUIQA4F/Umijujaq+Skies.jpg Traditional Knowledge, Environmental Sustainability, and a New Way Forward - Umijujaq Skies Umijujaq, Nunavik, Quebec https://www.thewayhome.world/umijujaq-video daily 0.75 2018-10-25 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/t/5bd22dcd1905f427136f38ff/1540493054124/ Umijujaq - Nathan Kettler, Assistant Park Warden Video https://static1.squarespace.com/static/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/5bd20e8af4e1fcd44fce7c97/5bd20efe71c10bbe673bbc09/1540493054124/ Umijujaq - Nathan Kettler, Assistant Park Warden Video https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1540500903978-R7W5E72V7N1W76W70K9J/image-asset.jpeg Umijujaq - Nathan Kettler, Assistant Park Warden Video - Umijujaq - Nathan Kettler, Assistant Park Warden https://www.thewayhome.world/the-way-home-photos-with-captions daily 0.75 2024-08-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683496599202-11WY744WUS0WZIHZEFT7/Dead+Glacier%2C+Baffin+Island%2C+Nunavut%2C+2007.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Retreat Baffin Island, Nunavut, 2007 Throughout the Arctic, glaciers are retreating at a startling rate, and these visibly diminishing rivers of ice are poignant and unmistakeable evidence of our warming atmosphere. At current rates of global warming, two-thirds of the world’s glaciers are projected to disappear by the end of this century. The continued use of fossil fuels is hugely problematic for the climate, for the biosphere, and for humanity. Unfortunately, carbon emissions are tightly correlated 1:1 with GDP and population growth. Together they go up in lockstep. Our culture has a built-in growth mandate, our economy is optimized for profits, and the industrial world remains dependent upon the unmatched power density of fossil fuels. As a result, emissions continue to rise. This situation will not change until there is a reorientation of what industrial society values and prizes most highly. In 2022 the world consumed nearly 55 percent more fossil fuels than it did in 1997, when delegates from nearly 200 nations met in Kyoto to agree on commitments to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases. As distinguished energy analyst Vaclav Smil says, "Since the world began to focus on the need to end the combustion of fossil fuels, we have not made the slightest progress in the goal of absolute global decarbonization." https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683496599202-11WY744WUS0WZIHZEFT7/Dead+Glacier%2C+Baffin+Island%2C+Nunavut%2C+2007.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Retreat Baffin Island, Nunavut, 2007 Throughout the Arctic, glaciers are retreating at a startling rate, and these visibly diminishing rivers of ice are poignant and unmistakeable evidence of our warming atmosphere. At current rates of global warming, two-thirds of the world’s glaciers are projected to disappear by the end of this century. The continued use of fossil fuels is hugely problematic for the climate, for the biosphere, and for humanity. Unfortunately, carbon emissions are tightly correlated 1:1 with GDP and population growth. Together they go up in lockstep. Our culture has a built-in growth mandate, our economy is optimized for profits, and the industrial world remains dependent upon the unmatched power density of fossil fuels. As a result, emissions continue to rise. This situation will not change until there is a reorientation of what industrial society values and prizes most highly. In 2022 the world consumed nearly 55 percent more fossil fuels than it did in 1997, when delegates from nearly 200 nations met in Kyoto to agree on commitments to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases. As distinguished energy analyst Vaclav Smil says, "Since the world began to focus on the need to end the combustion of fossil fuels, we have not made the slightest progress in the goal of absolute global decarbonization." https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699456778165-7ZEN61IZS827L74GXAH0/Aayu%2BPeter%252C%2BHunter%252C%2BLawyer%252C%2BSealskin%2BFasj%253Dhion%2BDesigner%252C%2BMusician%252C%2BMember%2Bof%2Bthe%2BOrder%2Bof%2BCanada%252C%2BIlulissat%252C%2BGreenland%252C%2B2011.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - A New Generation of Leaders Ilulissat, Greenland, 2011 Aayu Peter represents a new generation of Indigenous leaders who do not confuse being “modern” with being “Western.” She is a hunter; a lawyer; a sealskin clothing designer; a musician; a recording artist; the subject of numerous documentary films; and a Member of the Order of Canada. Aayu is a powerful spokesperson for Inuit involvement in issues relating to Arctic resource management and Inuit rights. Aayu proudly wears one of her modern sealskin creations. Her visage is decorated with a Tunnitt, the beautiful and ancient traditional women’s facial tattoo. For over a century, tunnitt had been forbidden by the Canadian government. "The true North Star is the self-determination of Indigenous Peoples and our ability to make decisions on any projects that have the potential to impact our lands and territories. It is time to change the old approaches and to center Indigenous leadership," says Galina Angarova, a Buryat from the Lake Baikal region of Siberia. Natural resource development on indigenous lands, increasingly including massive renewable energy projects such as Norway's Fossen Vind built on traditional Sami reindeer pasture land, can perpetuate extractivist practices and reinforce power imbalances, perpetuating a colonial dynamic where distant, external entities pursuing their own agendas benefit financially from the resources while the local communities absorb the costs. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683820224964-ODD9J5T8HPAAIMNV9219/Last%2BDay%2BOf%2BThe%2BGreat%2BIce%252C%2BDisko%2BBay%252C%2BGreenland%252C%2B2014.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Last Days Of The Great Ice Disko Bay, Greenland, 2014 Sermersuaq, The Greenland Ice Sheet, spans 660,000 square miles — an area almost the size of Alaska. It is nearly 2 miles thick at its height, and if it melts it has the potential to raise the world’s oceans by more than 20 feet. Today, The Greenland Ice Sheet loses 30 tons of ice every hour. As if to underscore the existential threat the loss of Sermersuaq, which means “The Great Ice” in Kalaallisut, poses for the entire planet, an iceberg calved from the Jakobshavn Glacier drifts under threatening skies. Out of the foreboding dark shadows, a ray of bright sunlight breaks through and strikes a portion of the iceberg, reminding us that the time to change our course is fleeting. Please pause to consider that in the year of the Rio Earth Summit - 1992 - when the world's leaders promised to stop climate change, fossil fuels provided 81 percent of the world’s primary energy. After more than three decades of attempted progress and trillions of dollars invested in alternatives, fossil fuels now account for 82 percent of global primary energy. Richard Heinberg outlines the choice we face when he asks, "The question is, shall we choose to gradually accustom ourselves to another way of life — one that more successfully integrates human purposes with ecological imperatives — or shall we cling to our present choices to the bitter end?" https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683750794429-J892J0JGWO97UM5B511A/Qeqertarsuq+Iceberg.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Massive Iceberg Looming Over Qeqertarsuaq Qeqertarsuaq, Disko Island, Greenland, 2014 Under dark and threatening skies, a massive grounded iceberg looms above the village of Qeqertarsuaq. As large as it appears, nine-tenths of the iceberg is underwater. This iceberg calved from Sermersuaq - “The Great Ice,” or the Greenland Ice Sheet, via the Jakobshavn Glacier, the source of the iceberg that sank the Titanic. The Jakobshavn Glacier is retreating rapidly, calving 35 billion tons of ice each year, which means it discharges more fresh water into the ocean in a single day than New York City uses in an entire month. The rate of discharge has doubled in the last decade. These are the times we live in, and we must work out how to live in them. Icebergs have been spotted dead ahead. Are there other courses we can chart that avoid the danger and lead to different outcomes? Are we mere passengers, passively watching our captains maintain a collison course towards growth and thus necessarily ever rising carbon emissions? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683496595340-P29TVZNLAT1NHYDGKSRF/Arctic+Dreams%2C+Ungava+Bay%2C+Nunavut%2C+Canada%2C+2008.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Arctic Dreams Akpatok Island, Ungava Bay, Nunavut, Canada, 2008 A large block of ice, melted and polished by the sun and the sea, lies stranded on the shore of a remote Arctic island. With sunlight pouring through a window in the ice, this natural sculpture presents us with a poignant reminder of sea ice loss and a vision of melancholy beauty. Despite thirty-six international climate conferences and trillions of dollars of investment in alternative energy over the last few decades, consider this: more carbon has been emitted just since the first global environmental summit in 1992 than in all of human history prior to that point. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699622107645-DC54J7T5CXTZS29MNWAU/Stranded%252Band%252BStarving%25252C%252BLower%252BSavage%252BIslands%25252C%252BNunavut%25252C%252BCanada%25252C%252B2011.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - The Face of Climate Change Lower Savage Islands, Nunavut, Canada, 2011 The changing climate means that the Arctic Ocean freezes later in the autumn and melts earlier in the summer than it used to. When the sea ice retreats during the summer, polar bears can find themselves stranded on remote islands with no way of procuring food for months until the sea freezes again. There was no turning away from this heartbreaking moment. I saw the bear watch a seal swimming nearby in open water, so close yet out of reach. With freeze-up still weeks away, this starving polar bear was in a precarious situation. The world struggles to rein in carbon emissions. But as Gus Speth, President Carter’s chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality and the co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council wrote recently, “There is a new struggle that needs to be joined now: the struggle to learn from our mistakes — the Big Mistake of climate catastrophe. What is it about our society, our economy, our politics, and our culture that has let this giant failing happen? What is it that has led us to this tragedy?” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683496602311-NO6GLPDXA3E3DKDQLUGS/Iceberg+Garden%2C+Disko+Island%2C+Greenland%2C+2014.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Decision Point Disko Island, Greenland, 2014 Giant icebergs calved from the glaciers of northwestern Greenland bear witness to the accelerating melting of Sermersuaq - The Great Ice. It is well-known that burning fossil fuels is warming the atmosphere and must stop, but here is the problem: a single barrel of oil contains 5.8 million British Thermal Units’ (BTUs) worth of energy — which is equivalent to more than 5 years of one human’s labor — and since the world consumes over 100 billion barrels of oil each year, oil provides us with the labor equivalent of more than 500 billion human workers annually. In our quest for perpetual economic growth, will we ever be willing to voluntarily dismiss these essential workers and give up the magic power of oil? As Jevon’s Paradox posits, the more efficient a source of energy, the more of it we will use, and there is no more efficient source of energy than oil. Since the 1990s we have increased our energy efficiency by 30 percent, but we have also increased our energy consumption by 70 percent. This is why, despite our best efforts and intentions, the temperature continues to rise every year. And this is why, despite trillions of dollars invested, wind and solar power contributed only 2.4 percent of world energy consumption in 2022 -- essentially a rounding error. Humanity is at Decision Point. There is no more time to wait. We must chart our course into the future now. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699375146864-437P2V02DD0GPCLSK6O9/Dark+Ice+on+the+Jakobshavn+Glacier%2C+Ilulissat%2C+Greenland%2C+2014+copy.jpeg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Dark Ice on the Jakobshavn Glacier Ilulissat, Greenland, 2014 Air pollution from around the world is carried by the jet stream and deposited on the vast Greenland Ice Sheet and its extensive floating ice shelves. In a perfect feedback loop the particulates combine with blooms of pigmented microalgae to darken large areas of the formerly bright white surface and accelerate the melting of the ice. The most recent scientific studies show that Greenland's glaciers are melting 100 times faster than previously estimated, and that the ice shelves in northern Greenland have lost more than a third of their volume just in the last half-century because of pollution and rising temperatures. The crucial challenge facing modern industrial society is that it is intrinsically an oil culture. It is shaped by oil in physical, material, and even metaphysical ways. From the trucks, automobiles, and highways we use, to our food supply, to our built environments, to our expectations of the future, oil is the master resource. As a result of this indispensable central role in all aspects of our lives, oil has also shaped our cultural values, practices, and beliefs. One way or another the petroculture is ending, and unless we change our ways voluntarily, ultimately it is geology that will determine our future on a planet of depleting resources. “2025 and beyond is when the world is going to be short of oil,” says Vicki Hollub, chief executive of Occidental Petroleum. We have built our civilization on cheap, easily accessible oil, and when it is no longer available, that civilization contracts and eventually stops. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683496598058-7L4SD17N5SKDS0QOEDTA/Dark+Cloud+and+Komatic+at+the+Floe+Edge%2C+Nunavut%2C+Canada%2C+2013.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Dark Cloud and Sled at the Floe Edge Bylot Island Floe Edge, Nunavut, Canada, 2013 Dramatic atmospheric conditions prevail at the floe-edge where the shore-fast sea ice meets the open water of Baffin Bay. “Everything is connected through our common atmosphere, not to mention our common spirit and humanity. What affects one affects us all… The future of Inuit is the future of the rest of the world - our home is a barometer for what is happening to our entire planet.” - Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Nobel Peace Prize Nominee and former chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/5f6d24b1-3add-4de6-b9f4-b0b499abdf20/Sami+Boy+and+Reindeer.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Sami Boy and Reindeer Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 From a very young age, Sami children spend time with their family’s herd out on the land, learning timeless cultural skills and traditions. Throughout the Arctic indigenous peoples maintain a strong connection to the environment through hunting, herding, fishing, and gathering renewable resources. These cultural practices provide the basis for most of their food production and have endured over thousands of years. Our global predicament is a cultural crisis, and that requires a cultural response. Fortunately we have one. For millennia the Inuit and Sami ways of life have been models of sustainable living in an interconnected, vibrant, and enchanted world. Stepping outside our culture and into theirs is quite revealing, and the contrast is stark. “Climate change is a complex issue, standing at the crossroads of science, ethics, society, education and, of course, culture – a dimension that has for too long been undervalued.” - UNESCO https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683496600885-HFLH1V6SRIVFY7M0DO5Y/Home+for+the+Night%2C+Puvirnituq%2C+Nunavik%2C+Canada%2C+2011.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Clarity at The Margins Puvirnituq, Nunavik, Canada, 2011 Traveling on the sea ice and living and working in the extreme Arctic environment requires specific knowledge and special skills passed from generation to generation. Traditional Inuit ways of thinking and being are based in cultural beliefs, lived experience, and acquired wisdom, and today these cultural traditions are being challenged by an intruding global industrial culture that is threatening their way of life and their environment. “It is at these margins of society that it is possible to see with surprising clarity our centre”, writes Arctic anthropologist Hugh Brody. “On colonial frontiers, where different and often rival ways of living meet, the underlying elements of our society become more clearly visible, sadly in exaggerated form.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/71b6a3d1-b8c8-4b3a-b90a-bb9555bf4941/Sami+-+People+of+the+Reindeer-4.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - The Summons Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 I had a dream one evening in the winter of 2022, the night before my exhibition with Edward Koren, Down to the Bone, was to open. In my dream, a lone reindeer appeared out of an Arctic whiteout and looked directly at me. Then the reindeer delivered a message: Come visit us. Come hear our story. A month later, while traveling with Sami herders across Arctic Norway’s Finnmark Plateau in a whiteout, I turned around, and the reindeer appeared to me once again, just as in my dream. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683496608384-17JLRZXVG29HVUJ4EDEI/Revered+Elder%2C+Puvirnituq%2C+Nunavik%2C+Canada%2C+2011.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Inummarik - "A True Inuk" Puvirnituq, Nunavik, Canada, 2011 Inummarik means “a true Inuk;” someone who is culturally skilled, knowledgeable, and a guiding source of wisdom for younger generations. In a time of dramatic environmental, technological, and cultural challenges, Inummarik strive to pass language, culture, traditional beliefs, skills, and worldviews on to Inuit youth so that they may have a framework for living a good life in harmony with nature that is full of purpose and meaning. Inummarik wisdom does not apply only to Inuit, it is universal. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683829733475-WERYBIJ8JUFZMW0B4CHJ/Waterfall%2Band%2BStranded%2BPolar%2BBear%252C%2BAkpatok%2BIsland%252C%2BNunavut%252C%2BCanada%252C%2B2011.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Waterfall and Stranded Polar Bear Akpatok Island, Nunavut, Canada, 2011 A stranded polar bear spends the summer wandering the shore beneath 800-foot-high limestone cliffs. The warming climate means that the sea ice forms later in the fall and melts earlier in the spring, meaning polar bears must live off their body’s fat reserves when there is no sea ice and thus no access to seals. While on land the bears are starving, losing roughly two pounds per day. They scavenge berries, seabird eggs, scurvy grass, and kelp while stranded, but none of these foods are fatty or abundant enough to sustain them over the long-term. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1715861539859-Z28KJIXGH07RD6C8X1U0/Sami+-+People+of+the+Reindeer-15.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Vitality, Creativity, and Autonomy Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 “Science and technology reign today as the practical gods of the modern age; they give us power to disrupt nature but little real insight into how it functions… Only when we look outside Western culture, or when someone outside looks in, do we discover the glaring inconsistencies and begin to measure the actual changes that science and technology have wrought in our lives.” - Vine Deloria Jr. Sami, Inuit, and the thousands of distinct place-based human cultures still fighting for survival reject the unquestioning acceptance of what Lewis Mumford called authoritarian technologies. They view the power of science and technology with a critical eye, and they remind us of the immense vitality, creativity, and autonomy that their humane, sustainable, egalitarian, and truly democratic traditions still offer us. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683829826372-ET1BRXBPWT02BXV9X2M9/Stranded%2BPolar%2BBear%2BSummering%2Bin%2Ba%2BSeabird%2BColony%252C%2BCoburg%2BIsland%252C%2BNunavut%252C%2BCanada%252C%2B2012.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Intrepid, Innovative, and Resilient Coburg Island, Nunavut, Canada, 2012 Marooned on land, unable to hunt seals, polar bears have occasionally been reported scavenging for eggs, dead birds, and fallen fledglings at the base of nesting cliffs as they searched for supplemental food during the ice-free season. Polar bears are not known to scale cliffs in search of food, but this intrepid, innovative, and resilient bear did just that, climbing a couple of hundred feet up the rock wall to access the plentiful birds and eggs in this seabird rookery. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699373944009-P2IY8ZBLX3FQMXDHB75N/Sami+Reindeer_pano+1.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Irony On The Plateau Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 As they have for centuries, reindeer and their Sami herders migrate across northern Scaninavia from the coast to the interior and back again, completing their timeless annual cycle. And as they have for centuries, Arctic Indigenous communities continue to experience stress from powerful outside political and industrial forces that threaten to restrict culturally vital harvesting and herding activities and to sever the powerful bond between the people and the land. Ironically, the energy transition designed to stop climate change is threatening the sustainable and environmentally friendly way of life of the Sámi, Europe’s last-remaining Indigenous people who are indeed models of low carbon living. Rather than learn from the Sami, European governments are eyeing their lands for giant industrial wind installations and for mines rich in rare minerals for electric vehical batteries. The Sami call this acquisitive approach to their lands “green colonization.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699378277350-DRXKZPRWGBN4QAAU9HMD/Refuge-14+copy.jpeg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Melting Ice Cellar Kaktovik, Alaska, 2017 Jack Kayotuk, a resident of the Inupiat village of Kaktovik on Barter Island in the Beaufort Sea off the north coast of Alaska, examines a melting ice cellar where the villagers once stored whale meat from the annual bowhead whale hunt. Dug deep into the permafrost, the cellars kept the meat frozen throughout the year. Today the permafrost is melting, rendering the cellars unsafe for food storage. Scientists have been warning that the Arctic is heating twice as fast as the rest of the planet. However, the most recent studies show that the Arctic is actually warming at four times the global average, and that the portion of the planet above the Arctic Circle — the area located above 66.5 degrees latitude — has warmed by more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1979. Unfortunately, when we add new energy sources to the system we don't replace older sources, we merely add to our capacity to grow our energy consumption. Though the world switched from wood to coal to oil as primary energy sources over the last century and a half, we still burn more wood today for energy than we did 150 years ago. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1721168609878-5CKMA44D1GIHS50Z1EUT/Idle%2BTimes%2BWaiting%2BFor%2BFreeze-Up%252C%2BSattut%252C%2BGreenland%252C%2B2014.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Sikuvut Nunguliqtuq - "Our Ice is Vanishing" Sattut, Greenland, 2014 Dogsleds and a sled dog wait patiently for freeze-up so they can venture out onto the sea ice once again. Just as the polar bears need a platform of sea ice to hunt seals at their breathing holes, Inuit culture is adapted to the sea ice environment. The ice permits mobility and flexibility, and hunting cultures must always be ready to move and seize new opportunities, for no two years are ever alike, animal migration patterns change, and “the world is in a constant state of coming into existence at all times” (Pinngortitaq). https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1717808970974-QQ98TPPNRV2QUDQWT0NL/Heading%2BHome%252C%2BQaanaaq%252C%2BThule%252C%2BGreenland%252C%2B2017_pano.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit Qaanaaq, Thule, Greenland, 2017 Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (or simply IQ - ”What Inuit have always known to be true”) means the cultural wisdom gained from extensive experience, passed from generation to generation. “It also means knowledge of the Arctic environment - of snow, ice, water, weather and the environment that we share. It encompasses being in harmony with people, land and living things - and respecting them. It implies life skills, alertness and the ability to train others for a strong healthy life. It provides purpose and meaning for us and is a way of being in the world that our ancestors set down for us to ensure our survival and well-being.” - Mark Kalluak, Nunavut https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699378273766-VS7EN4OEPC1Z45OQOISG/Sami+-+People+of+the+Reindeer-32+copy.jpeg The Way Home Photos with Captions - A Special Relationship Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 A Sami reindeer herder and his dogs take a rest from the migration as the herd mills around them. For hundreds of years, the reindeer have provided the Sami with food, clothing, shelter, and materials. And as it has for hundreds of years, most reindeer herding in Norway takes place on the Finnmark Plateau north of the Arctic Circle. Herders follow the same migration paths from the coast to the interior from year to year, and while each family has its own pastures, all of the land is held in common. Sami herders each have their preferred areas, but with the changing climate and deteriorating conditions, it is widely accepted that families may need to share their traditional pastures. In the winter on the plateau the reindeer live on lichen, which is buried under the snow and can be difficult if not impossible for them to access after a Cuohki event, when rain on pastures freezes and forms an ice sheet sealing in the lichen. Today, with wildly fluctuating winter temperatures, even the Finnmark Plateau at 70 degrees north latitude is regularly experiencing dangerous thaws and freezes. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683496594478-CTVAPSK5WZ4CCH2CKW3Q/A+Stroll+Into+Town%2C+Disko+Fjord%2C+Greenland%2C+2014.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - A Stroll Into Town Disko Fjord, Greenland, 2014 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1684332476928-GILII2NHFIH7GP9GGS0P/Dogsleds+Beneath+the+Cliffs%2C+Thule%2C+Greenland%2C+2017.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Independence Thule, Greenland, 2017 Inughuit subsistence hunters travel the sea ice by dogsled in search of seals, walruses, and polar bears. The hunters of northern Greenland depend upon wild game for roughly 80 percent of their diet. By using traditional technologies that they both manufacture and control such as dogsleds, the Inughuit retain their culture and independence, insulating themselves from the need for expensive modern commercially manufactured tools and dependence upon distant, unreliable six-continent supply chains. Historian David Fleming summarized this approach to living on a planet of finite resources when he wrote, “Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683496597171-9XPCG4TNXIUO3ESEXUMC/Breaking+Away%2C+Ilulissat%2C+Greenland%2C+2014.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Breaking Away Ilulissat Ice Fjord, Greenland, 2014 Ice calved from the Jakobshavn Glacier drifts into Disko Bay. The rapid warming of the Arctic creates ripple effects all over the planet. As a result, once-stable sea levels are rising, weather patterns are shifting, and ecosystems around the world are changing. "Beyond policy changes and investment, a seismic cultural shift is imperative to steer humanity away from self-destruction towards a just and sustainable future. We must realign our political will, economic priorities and societal values to recognise that ecological wellbeing is matched to human wellbeing." - Sir David King, Chair of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699378615177-U0FZKWTKZW1YYTMG8GMG/Qaanaaq-21+copy.jpeg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Sled Dog Culture Thule, Greenland, 2017 Northern Greenland is home to the largest sled dog population in the Arctic, and the Inughuit, or Polar Inuit, take pride in their unique and vibrant sled dog culture. The Greenland sled dog is the oldest breed in the world, having migrated with the Inughuit on their 4,000 year journey across the Arctic from Alaska to Greenland. To preserve their extraordinary culture, the Inughuit have made the choice to not allow the use of snowmobiles in their homeland. Today however, both the Greenland sled dog and the ancient sled dog culture are in danger of disappearing due to both climate change and powerful political, economic, and development pressures that, in a very old story, would like to see the independent Indigenous population off of the land in order to develop it. Inughuit elders fear that the sled dog culture, with its embodied wisdom that has sustained them for at least the last 4,000 years, will be gone in a generation. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683919213558-F7WF1KRA27P2ZURIWINV/LastDays+Website-53.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Resistance Qaanaaq, Thule, Greenland, 2017 A contemporary Inughuit hunter leads his dog team onto the sea ice to begin a hunting expedition. “Hunters and gatherers stand at the opposite pole from the dense urban life experienced by most people; yet those same hunters may have the key answers to some of the central questions about the human condition: Can people live without the state or the market? Can people live without accumulated wealth or “advanced” technology? Can people live in nature without destroying it?” - Richard B. Lee https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699291882802-0KS00ZCD2VP81Y7PFZ9R/Sami+-+People+of+the+Reindeer-28.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - A Familiar Story Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 Before the 17th century and the colonial intrusion into Sami territory by the emerging nation states of Scandinavia and Russia, the Sami were hunter gatherers. They harvested wild reindeer for food, clothing, shelter, and tools. Their needs were few and easily met. When their lands were taken from them by colonial authorities, the Sami began domsticating the wild reindeer and increasing the size of their herds in order to pay taxes to the new governments with hides. Since the 1600s, in a story familiar to virtually every indigenous and place-based people on the planet, the Sami have endured centuries of forced assimilation, uprooting, relocation, abuse, and the systematic loss of their language and culture. Even today, after a recent report issued by Norway’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission detailed centuries of government wrongdoing and complicity, little has changed as industrial development continues to threaten the traditional Sami lands, waters, and way of life. Unfortunately, around the world colonial powers are once more eyeing Indigenous lands. As Galina Angarova, herself a Buryat from Siberia, points out, "Indigenous Peoples are increasingly experiencing the impacts of the transition to the green economy as the world accelerates its quest for resources. Targeting the lands of Indigenous Peoples for exploration and exploitation without consultation and consent has been ongoing for the past 500 years." https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683919213601-MZX1JT8FFW7MLN2KWY8D/LastDays+Website-52.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Siulersortaat - “Those Who Guide The Way" Inglefield Fjord, Thule, Greenland 2017 For thousands of years, Inuit have hunted the sea ice for food, clothing, and other essential uses. In Northwest Greenland, Inughuit hunters still wear sealskin boots, polar bear pants, and caribou parkas because these materials are locally available, sustainably harvested, do not require participation in the cash economy to procure, and are superior to any manufactured clothing for use in the harsh Arctic environment. These hunters are respected for their foresight, leadership, experience, and insight. Hunters are siulersortaat - “those who guide the way.” Hunting remains a crucial part of Inuit cultural identity and satisfies many important social, cultural, economic, and nutritional needs of families, households, and communities. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683819578559-MPIREF3XOJMILP93TS7W/LastDays+Website-51.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Isuma - "Possessing Knowledge and Wisdom" Gjoa Haven, King William Island, Nunavut, Canada, 2009 A little Inuit girl stands in front of drying muskox and grizzly bear hides in Gjoa Haven, on King William Island in the Northwest Passage. The grizzly hide is evidence of a warming climate, as King William Island was well north of their range until recently. During his first-ever transit of the Northwest Passage from 1903-06 aboard the Gjoa, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen spent two years here learning the Inuit survival skills and intimate knowledge of the polar environment that enabled him to become the first person to reach the South Pole. Here among Inuit Amundsen developed Isuma - “the knowledge and wisdom to successfully navigate new and unexpected circumstances.” His rival, Captain Robert Scott of the British Royal Navy, refused to adopt Inuit wisdom in his quest for the Pole, and Scott and all of his men perished on their journey. The planetary emergency is largely the legacy of a lack of Isuma - the industrial development of a finite planet, the commodification and abuse of nature, and the decline of rooted and local ways of knowing and being. What can we learn from Inuit, Sami, and others like them, and can we develop Isuma as we head into the uncharted territory of planetary overshoot? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1684178291940-0A5HFNHAOPVH5KCRGDCW/Sled+Dogs+Running+Over+the+Ice%2C+Thule%2C+Greenland%2C+2017.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Homeward Bound -- Fresh Tracks Upon The Sea Ice Thule, Greenland, 2017 An Inughuit hunter drives his dogsled over the snow covered sea ice near the village of Siorapaluk, the world’s most northerly community. The Inughuit were first contacted by Europeans in 1818, when British naval officer John Ross led an expedition searching for the Northwest Passage into their territory. Until that encounter the Inughuit had lived for centuries in total isolation, completely unaware of the existence of other humans. In April 1909, American explorer Robert Peary depended upon Inughuit drivers and their dogsleds on an expedition that claimed to be the first to have reached the geographic North Pole. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683496604886-F3DG89H06R88UZWS9PJT/Meltwater+at+Midnight%2C+Eclipse+Sound%2C+Nunavut%2C+Canada%2C+2013.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Witnesses and Messengers Eclipse Sound, Nunavut, Canada, 2013 At midnight in June, an Inuit sled navigates the melting ice of Eclipse Sound separating Baffin Island and Bylot Island in the Canadian High Arctic. The ice is vital to Inuit because it allows them the mobility to pursue their way of life. Since Inuit live on a platform of ice, and they are daily immersed in their environment, they are the witnesses and messengers (silaup aalaruqpalianigata tusaqtittijiit) to the rest of us. They are telling us that the ice is melting and becoming more dangerous, and that this has both local and global consequences. From physics to biology, the Indigenous worldview of interconnection and cooperation among natural systems is confirmed by scientific evidence. Can the rest of us adopt this worldview and align our behavior with biophysical reality in time to avert catastrophe? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/049294b1-105d-4ac9-a180-587a98871ec8/Sami+Woman+and+Child.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Sami Woman and Child in Migration Camp Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 Sami are recognized as Europe’s only Indiginous culture. They number around 80,000 people scattered across their roughly 150,000 square mile territory in the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula in Russia (a homeland they call Sápmi). For centuries those countries suppressed their languages and forced Sami to assimilate culturally while dispossessing them and opening their lands for settlement and development. Their challenges continue. Today Sami must fight to protect their lands against the extractive industries and to protect their migratory routes from industrial development. The European Union is coveting resources on Sami lands as they are deemed critcal to its efforts to become the world’s first net-zero emissions continent by 2050. To reach this goal will require massive industrialization of traditional Sami pasture lands. According to our economic system, the sustainable, low carbon Sami way of life has little value because of its relatively small contribution to the European Union’s GDP. From a strictly economic perspective, it follows that their land-based cultural activities, worldview, and sustainable, virtually carbon-free way of life should be abandoned and give way to more profitable industries. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699291881232-0KP92PK6Z9RLM47S1NS0/Sami+-+People+of+the+Reindeer-7.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Reindeer or Caribou? Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 What is a reindeer and what is a caribou? In fact, reindeer and caribou are the exact same deer species (Rangifer tarandus). The animals are called reindeer in Europe and Asia, while in North America they are called caribou. However, domesticated caribou are called reindeer all around the world, including in North America. Both male and female caribou and reindeer grow antlers, and they are well designed for the coldest climates. Caribou and reindeer have hair on every part of their body, including their hooves, and they are also the only deer species to have hair covering their noses. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/e6d3139c-5720-453c-9348-19c0d0f2ce18/Standing+Polar+Bear+and+Camp+copy.jpeg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Complex and Dynamic Relationships Baffin Island Floe Edge, Nunavut, Canada, 2013 A polar bear at the floe edge — the place where the shore-fast sea ice meets the open Arctic Ocean — pays a visit to an Inuit narwhal hunting camp. Both the bears and the Inuit use the sea ice as a place to travel and to hunt, and interractions are frequent. With thousands of years of experience, Inuit know that you need to have the proper attitude, and a tremendous skill set, to live safely and comfortably in the sea ice environment. If you aren’t situationally aware, if you aren’t paying attention to your surroundings, if you don’t understand how everything impacts everything else, you can easily find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Wherever people live today, the climate no longer cares if they are deep in the wilderness or in the heart of a city. The paradigm has changed in the last decade or so, and urban centers with tens of thousands of people are now regularly engulfed in wildfires and battered by superstorms. The protective illusion of the built environment has been breached by our own actions. Regardless of where we are, we need to invest in and acquire a deep body of cultural and ecological knowledge to survive. We need to understand complex, dynamic relationships. We need wisdom. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699299356988-XGD9C6ZX9SQLLSLEIFV0/Inside+the+Igloo+copy.jpeg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Sharing Conciousness With Nature Puvirnituq, Nunavik, 2011 To thrive in their challenging Arctic homeland, Inuit rely upon the wisdom and guidance of traditional knowledge passed down for millennia. This traditional ecological and adaptive knowledge, called Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit in Inuktitut, includes not only a road map for navigating the physical landscape, but also guidance for safely negotiating the spiritual landscape as well. For Inuit the two are the same, encompassed by a sentient, animate, mystic power permeating all of existence they call Sila. Sila connects people to the land, sea, and atmosphere; to the natural order of things; to the life-giving elements; and a person without Sila is thought to lack an essential relationship with the universe that is necessary for all human well-being. I have heard Sila described this way: “Sila is our concept for the weather, the climate, the mind, consciousness. It is the universal order where man is in unity with nature. Sila is the shared life that the sea, wind, mountains, animals, and humans possess. When you share consciousness with nature you treat nature with respect.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699373944338-KC97LGWURQK4ZG5RLNVE/Sami+Reindeer_pano+2.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Holding The Line Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 Each day brings dispiriting news about the state of the earth: melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, diminished food and water supplies, deforestation and desertification, growing inequality and wealth disparity, and mass extinctions of plant and animal species. It should come as no surprise that this unfolding planetary emergency is occurring as modern industrial society has all but severed its ties with the natural world. The accelerating diminishment of personal as well as cultural knowledge about nature’s vital role in human sustenance and security undermines modern society’s ability to make well-informed decisions regarding natural resources. Traditional cultures such as Sami and Inuit provide critical bulwarks against further environmental deterioration and loss of ecological knowledge. The stories they tell guide them to live lightly upon the land, their home. "What matters is the potency of a belief, the manner in which a conviction plays out in the day-to-day lives of a people, for in a very real sense this determines the ecological footprint of a culture, the impact that any society has on its environment. A child raised to believe that a mountain is the abode of a protective spirit will be a profoundly different human being from a youth brought up to believe that a mountain is an inert mass of rock ready to be mined." - Wade Davis https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1715962672380-FKXLIBOCXRHYVK9SMYB0/Arriving+in+Qeqertat.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Arriving in Qeqertat Qeqertat, Thule, Greenland, 2017 Qeqertat is a village of approximately 20 people on the shore of Inglefield Fjord in far northern Greenland. The Inughuit, or Polar Inuit, who call this region home are one of the smallest indigenous groups in the world, with a population of just 800 people. In the Inughuit homeland snow machines are not permitted, and all winter travel is by dogsled. Despite the increasingly corrosive intrusions of modern industrial society, many Indigenous and place-based peoples live in multi-generational, supportive, and classless communities in traditional homelands. They pursue the ways of life they love, make well-designed tools with their own hands, see little distinction between social life and economic life, enjoy ample leisure time and affluence, and have a negligible impact upon the environment. They are modern, stable societies with healthy living traditions, and they pose a serious challenge to the ethnocentric, orthodox worldview of modern industrial society. Stepping outside of our culture and into theirs is revealing; the contrast is stark. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699378275138-3BMKTR2BS1CLVLYZZYP7/Sami+-+People+of+the+Reindeer-34+copy.jpeg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Just Being Kids Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 Sami kids on the migration go back and forth from home and school in town to join their father in his mobile camp on the plateau. Out on the land they have the time to absorb their cultural heritage and also to just be kids, throwing snowballs and going for sled rides. But their elders worry that the days of the traditional Sami way of life are numbered. A clear example of ongoing colonization of their lands, Sami activists say, is Norway’s largest onshore industrial wind energy project, Fosen Vind. In 2021, the Norwegian Supreme Court ruled that parts of Fosen Vind had been built illegally on Sami reindeer herding territory, endangering the traditional livelihoods of Sami herders. The Supreme Court ordered the removal of the project. Despite the court’s ruling, the Norwegian government has made no moves to enforce the ruling and restore the land to the Sami, despite the clear legal obligation to do so. If things don't change, reindeer herder Niilas Sara told me during the migration, the traditional Sami way of life will be gone within fifty years. This echoed a similar prediction for the Inughuit dog sled culture that I heard from the hunters while on expedition in northern Greenland. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1715792017608-IU3BI5KTLQ2SC45BBGY1/Anderson+Yezerski+Gallery+7+copy.jpeg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Democratic and Autocratic Technologies Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 As they have since time immemorial, Sami herders watch their reindeer migrate across the vastness of the Finnmark Plateau in Arctic Norway. In 1963 Lewis Muford, American historian, sociologist, and philosopher of technology, wrote, "What I would call democratic technics is the small scale method of production, resting mainly on human skill and animal energy but always, even when employing machines, remaining under the active direction of the craftsman or the farmer, each group developing its own gifts, through appropriate arts and social ceremonies, as well as making discreet use of the gifts of nature..." And then Mumford asks, "Why has our age surrendered so easily to the controllers, the manipulators, the conditioners of an authoritarian technics?" https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699541169088-U2I4GYNUY4DWM6PUJXH6/Emily+Testing+the+Ice+copy.jpeg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Culture is an Authentic, Original Response to a Specific Place. Baffin Island Floe Edge, Nunavut, Canada, 2013 By relocalizing, by relearning who and where we are, we will be able to renegotiate our relationships with the land and with each other. Science plainly shows that ecosystems are not interchangeable, and neither are the place-based traditional ways of living in those ecosystems. Culture is an authentic, original response to a specific place. When we see the land as the place where we are from, where we belong, and where future generations will thrive, we will know how to take care of it. By relocalizing, or as Vine Deloria Jr. and Daniel Wildcat put it, “indigenizing”, we will develop “elegantly designed solutions to living well that are predicated upon the uniqueness of place”, as David Orr says. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699461649630-H7N4JT8KU3HHTKQEJPP2/Sami+Reindeer_pano+4.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Technology, Modernity, and Design Thule, Greenland, 2017 A modern 21st century Inughuit hunter rests his dogsled team while traveling over the sea ice near 80 degrees North in Greenland. The technology he uses, from his dogs to his sled to his clothing, is designed to function perfectly in his home environment. Using these tools does not make him an anachronism, he simply has no desire to trade what works well for what Western industrial society considers more modern — and would very much like to sell to him for a price he would prefer not to pay. Western industrial society might not consider him modern because we confuse modernity with putting distance between ourselves, the land, and the sources of our sustenance. We also confuse modern technology with good design. Modern technologies are increasingly complex and reliant on computer software that makes them unfamiliar, hard to use, and hard to control. Good design, on the other hand, is the art of taking something familiar and useful and adapting it to contemporary situations as the need arises. “Where good design becomes part of the social fabric at all levels, unanticipated positive side effects multiply,” says David Orr. “When people fail to design carefully, lovingly, and competently, unwanted side effects and disasters multiply. By the evidence of pollution, violence, social decay, and waste all around us, we have designed things badly.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699456335458-7LKLH32DRR90T599XQ8X/Tomas+Leads+the+Team+copy.jpeg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Locally Specific, Universally Relevant Thule, Greenland, 2017 Indigenous peoples throughout the Arctic posses detailed and highly complex knowledge of the natural world gained through first-hand experience and then passed on from generation to generation. This traditional ecological knowledge has allowed them to sustainably benefit from highly productive ecosystems for thousands of years, and it provides a solid foundation for cultural, spiritual, and ethical guidance in the use of appropriate technologies and management of natural resources. This knowledge is locally specific, but the priciples are universal. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699461796917-49HJJVJ5HD14KWCU330C/Sami+Reindeer_pano+3.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Gratitude and Reverence Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 In a moment of gratitude and perhaps even reverence, a Sami woman kneels in the snow before one of her reindeer, who returns her gaze. Inuit and Sami teach us that our challenge is not material or technical, it is cultural and spiritual. In order to begin healing the planet and ourselves, they suggest, we need to see ourselves as of this land, our native home. Once we revere the land, we will treat it with respect. When we revere the land and the local land-based traditions that are our heritage, we will engage with the land and live resiliently, because the way we will live is wise, sustainable, and time-tested over many generations. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699456332423-CXQK3G0VFVAZ3TW0L2G8/Dogsled+Camp+copy.jpeg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Time to Come Home Thule, Greenland, 2017 In a timeless scene, Inughuit hunters set up camp on the sea ice as they have for countless generations. In contrast to modern industrial society’s long history as transient conquerors and exploiters, cultures such as Inuit and Sami offer us another way of seeing ourselves in the world going forward. We simply can no longer afford to view ourselves as homeless outsiders in abstract non-places, here to enrich ourselves at the land’s expense; or see the land as merely a limitless treasure chest of lifeless commodities to exploit. Nature is our home, and, as Simone Weil wrote, “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” Rather than behave as cosmic outlaws, by following the examples of Inuit and Sami we might instead root ourselves in space and time. All people need a sense of belonging to something that is bigger than they are, and we underestimate that deep human need at our peril. Many of us have allowed ourselves to become deracinated, but when we look around we see there are myriad ways to put down roots and pursue ways of living that are appropriate for the specific environments we inhabit. All the evidence suggests that it’s time to come home. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699461649816-C5QERM97FO3BL077TYZR/Sami+Reindeer_pano+5.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - There are Many Paths Thule, Greenland, 2017 We have hit the limits to growth. The cheap and abundant energy and materials that have powered Western industrial civilization for the last century and a half are in terminal decline, as is the planet’s ability to absorb our waste. As a result a great simplification is coming. One way or another, we will have to manage a return to a lower energy, lower materials input way of living. That is the reality of living on a planet of finite natural resources. This has nothing to do with human ingenuity, it is simply pure physics, biology, and geology. We can ignore reality all we like, but reality never goes away. There is so much we can do. As Daniel Wildcat, a professor at Haskell Indian Nations University and a member of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma says, “There are many paths, each situated in the actual places, such as prairies, forests, deserts, and so forth, and environments where our tribal societies and cultures emerged. The experiences of time and history are shaped by places. This is not a pre-or-postmodernist or deep ecologist position. It is an indigenous realist position, one that increasing numbers of ecologists, such as Wes Jackson at The Land Institute, are recognizing as crucial if we human beings are to learn how to live in healthy sustainable communities utilizing appropriate technologies.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1715962671624-Y0R2SBOAR0KMLSGLO49A/Whiteout+on+the+Plateau.jpg The Way Home Photos with Captions - Heading Home Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 Sami reindeer herders head back to migration camp immersed in a total whiteout. In a true whiteout such as this, the horizon disappears and both the sky and all landscape features vanish. There are no points of visual reference by which to navigate; even shadows disappear because the light arrives in equal measure from all directions. There is no up or down, no forward or backward. Being in a whiteout is like floating inside an opaque white room. A whiteout is completely disorienting, most people suffer from vertigo in these conditions, and yet Sami know exactly where they are and how to get home. Many in modern industrial society find themselves rootless and directionless, as though lost in a dizzying whiteout. Trying to navigate our complex circumstances we are confused, unsure of who and where we are, and unable to find our way home. To get there we need all the help we can get. We need new stories, new narratives, and new guides to lead us back. We need inspiration and imagination, and we need an enlarged sense of what’s possible. https://www.thewayhome.world/new-page-1 daily 0.75 2016-04-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1449244027042-JTIUHGN6V2U372TXKEDB/image-asset.jpeg Contact Rock and Ice, Davis Strait, Canadian Arctic (click to enlarge) https://www.thewayhome.world/outline daily 0.75 2016-09-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1461089617942-0IBO1K6ICMPYE9OUG07R/Where+Men+and+Bears+Dance-52.jpg Outline Inuit Women in Ittileq, Greenland (click to enlarge). https://www.thewayhome.world/about-stephen-gorman daily 0.75 2017-05-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1452892568890-XP4TJQUT8UEJ4P1QXPE6/Stephen+Gorman+and+the+Hunters+From+Kangiqsualujuaq+and+Nain+-+Hebron+Mission+Site+Nunatsiavut%2C+Canadian+Arctic.jpg Stephen Gorman Stephen Gorman (third from left, front row) and the Inuit hunters from Kangiqsualujjuaq, Nunavik and Nain, Nunatsiavut, at the annual winter hunter's rendezvous at the site of the historic Hebron Moravian Mission, Nunatsiavut (click to enlarge). https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1449243237794-ZN1TNNIZOL5F5LC1EQOO/Book+Cover+-+Northeastern+Wilds.jpg Stephen Gorman https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1449243496993-UG3ORWSAXLFB1UKTDZRP/image-asset.jpeg Stephen Gorman https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1458930346503-K4G7CD811JBQKNGWJ614/image-asset.jpeg Stephen Gorman Stephen Gorman at the floe edge off Bylot Island in the Canadian Arctic 450 miles above the Arctic Circle (click to enlarge). https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1449242931919-M8BCI7IV9QF42KU1W99H/image-asset.jpeg Stephen Gorman https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1449243388959-78E1956V4GSP4L5EJPTQ/image-asset.jpeg Stephen Gorman https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1449242718291-JKJ2U54XSMZKVSYAEEIN/image-asset.jpeg Stephen Gorman https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1449243056667-06YMHND9HNA4DQDYQ0NO/image-asset.jpeg Stephen Gorman https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1458063912789-W2ZC19ZE4N1DDKGNO5PY/Stephen+Gorman+and+Inukshuk+-+Puvirntituq%2C+QC.jpg Stephen Gorman Stephen Gorman on a winter expedition along the northeast coast of Hudson Bay, Nunavik, Canadian Arctic (click to enlarge).. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1476988870243-DQPMGDAZUH4DN2Z7W6LF/Winter+Camping.jpeg Stephen Gorman https://www.thewayhome.world/at-the-floe-edge daily 0.75 2024-07-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/e6d3139c-5720-453c-9348-19c0d0f2ce18/Standing+Polar+Bear+and+Camp+copy.jpeg At the Floe Edge - Make it stand out Polar Bear and Inuit Hunting Camp on the Sea Ice, Baffin Island Floe Edge, Nunavut, Canada https://www.thewayhome.world/author-qualifications daily 0.75 2016-04-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1461012784564-9AI06IJYUFEO63WKLWXB/image-asset.jpeg Author Qualifications Stephen Gorman on Expedition on the Sea Ice in the Fabled Northwest Passage, Canadian Arctic (click to enlarge). https://www.thewayhome.world/viewing-instructions daily 0.75 2016-06-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1461345574036-E3OLK1WCBT640JW9TMID/image-asset.jpeg Viewing Instructions An Inuit Fishing Boat in Uummannaq Fjord, Greenland (click to enlarge). https://www.thewayhome.world/audience daily 0.75 2016-05-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1460663674136-IIGWECY1M7FUJXB0VICO/image-asset.jpeg Audience and Market Witnesses to the Last Days of the Great Ice (click to enlarge). https://www.thewayhome.world/promotion daily 0.75 2016-10-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1458319800819-KF60YFYFGTMEAP3CNGYK/image-asset.jpeg Promotion https://www.thewayhome.world/competition daily 0.75 2016-04-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1461090708564-QDI07NFY5DBTPGXFV1BD/image-asset.jpeg Competition Aayu Peter - hunter, lawyer, and sealskin fashion designer - models one of her own pieces in Ilulissat, Greenland. Aayu is a member of the Order of Canada, an honor bestowed upon her by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in recognition of her outstanding achievement, dedication to the community, and service to the nation (click to enlarge). https://www.thewayhome.world/noaa-video-of-shrinking-ice daily 0.75 2016-04-22 https://www.thewayhome.world/praise daily 0.75 2016-06-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1461690270071-UQSM6CMR6TU1N19P1J6V/image-asset.jpeg Praise Portrait of an Arctic Fox at Sunset, Northern Hudson Bay, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic (click to enlarge). https://www.thewayhome.world/arctic-sea-ice-hits-stunning-new-low daily 0.75 2016-06-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1465394301201-HRUDY7LISWWPK1Z4V0AJ/image-asset.png Arctic Sea Ice Hits Stunning New Low “We’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Mark Serreze, who directs NOAA'S National Snow and Ice Data Center. “It’s way below the previous record, very far below it, and we’re something like almost a month ahead of where we were in 2012,” which was the previous all-time low sea ice extent for the month of May. The ice loss is being driven by the astonishingly high temperatures in the Arctic this past winter, and “that warmth has persisted through spring, and so we’re in a bad way right now,” Serreze said. (Click to enlarge) https://www.thewayhome.world/vanishing-point-1 daily 0.75 2023-04-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1639674190569-2EJQOS0FT7R1STU6X3V7/Qeqertarsuq+Iceberg.jpg Last Days of the Great Ice https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1639674564421-L90XP0WLK6XN4A6DL98R/Last+Days+of+the+Great+Ice.jpg Last Days of the Great Ice - Last Days of the Great Ice Disko Bay, Greenland, 2014 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1639598716129-LQNJZRJD9I3WPTM113QH/Vanishing%2BPoint%2BGallery-13.jpg Last Days of the Great Ice - Meltwater River, Greenland Ice sheet Greenland Ice Sheet, Greenland https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1639591541059-R5EIEFQZ1U0IB7EYTQ0I/Vanishing%2BPoint%2BGallery-48.jpg Last Days of the Great Ice - Dead Glacier Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canadian Arctic A vast scree field marks the quick retreat of a receding glacier on Baffin Island. https://www.thewayhome.world/contact daily 0.75 2023-11-03 https://www.thewayhome.world/planb daily 0.75 2024-09-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/293493f5-5b46-4c4a-a8d3-18f0e3dd4bee/DTTB+Banner.jpg The Search For Plan B - Make it stand out Peabody- Essex Museum, March, 2022 (Click to enlarge) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1449242931919-M8BCI7IV9QF42KU1W99H/image-asset.jpeg The Search For Plan B Arctic Visions was commissioned by the Makivik Corporation representing the Inuit of Nunavik, Canada, and won the Benjamin Franklin Award in 2012 (Click to enlarge) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/ab5fbbcd-32c5-4cd2-8756-ed0e3cfbe826/Steve+at+Peabody-Essex+Museum.jpg The Search For Plan B - Make it stand out Stephen Gorman in front of one of his Down to the Bone photographs at the Peabody-Essex Museum. (Click to enlarge) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/04fd181f-fd93-4898-9676-ae68674b661c/Eyes+on+the+Arctic+Final-2+copy+2.jpeg The Search For Plan B - Make it stand out Eyes on the Arctic, International Pavilion, Ottawa, Canada, February 2017 (Click to enlarge) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/b17de057-28c6-4064-aba2-8f92dcb539a6/Reindeer+Logo+1000x1000+copy.jpeg The Search For Plan B - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/93609a28-1ab2-4897-99f2-b02d903e1528/Stephen+and+Ilonguok+on+Expedition.jpg The Search For Plan B - Make it stand out Stephen and Ilonguok taking a trail break on expedition over the sea ice near 80 Degrees North, Thule, Greenland (Click to enlarge) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1458930346503-K4G7CD811JBQKNGWJ614/image-asset.jpeg The Search For Plan B Stephen Gorman on expedition at the Baffin Island floe edge in the Canadian Arctic 450 miles above the Arctic Circle (click to enlarge). https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1538d82c-a0fa-4d4c-9244-866f00c64599/Reindeer+Logo+Small.jpeg The Search For Plan B - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/f8ec92df-d56f-4f03-a037-12b2f5131da9/Screenshot+2024-04-12+at+10.56.25+AM.png The Search For Plan B - Make it stand out Waiting for Winter, Stephen’s first illustrated children’s book, will be released by Capstone Publishing in the fall of 2025 (Click to enlarge) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1452892568890-XP4TJQUT8UEJ4P1QXPE6/Stephen+Gorman+and+the+Hunters+From+Kangiqsualujuaq+and+Nain+-+Hebron+Mission+Site+Nunatsiavut%2C+Canadian+Arctic.jpg The Search For Plan B Stephen Gorman (third from left, front row) and the Inuit hunters from Kangiqsualujjuaq, Nunavik and Nain, Nunatsiavut, Canadian Arctic, at the annual winter hunter's rendezvous at the site of the historic Hebron Moravian Mission, Nunatsiavut, Canadian Arctic (click to enlarge). https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1f87a5f0-60fa-4294-8358-44128660409f/Environmental+Impact+II+-+NMWA+Sneak+Peek_7.jpg The Search For Plan B - Make it stand out Stephen Gorman discussing his work at The National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/31902cd0-1d3e-4efa-b3f7-1ed00338cca6/Steve+at+the+Sacred+Stone+copy.jpg The Search For Plan B - Make it stand out Stephen at the Sacred Stone, a Sami spiritual site, Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway (Click to enlarge) https://www.thewayhome.world/videos daily 0.75 2024-07-16 https://www.thewayhome.world/new-page-3 daily 0.75 2017-06-29 https://www.thewayhome.world/a-view-from-the-ice daily 0.75 2017-05-18 https://www.thewayhome.world/climate-refugees-2 daily 0.75 2017-10-24 https://www.thewayhome.world/noaa-2017-arctic-report-card-1 daily 0.75 2017-12-13 https://www.thewayhome.world/description daily 0.75 2024-08-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/d6f664a2-240a-4447-8399-5099f3029371/Massive+Iceberg+Looming+Over+Qeqertarsuaq.jpg Exhibition Description - Make it stand out Massive Iceberg Looming Over Qeqertarsuq, Greenland https://www.thewayhome.world/endorsements daily 0.75 2024-03-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/5f6d24b1-3add-4de6-b9f4-b0b499abdf20/Sami+Boy+and+Reindeer.jpg Praise - Make it stand out Sami Boy and Reindeer, Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway https://www.thewayhome.world/last-days-of-the-great-ice-article daily 0.75 2023-10-04 https://www.thewayhome.world/exhibition-photographs daily 0.75 2024-02-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683496599202-11WY744WUS0WZIHZEFT7/Dead+Glacier%2C+Baffin+Island%2C+Nunavut%2C+2007.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Retreat Baffin Island, Nunavut, 2007 Throughout the Arctic, glaciers are retreating at a startling rate, and these visibly diminishing rivers of ice are poignant and unmistakeable evidence of our warming atmosphere. At current rates of global warming, two-thirds of the world’s glaciers are projected to disappear by the end of this century. The continued use of fossil fuels is hugely problematic for the climate, for the biosphere, and for humanity. Unfortunately, carbon emissions are tightly correlated 1:1 with GDP and population growth. Together they go up in lockstep. Our culture has a built-in growth mandate, our economy is optimized for profits, and the industrial world remains dependent upon the unmatched power density of fossil fuels. As a result, emissions continue to rise. This situation will not change until there is a reorientation of what industrial society values and prizes most highly. In 2022 the world consumed nearly 55 percent more fossil fuels than it did in 1997, when delegates from nearly 200 nations met in Kyoto to agree on commitments to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases. As distinguished energy analyst Vaclav Smil says, "Since the world began to focus on the need to end the combustion of fossil fuels, we have not made the slightest progress in the goal of absolute global decarbonization." https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699456778165-7ZEN61IZS827L74GXAH0/Aayu%2BPeter%252C%2BHunter%252C%2BLawyer%252C%2BSealskin%2BFasj%253Dhion%2BDesigner%252C%2BMusician%252C%2BMember%2Bof%2Bthe%2BOrder%2Bof%2BCanada%252C%2BIlulissat%252C%2BGreenland%252C%2B2011.jpg Exhibition Photographs - A New Generation of Leaders Ilulissat, Greenland, 2011 Aayu Peter represents a new generation of Indigenous leaders who do not confuse being “modern” with being “Western.” She is a hunter; a lawyer; a sealskin clothing designer; a musician; a recording artist; the subject of numerous documentary films; and a Member of the Order of Canada. Aayu is a powerful spokesperson for Inuit involvement in issues relating to Arctic resource management and Inuit rights. Aayu proudly wears one of her modern sealskin creations. Her visage is decorated with a Tunnitt, the beautiful and ancient traditional women’s facial tattoo. For over a century, tunnitt had been forbidden by the Canadian government. "The true North Star is the self-determination of Indigenous Peoples and our ability to make decisions on any projects that have the potential to impact our lands and territories. It is time to change the old approaches and to center Indigenous leadership," says Galina Angarova, a Buryat from the Lake Baikal region of Siberia. Natural resource development on indigenous lands, increasingly including massive renewable energy projects such as Norway's Fossen Vind built on traditional Sami reindeer pasture land, can perpetuate extractivist practices and reinforce power imbalances, perpetuating a colonial dynamic where distant, external entities pursuing their own agendas benefit financially from the resources while the local communities absorb the costs. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683820224964-ODD9J5T8HPAAIMNV9219/Last%2BDay%2BOf%2BThe%2BGreat%2BIce%252C%2BDisko%2BBay%252C%2BGreenland%252C%2B2014.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Last Days Of The Great Ice Disko Bay, Greenland, 2014 Sermersuaq, The Greenland Ice Sheet, spans 660,000 square miles — an area almost the size of Alaska. It is nearly 2 miles thick at its height, and if it melts it has the potential to raise the world’s oceans by more than 20 feet. Today, The Greenland Ice Sheet loses 30 tons of ice every hour. As if to underscore the existential threat the loss of Sermersuaq, which means “The Great Ice” in Kalaallisut, poses for the entire planet, an iceberg calved from the Jakobshavn Glacier drifts under threatening skies. Out of the foreboding dark shadows, a ray of bright sunlight breaks through and strikes a portion of the iceberg, reminding us that the time to change our course is fleeting. Please pause to consider that in the year of the Rio Earth Summit - 1992 - when the world's leaders promised to stop climate change, fossil fuels provided 81 percent of the world’s primary energy. After more than three decades of attempted progress and trillions of dollars invested in alternatives, fossil fuels now account for 82 percent of global primary energy. Richard Heinberg outlines the choice we face when he asks, "The question is, shall we choose to gradually accustom ourselves to another way of life — one that more successfully integrates human purposes with ecological imperatives — or shall we cling to our present choices to the bitter end?" https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683750794429-J892J0JGWO97UM5B511A/Qeqertarsuq+Iceberg.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Massive Iceberg Looming Over Qeqertarsuaq Qeqertarsuaq, Disko Island, Greenland, 2014 Under dark and threatening skies, a massive grounded iceberg looms above the village of Qeqertarsuaq. As large as it appears, nine-tenths of the iceberg is underwater. This iceberg calved from Sermersuaq - “The Great Ice,” or the Greenland Ice Sheet, via the Jakobshavn Glacier, the source of the iceberg that sank the Titanic. The Jakobshavn Glacier is retreating rapidly, calving 35 billion tons of ice each year, which means it discharges more fresh water into the ocean in a single day than New York City uses in an entire month. The rate of discharge has doubled in the last decade. These are the times we live in, and we must work out how to live in them. Icebergs have been spotted dead ahead. Are there other courses we can chart that avoid the danger and lead to different outcomes? Are we mere passengers, passively watching our captains maintain a collison course towards growth and thus necessarily ever rising carbon emissions? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683496595340-P29TVZNLAT1NHYDGKSRF/Arctic+Dreams%2C+Ungava+Bay%2C+Nunavut%2C+Canada%2C+2008.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Arctic Dreams Akpatok Island, Ungava Bay, Nunavut, Canada, 2008 A large block of ice, melted and polished by the sun and the sea, lies stranded on the shore of a remote Arctic island. With sunlight pouring through a window in the ice, this natural sculpture presents us with a poignant reminder of sea ice loss and a vision of melancholy beauty. Despite thirty-six international climate conferences and trillions of dollars of investment in alternative energy over the last few decades, consider this: more carbon has been emitted just since the first global environmental summit in 1992 than in all of human history prior to that point. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699622107645-DC54J7T5CXTZS29MNWAU/Stranded%252Band%252BStarving%25252C%252BLower%252BSavage%252BIslands%25252C%252BNunavut%25252C%252BCanada%25252C%252B2011.jpg Exhibition Photographs - The Face of Climate Change Lower Savage Islands, Nunavut, Canada, 2011 The changing climate means that the Arctic Ocean freezes later in the autumn and melts earlier in the summer than it used to. When the sea ice retreats during the summer, polar bears can find themselves stranded on remote islands with no way of procuring food for months until the sea freezes again. There was no turning away from this heartbreaking moment. I saw the bear watch a seal swimming nearby in open water, so close yet out of reach. With freeze-up still weeks away, this starving polar bear was in a precarious situation. The world struggles to rein in carbon emissions. But as Gus Speth, President Carter’s chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality and the co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council wrote recently, “There is a new struggle that needs to be joined now: the struggle to learn from our mistakes — the Big Mistake of climate catastrophe. What is it about our society, our economy, our politics, and our culture that has let this giant failing happen? What is it that has led us to this tragedy?” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683496602311-NO6GLPDXA3E3DKDQLUGS/Iceberg+Garden%2C+Disko+Island%2C+Greenland%2C+2014.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Decision Point Disko Island, Greenland, 2014 Giant icebergs calved from the glaciers of northwestern Greenland bear witness to the accelerating melting of Sermersuaq - The Great Ice. It is well-known that burning fossil fuels is warming the atmosphere and must stop, but here is the problem: a single barrel of oil contains 5.8 million British Thermal Units’ (BTUs) worth of energy — which is equivalent to more than 5 years of one human’s labor — and since the world consumes over 100 billion barrels of oil each year, oil provides us with the labor equivalent of more than 500 billion human workers annually. In our quest for perpetual economic growth, will we ever be willing to voluntarily dismiss these essential workers and give up the magic power of oil? As Jevon’s Paradox posits, the more efficient a source of energy, the more of it we will use, and there is no more efficient source of energy than oil. Since the 1990s we have increased our energy efficiency by 30 percent, but we have also increased our energy consumption by 70 percent. This is why, despite our best efforts and intentions, the temperature continues to rise every year. And this is why, despite trillions of dollars invested, wind and solar power contributed only 2.4 percent of world energy consumption in 2022 -- essentially a rounding error. Humanity is at Decision Point. There is no more time to wait. We must chart our course into the future now. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699375146864-437P2V02DD0GPCLSK6O9/Dark+Ice+on+the+Jakobshavn+Glacier%2C+Ilulissat%2C+Greenland%2C+2014+copy.jpeg Exhibition Photographs - Dark Ice on the Jakobshavn Glacier Ilulissat, Greenland, 2014 Air pollution from around the world is carried by the jet stream and deposited on the vast Greenland Ice Sheet and its extensive floating ice shelves. In a perfect feedback loop the particulates combine with blooms of pigmented microalgae to darken large areas of the formerly bright white surface and accelerate the melting of the ice. The most recent scientific studies show that Greenland's glaciers are melting 100 times faster than previously estimated, and that the ice shelves in northern Greenland have lost more than a third of their volume just in the last half-century because of pollution and rising temperatures. The crucial challenge facing modern industrial society is that it is intrinsically an oil culture. It is shaped by oil in physical, material, and even metaphysical ways. From the trucks, automobiles, and highways we use, to our food supply, to our built environments, to our expectations of the future, oil is the master resource. As a result of this indispensable central role in all aspects of our lives, oil has also shaped our cultural values, practices, and beliefs. One way or another the petroculture is ending, and unless we change our ways voluntarily, ultimately it is geology that will determine our future on a planet of depleting resources. “2025 and beyond is when the world is going to be short of oil,” says Vicki Hollub, chief executive of Occidental Petroleum. We have built our civilization on cheap, easily accessible oil, and when it is no longer available, that civilization contracts and eventually stops. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683496598058-7L4SD17N5SKDS0QOEDTA/Dark+Cloud+and+Komatic+at+the+Floe+Edge%2C+Nunavut%2C+Canada%2C+2013.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Dark Cloud and Sled at the Floe Edge Bylot Island Floe Edge, Nunavut, Canada, 2013 Dramatic atmospheric conditions prevail at the floe-edge where the shore-fast sea ice meets the open water of Baffin Bay. “Everything is connected through our common atmosphere, not to mention our common spirit and humanity. What affects one affects us all… The future of Inuit is the future of the rest of the world - our home is a barometer for what is happening to our entire planet.” - Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Nobel Peace Prize Nominee and former chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/5f6d24b1-3add-4de6-b9f4-b0b499abdf20/Sami+Boy+and+Reindeer.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Sami Boy and Reindeer Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 From a very young age, Sami children spend time with their family’s herd out on the land, learning timeless cultural skills and traditions. Throughout the Arctic indigenous peoples maintain a strong connection to the environment through hunting, herding, fishing, and gathering renewable resources. These cultural practices provide the basis for most of their food production and have endured over thousands of years. Our global predicament is a cultural crisis, and that requires a cultural response. Fortunately we have one. For millennia the Inuit and Sami ways of life have been models of sustainable living in an interconnected, vibrant, and enchanted world. Stepping outside our culture and into theirs is quite revealing, and the contrast is stark. “Climate change is a complex issue, standing at the crossroads of science, ethics, society, education and, of course, culture – a dimension that has for too long been undervalued.” - UNESCO https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683496600885-HFLH1V6SRIVFY7M0DO5Y/Home+for+the+Night%2C+Puvirnituq%2C+Nunavik%2C+Canada%2C+2011.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Clarity at The Margins Puvirnituq, Nunavik, Canada, 2011 Traveling on the sea ice and living and working in the extreme Arctic environment requires specific knowledge and special skills passed from generation to generation. Traditional Inuit ways of thinking and being are based in cultural beliefs, lived experience, and acquired wisdom, and today these cultural traditions are being challenged by an intruding global industrial culture that is threatening their way of life and their environment. “It is at these margins of society that it is possible to see with surprising clarity our centre”, writes Arctic anthropologist Hugh Brody. “On colonial frontiers, where different and often rival ways of living meet, the underlying elements of our society become more clearly visible, sadly in exaggerated form.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/71b6a3d1-b8c8-4b3a-b90a-bb9555bf4941/Sami+-+People+of+the+Reindeer-4.jpg Exhibition Photographs - The Summons Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 I had a dream one evening in the winter of 2022, the night before my exhibition with Edward Koren, Down to the Bone, was to open. In my dream, a lone reindeer appeared out of an Arctic whiteout and looked directly at me. Then the reindeer delivered a message: Come visit us. Come hear our story. A month later, while traveling with Sami herders across Arctic Norway’s Finnmark Plateau in a whiteout, I turned around, and the reindeer appeared to me once again, just as in my dream. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683496608384-17JLRZXVG29HVUJ4EDEI/Revered+Elder%2C+Puvirnituq%2C+Nunavik%2C+Canada%2C+2011.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Inummarik - "A True Inuk" Puvirnituq, Nunavik, Canada, 2011 Inummarik means “a true Inuk;” someone who is culturally skilled, knowledgeable, and a guiding source of wisdom for younger generations. In a time of dramatic environmental, technological, and cultural challenges, Inummarik strive to pass language, culture, traditional beliefs, skills, and worldviews on to Inuit youth so that they may have a framework for living a good life in harmony with nature that is full of purpose and meaning. Inummarik wisdom does not apply only to Inuit, it is universal. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683829733475-WERYBIJ8JUFZMW0B4CHJ/Waterfall%2Band%2BStranded%2BPolar%2BBear%252C%2BAkpatok%2BIsland%252C%2BNunavut%252C%2BCanada%252C%2B2011.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Waterfall and Stranded Polar Bear Akpatok Island, Nunavut, Canada, 2011 A stranded polar bear spends the summer wandering the shore beneath 800-foot-high limestone cliffs. The warming climate means that the sea ice forms later in the fall and melts earlier in the spring, meaning polar bears must live off their body’s fat reserves when there is no sea ice and thus no access to seals. While on land the bears are starving, losing roughly two pounds per day. They scavenge berries, seabird eggs, scurvy grass, and kelp while stranded, but none of these foods are fatty or abundant enough to sustain them over the long-term. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1715861539859-Z28KJIXGH07RD6C8X1U0/Sami+-+People+of+the+Reindeer-15.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Vitality, Creativity, and Autonomy Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 “Science and technology reign today as the practical gods of the modern age; they give us power to disrupt nature but little real insight into how it functions… Only when we look outside Western culture, or when someone outside looks in, do we discover the glaring inconsistencies and begin to measure the actual changes that science and technology have wrought in our lives.” - Vine Deloria Jr. Sami, Inuit, and the thousands of distinct place-based human cultures still fighting for survival reject the unquestioning acceptance of what Lewis Mumford called authoritarian technologies. They view the power of science and technology with a critical eye, and they remind us of the immense vitality, creativity, and autonomy that their humane, sustainable, egalitarian, and truly democratic traditions still offer us. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683829826372-ET1BRXBPWT02BXV9X2M9/Stranded%2BPolar%2BBear%2BSummering%2Bin%2Ba%2BSeabird%2BColony%252C%2BCoburg%2BIsland%252C%2BNunavut%252C%2BCanada%252C%2B2012.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Intrepid, Innovative, and Resilient Coburg Island, Nunavut, Canada, 2012 Marooned on land, unable to hunt seals, polar bears have occasionally been reported scavenging for eggs, dead birds, and fallen fledglings at the base of nesting cliffs as they searched for supplemental food during the ice-free season. Polar bears are not known to scale cliffs in search of food, but this intrepid, innovative, and resilient bear did just that, climbing a couple of hundred feet up the rock wall to access the plentiful birds and eggs in this seabird rookery. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699373944009-P2IY8ZBLX3FQMXDHB75N/Sami+Reindeer_pano+1.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Irony On The Plateau Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 As they have for centuries, reindeer and their Sami herders migrate across northern Scaninavia from the coast to the interior and back again, completing their timeless annual cycle. And as they have for centuries, Arctic Indigenous communities continue to experience stress from powerful outside political and industrial forces that threaten to restrict culturally vital harvesting and herding activities and to sever the powerful bond between the people and the land. Ironically, the energy transition designed to stop climate change is threatening the sustainable and environmentally friendly way of life of the Sámi, Europe’s last-remaining Indigenous people who are indeed models of low carbon living. Rather than learn from the Sami, European governments are eyeing their lands for giant industrial wind installations and for mines rich in rare minerals for electric vehical batteries. The Sami call this acquisitive approach to their lands “green colonization.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699378277350-DRXKZPRWGBN4QAAU9HMD/Refuge-14+copy.jpeg Exhibition Photographs - Melting Ice Cellar Kaktovik, Alaska, 2017 Jack Kayotuk, a resident of the Inupiat village of Kaktovik on Barter Island in the Beaufort Sea off the north coast of Alaska, examines a melting ice cellar where the villagers once stored whale meat from the annual bowhead whale hunt. Dug deep into the permafrost, the cellars kept the meat frozen throughout the year. Today the permafrost is melting, rendering the cellars unsafe for food storage. Scientists have been warning that the Arctic is heating twice as fast as the rest of the planet. However, the most recent studies show that the Arctic is actually warming at four times the global average, and that the portion of the planet above the Arctic Circle — the area located above 66.5 degrees latitude — has warmed by more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1979. Unfortunately, when we add new energy sources to the system we don't replace older sources, we merely add to our capacity to grow our energy consumption. Though the world switched from wood to coal to oil as primary energy sources over the last century and a half, we still burn more wood today for energy than we did 150 years ago. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1721168609878-5CKMA44D1GIHS50Z1EUT/Idle%2BTimes%2BWaiting%2BFor%2BFreeze-Up%252C%2BSattut%252C%2BGreenland%252C%2B2014.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Sikuvut Nunguliqtuq - "Our Ice is Vanishing" Sattut, Greenland, 2014 Dogsleds and a sled dog wait patiently for freeze-up so they can venture out onto the sea ice once again. Just as the polar bears need a platform of sea ice to hunt seals at their breathing holes, Inuit culture is adapted to the sea ice environment. The ice permits mobility and flexibility, and hunting cultures must always be ready to move and seize new opportunities, for no two years are ever alike, animal migration patterns change, and “the world is in a constant state of coming into existence at all times” (Pinngortitaq). https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1717808970974-QQ98TPPNRV2QUDQWT0NL/Heading%2BHome%252C%2BQaanaaq%252C%2BThule%252C%2BGreenland%252C%2B2017_pano.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit Qaanaaq, Thule, Greenland, 2017 Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (or simply IQ - ”What Inuit have always known to be true”) means the cultural wisdom gained from extensive experience, passed from generation to generation. “It also means knowledge of the Arctic environment - of snow, ice, water, weather and the environment that we share. It encompasses being in harmony with people, land and living things - and respecting them. It implies life skills, alertness and the ability to train others for a strong healthy life. It provides purpose and meaning for us and is a way of being in the world that our ancestors set down for us to ensure our survival and well-being.” - Mark Kalluak, Nunavut https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699378273766-VS7EN4OEPC1Z45OQOISG/Sami+-+People+of+the+Reindeer-32+copy.jpeg Exhibition Photographs - A Special Relationship Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 A Sami reindeer herder and his dogs take a rest from the migration as the herd mills around them. For hundreds of years, the reindeer have provided the Sami with food, clothing, shelter, and materials. And as it has for hundreds of years, most reindeer herding in Norway takes place on the Finnmark Plateau north of the Arctic Circle. Herders follow the same migration paths from the coast to the interior from year to year, and while each family has its own pastures, all of the land is held in common. Sami herders each have their preferred areas, but with the changing climate and deteriorating conditions, it is widely accepted that families may need to share their traditional pastures. In the winter on the plateau the reindeer live on lichen, which is buried under the snow and can be difficult if not impossible for them to access after a Cuohki event, when rain on pastures freezes and forms an ice sheet sealing in the lichen. Today, with wildly fluctuating winter temperatures, even the Finnmark Plateau at 70 degrees north latitude is regularly experiencing dangerous thaws and freezes. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1684332476928-GILII2NHFIH7GP9GGS0P/Dogsleds+Beneath+the+Cliffs%2C+Thule%2C+Greenland%2C+2017.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Independence Thule, Greenland, 2017 Inughuit subsistence hunters travel the sea ice by dogsled in search of seals, walruses, and polar bears. The hunters of northern Greenland depend upon wild game for roughly 80 percent of their diet. By using traditional technologies that they both manufacture and control such as dogsleds, the Inughuit retain their culture and independence, insulating themselves from the need for expensive modern commercially manufactured tools and dependence upon distant, unreliable six-continent supply chains. Historian David Fleming summarized this approach to living on a planet of finite resources when he wrote, “Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683496597171-9XPCG4TNXIUO3ESEXUMC/Breaking+Away%2C+Ilulissat%2C+Greenland%2C+2014.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Breaking Away Ilulissat Ice Fjord, Greenland, 2014 Ice calved from the Jakobshavn Glacier drifts into Disko Bay. The rapid warming of the Arctic creates ripple effects all over the planet. As a result, once-stable sea levels are rising, weather patterns are shifting, and ecosystems around the world are changing. "Beyond policy changes and investment, a seismic cultural shift is imperative to steer humanity away from self-destruction towards a just and sustainable future. We must realign our political will, economic priorities and societal values to recognise that ecological wellbeing is matched to human wellbeing." - Sir David King, Chair of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699378615177-U0FZKWTKZW1YYTMG8GMG/Qaanaaq-21+copy.jpeg Exhibition Photographs - Sled Dog Culture Thule, Greenland, 2017 Northern Greenland is home to the largest sled dog population in the Arctic, and the Inughuit, or Polar Inuit, take pride in their unique and vibrant sled dog culture. The Greenland sled dog is the oldest breed in the world, having migrated with the Inughuit on their 4,000 year journey across the Arctic from Alaska to Greenland. To preserve their extraordinary culture, the Inughuit have made the choice to not allow the use of snowmobiles in their homeland. Today however, both the Greenland sled dog and the ancient sled dog culture are in danger of disappearing due to both climate change and powerful political, economic, and development pressures that, in a very old story, would like to see the independent Indigenous population off of the land in order to develop it. Inughuit elders fear that the sled dog culture, with its embodied wisdom that has sustained them for at least the last 4,000 years, will be gone in a generation. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683919213558-F7WF1KRA27P2ZURIWINV/LastDays+Website-53.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Resistance Qaanaaq, Thule, Greenland, 2017 A contemporary Inughuit hunter leads his dog team onto the sea ice to begin a hunting expedition. “Hunters and gatherers stand at the opposite pole from the dense urban life experienced by most people; yet those same hunters may have the key answers to some of the central questions about the human condition: Can people live without the state or the market? Can people live without accumulated wealth or “advanced” technology? Can people live in nature without destroying it?” - Richard B. Lee https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699291882802-0KS00ZCD2VP81Y7PFZ9R/Sami+-+People+of+the+Reindeer-28.jpg Exhibition Photographs - A Familiar Story Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 Before the 17th century and the colonial intrusion into Sami territory by the emerging nation states of Scandinavia and Russia, the Sami were hunter gatherers. They harvested wild reindeer for food, clothing, shelter, and tools. Their needs were few and easily met. When their lands were taken from them by colonial authorities, the Sami began domsticating the wild reindeer and increasing the size of their herds in order to pay taxes to the new governments with hides. Since the 1600s, in a story familiar to virtually every indigenous and place-based people on the planet, the Sami have endured centuries of forced assimilation, uprooting, relocation, abuse, and the systematic loss of their language and culture. Even today, after a recent report issued by Norway’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission detailed centuries of government wrongdoing and complicity, little has changed as industrial development continues to threaten the traditional Sami lands, waters, and way of life. Unfortunately, around the world colonial powers are once more eyeing Indigenous lands. As Galina Angarova, herself a Buryat from Siberia, points out, "Indigenous Peoples are increasingly experiencing the impacts of the transition to the green economy as the world accelerates its quest for resources. Targeting the lands of Indigenous Peoples for exploration and exploitation without consultation and consent has been ongoing for the past 500 years." https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683919213601-MZX1JT8FFW7MLN2KWY8D/LastDays+Website-52.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Siulersortaat - “Those Who Guide The Way" Inglefield Fjord, Thule, Greenland 2017 For thousands of years, Inuit have hunted the sea ice for food, clothing, and other essential uses. In Northwest Greenland, Inughuit hunters still wear sealskin boots, polar bear pants, and caribou parkas because these materials are locally available, sustainably harvested, do not require participation in the cash economy to procure, and are superior to any manufactured clothing for use in the harsh Arctic environment. These hunters are respected for their foresight, leadership, experience, and insight. Hunters are siulersortaat - “those who guide the way.” Hunting remains a crucial part of Inuit cultural identity and satisfies many important social, cultural, economic, and nutritional needs of families, households, and communities. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683819578559-MPIREF3XOJMILP93TS7W/LastDays+Website-51.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Isuma - "Possessing Knowledge and Wisdom" Gjoa Haven, King William Island, Nunavut, Canada, 2009 A little Inuit girl stands in front of drying muskox and grizzly bear hides in Gjoa Haven, on King William Island in the Northwest Passage. The grizzly hide is evidence of a warming climate, as King William Island was well north of their range until recently. During his first-ever transit of the Northwest Passage from 1903-06 aboard the Gjoa, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen spent two years here learning the Inuit survival skills and intimate knowledge of the polar environment that enabled him to become the first person to reach the South Pole. Here among Inuit Amundsen developed Isuma - “the knowledge and wisdom to successfully navigate new and unexpected circumstances.” His rival, Captain Robert Scott of the British Royal Navy, refused to adopt Inuit wisdom in his quest for the Pole, and Scott and all of his men perished on their journey. The planetary emergency is largely the legacy of a lack of Isuma - the industrial development of a finite planet, the commodification and abuse of nature, and the decline of rooted and local ways of knowing and being. What can we learn from Inuit, Sami, and others like them, and can we develop Isuma as we head into the uncharted territory of planetary overshoot? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1684178291940-0A5HFNHAOPVH5KCRGDCW/Sled+Dogs+Running+Over+the+Ice%2C+Thule%2C+Greenland%2C+2017.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Homeward Bound -- Fresh Tracks Upon The Sea Ice Thule, Greenland, 2017 An Inughuit hunter drives his dogsled over the snow covered sea ice near the village of Siorapaluk, the world’s most northerly community. The Inughuit were first contacted by Europeans in 1818, when British naval officer John Ross led an expedition searching for the Northwest Passage into their territory. Until that encounter the Inughuit had lived for centuries in total isolation, completely unaware of the existence of other humans. In April 1909, American explorer Robert Peary depended upon Inughuit drivers and their dogsleds on an expedition that claimed to be the first to have reached the geographic North Pole. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683496604886-F3DG89H06R88UZWS9PJT/Meltwater+at+Midnight%2C+Eclipse+Sound%2C+Nunavut%2C+Canada%2C+2013.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Witnesses and Messengers Eclipse Sound, Nunavut, Canada, 2013 At midnight in June, an Inuit sled navigates the melting ice of Eclipse Sound separating Baffin Island and Bylot Island in the Canadian High Arctic. The ice is vital to Inuit because it allows them the mobility to pursue their way of life. Since Inuit live on a platform of ice, and they are daily immersed in their environment, they are the witnesses and messengers (silaup aalaruqpalianigata tusaqtittijiit) to the rest of us. They are telling us that the ice is melting and becoming more dangerous, and that this has both local and global consequences. From physics to biology, the Indigenous worldview of interconnection and cooperation among natural systems is confirmed by scientific evidence. Can the rest of us adopt this worldview and align our behavior with biophysical reality in time to avert catastrophe? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/049294b1-105d-4ac9-a180-587a98871ec8/Sami+Woman+and+Child.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Sami Woman and Child in Migration Camp Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 Sami are recognized as Europe’s only Indiginous culture. They number around 80,000 people scattered across their roughly 150,000 square mile territory in the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula in Russia (a homeland they call Sápmi). For centuries those countries suppressed their languages and forced Sami to assimilate culturally while dispossessing them and opening their lands for settlement and development. Their challenges continue. Today Sami must fight to protect their lands against the extractive industries and to protect their migratory routes from industrial development. The European Union is coveting resources on Sami lands as they are deemed critcal to its efforts to become the world’s first net-zero emissions continent by 2050. To reach this goal will require massive industrialization of traditional Sami pasture lands. According to our economic system, the sustainable, low carbon Sami way of life has little value because of its relatively small contribution to the European Union’s GDP. From a strictly economic perspective, it follows that their land-based cultural activities, worldview, and sustainable, virtually carbon-free way of life should be abandoned and give way to more profitable industries. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699291881232-0KP92PK6Z9RLM47S1NS0/Sami+-+People+of+the+Reindeer-7.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Reindeer or Caribou? Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 What is a reindeer and what is a caribou? In fact, reindeer and caribou are the exact same deer species (Rangifer tarandus). The animals are called reindeer in Europe and Asia, while in North America they are called caribou. However, domesticated caribou are called reindeer all around the world, including in North America. Both male and female caribou and reindeer grow antlers, and they are well designed for the coldest climates. Caribou and reindeer have hair on every part of their body, including their hooves, and they are also the only deer species to have hair covering their noses. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/e6d3139c-5720-453c-9348-19c0d0f2ce18/Standing+Polar+Bear+and+Camp+copy.jpeg Exhibition Photographs - Complex and Dynamic Relationships Baffin Island Floe Edge, Nunavut, Canada, 2013 A polar bear at the floe edge — the place where the shore-fast sea ice meets the open Arctic Ocean — pays a visit to an Inuit narwhal hunting camp. Both the bears and the Inuit use the sea ice as a place to travel and to hunt, and interractions are frequent. With thousands of years of experience, Inuit know that you need to have the proper attitude, and a tremendous skill set, to live safely and comfortably in the sea ice environment. If you aren’t situationally aware, if you aren’t paying attention to your surroundings, if you don’t understand how everything impacts everything else, you can easily find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Wherever people live today, the climate no longer cares if they are deep in the wilderness or in the heart of a city. The paradigm has changed in the last decade or so, and urban centers with tens of thousands of people are now regularly engulfed in wildfires and battered by superstorms. The protective illusion of the built environment has been breached by our own actions. Regardless of where we are, we need to invest in and acquire a deep body of cultural and ecological knowledge to survive. We need to understand complex, dynamic relationships. We need wisdom. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699299356988-XGD9C6ZX9SQLLSLEIFV0/Inside+the+Igloo+copy.jpeg Exhibition Photographs - Sharing Conciousness With Nature Puvirnituq, Nunavik, 2011 To thrive in their challenging Arctic homeland, Inuit rely upon the wisdom and guidance of traditional knowledge passed down for millennia. This traditional ecological and adaptive knowledge, called Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit in Inuktitut, includes not only a road map for navigating the physical landscape, but also guidance for safely negotiating the spiritual landscape as well. For Inuit the two are the same, encompassed by a sentient, animate, mystic power permeating all of existence they call Sila. Sila connects people to the land, sea, and atmosphere; to the natural order of things; to the life-giving elements; and a person without Sila is thought to lack an essential relationship with the universe that is necessary for all human well-being. I have heard Sila described this way: “Sila is our concept for the weather, the climate, the mind, consciousness. It is the universal order where man is in unity with nature. Sila is the shared life that the sea, wind, mountains, animals, and humans possess. When you share consciousness with nature you treat nature with respect.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699373944338-KC97LGWURQK4ZG5RLNVE/Sami+Reindeer_pano+2.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Holding The Line Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 Each day brings dispiriting news about the state of the earth: melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, diminished food and water supplies, deforestation and desertification, growing inequality and wealth disparity, and mass extinctions of plant and animal species. It should come as no surprise that this unfolding planetary emergency is occurring as modern industrial society has all but severed its ties with the natural world. The accelerating diminishment of personal as well as cultural knowledge about nature’s vital role in human sustenance and security undermines modern society’s ability to make well-informed decisions regarding natural resources. Traditional cultures such as Sami and Inuit provide critical bulwarks against further environmental deterioration and loss of ecological knowledge. The stories they tell guide them to live lightly upon the land, their home. "What matters is the potency of a belief, the manner in which a conviction plays out in the day-to-day lives of a people, for in a very real sense this determines the ecological footprint of a culture, the impact that any society has on its environment. A child raised to believe that a mountain is the abode of a protective spirit will be a profoundly different human being from a youth brought up to believe that a mountain is an inert mass of rock ready to be mined." - Wade Davis https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1715962672380-FKXLIBOCXRHYVK9SMYB0/Arriving+in+Qeqertat.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Arriving in Qeqertat Qeqertat, Thule, Greenland, 2017 Qeqertat is a village of approximately 20 people on the shore of Inglefield Fjord in far northern Greenland. The Inughuit, or Polar Inuit, who call this region home are one of the smallest indigenous groups in the world, with a population of just 800 people. In the Inughuit homeland snow machines are not permitted, and all winter travel is by dogsled. Despite the increasingly corrosive intrusions of modern industrial society, many Indigenous and place-based peoples live in multi-generational, supportive, and classless communities in traditional homelands. They pursue the ways of life they love, make well-designed tools with their own hands, see little distinction between social life and economic life, enjoy ample leisure time and affluence, and have a negligible impact upon the environment. They are modern, stable societies with healthy living traditions, and they pose a serious challenge to the ethnocentric, orthodox worldview of modern industrial society. Stepping outside of our culture and into theirs is revealing; the contrast is stark. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699378275138-3BMKTR2BS1CLVLYZZYP7/Sami+-+People+of+the+Reindeer-34+copy.jpeg Exhibition Photographs - Just Being Kids Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 Sami kids on the migration go back and forth from home and school in town to join their father in his mobile camp on the plateau. Out on the land they have the time to absorb their cultural heritage and also to just be kids, throwing snowballs and going for sled rides. But their elders worry that the days of the traditional Sami way of life are numbered. A clear example of ongoing colonization of their lands, Sami activists say, is Norway’s largest onshore industrial wind energy project, Fosen Vind. In 2021, the Norwegian Supreme Court ruled that parts of Fosen Vind had been built illegally on Sami reindeer herding territory, endangering the traditional livelihoods of Sami herders. The Supreme Court ordered the removal of the project. Despite the court’s ruling, the Norwegian government has made no moves to enforce the ruling and restore the land to the Sami, despite the clear legal obligation to do so. If things don't change, reindeer herder Niilas Sara told me during the migration, the traditional Sami way of life will be gone within fifty years. This echoed a similar prediction for the Inughuit dog sled culture that I heard from the hunters while on expedition in northern Greenland. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1715792017608-IU3BI5KTLQ2SC45BBGY1/Anderson+Yezerski+Gallery+7+copy.jpeg Exhibition Photographs - Democratic and Autocratic Technologies Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 As they have since time immemorial, Sami herders watch their reindeer migrate across the vastness of the Finnmark Plateau in Arctic Norway. In 1963 Lewis Muford, American historian, sociologist, and philosopher of technology, wrote, "What I would call democratic technics is the small scale method of production, resting mainly on human skill and animal energy but always, even when employing machines, remaining under the active direction of the craftsman or the farmer, each group developing its own gifts, through appropriate arts and social ceremonies, as well as making discreet use of the gifts of nature..." And then Mumford asks, "Why has our age surrendered so easily to the controllers, the manipulators, the conditioners of an authoritarian technics?" https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699541169088-U2I4GYNUY4DWM6PUJXH6/Emily+Testing+the+Ice+copy.jpeg Exhibition Photographs - Culture is an Authentic, Original Response to a Specific Place. Baffin Island Floe Edge, Nunavut, Canada, 2013 By relocalizing, by relearning who and where we are, we will be able to renegotiate our relationships with the land and with each other. Science plainly shows that ecosystems are not interchangeable, and neither are the place-based traditional ways of living in those ecosystems. Culture is an authentic, original response to a specific place. When we see the land as the place where we are from, where we belong, and where future generations will thrive, we will know how to take care of it. By relocalizing, or as Vine Deloria Jr. and Daniel Wildcat put it, “indigenizing”, we will develop “elegantly designed solutions to living well that are predicated upon the uniqueness of place”, as David Orr says. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699461649630-H7N4JT8KU3HHTKQEJPP2/Sami+Reindeer_pano+4.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Technology, Modernity, and Design Thule, Greenland, 2017 A modern 21st century Inughuit hunter rests his dogsled team while traveling over the sea ice near 80 degrees North in Greenland. The technology he uses, from his dogs to his sled to his clothing, is designed to function perfectly in his home environment. Using these tools does not make him an anachronism, he simply has no desire to trade what works well for what Western industrial society considers more modern — and would very much like to sell to him for a price he would prefer not to pay. Western industrial society might not consider him modern because we confuse modernity with putting distance between ourselves, the land, and the sources of our sustenance. We also confuse modern technology with good design. Modern technologies are increasingly complex and reliant on computer software that makes them unfamiliar, hard to use, and hard to control. Good design, on the other hand, is the art of taking something familiar and useful and adapting it to contemporary situations as the need arises. “Where good design becomes part of the social fabric at all levels, unanticipated positive side effects multiply,” says David Orr. “When people fail to design carefully, lovingly, and competently, unwanted side effects and disasters multiply. By the evidence of pollution, violence, social decay, and waste all around us, we have designed things badly.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699456335458-7LKLH32DRR90T599XQ8X/Tomas+Leads+the+Team+copy.jpeg Exhibition Photographs - Locally Specific, Universally Relevant Thule, Greenland, 2017 Indigenous peoples throughout the Arctic posses detailed and highly complex knowledge of the natural world gained through first-hand experience and then passed on from generation to generation. This traditional ecological knowledge has allowed them to sustainably benefit from highly productive ecosystems for thousands of years, and it provides a solid foundation for cultural, spiritual, and ethical guidance in the use of appropriate technologies and management of natural resources. This knowledge is locally specific, but the priciples are universal. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699461796917-49HJJVJ5HD14KWCU330C/Sami+Reindeer_pano+3.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Gratitude and Reverence Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 In a moment of gratitude and perhaps even reverence, a Sami woman kneels in the snow before one of her reindeer, who returns her gaze. Inuit and Sami teach us that our challenge is not material or technical, it is cultural and spiritual. In order to begin healing the planet and ourselves, they suggest, we need to see ourselves as of this land, our native home. Once we revere the land, we will treat it with respect. When we revere the land and the local land-based traditions that are our heritage, we will engage with the land and live resiliently, because the way we will live is wise, sustainable, and time-tested over many generations. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699456332423-CXQK3G0VFVAZ3TW0L2G8/Dogsled+Camp+copy.jpeg Exhibition Photographs - Time to Come Home Thule, Greenland, 2017 In a timeless scene, Inughuit hunters set up camp on the sea ice as they have for countless generations. In contrast to modern industrial society’s long history as transient conquerors and exploiters, cultures such as Inuit and Sami offer us another way of seeing ourselves in the world going forward. We simply can no longer afford to view ourselves as homeless outsiders in abstract non-places, here to enrich ourselves at the land’s expense; or see the land as merely a limitless treasure chest of lifeless commodities to exploit. Nature is our home, and, as Simone Weil wrote, “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” Rather than behave as cosmic outlaws, by following the examples of Inuit and Sami we might instead root ourselves in space and time. All people need a sense of belonging to something that is bigger than they are, and we underestimate that deep human need at our peril. Many of us have allowed ourselves to become deracinated, but when we look around we see there are myriad ways to put down roots and pursue ways of living that are appropriate for the specific environments we inhabit. All the evidence suggests that it’s time to come home. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1699461649816-C5QERM97FO3BL077TYZR/Sami+Reindeer_pano+5.jpg Exhibition Photographs - There are Many Paths Thule, Greenland, 2017 We have hit the limits to growth. The cheap and abundant energy and materials that have powered Western industrial civilization for the last century and a half are in terminal decline, as is the planet’s ability to absorb our waste. As a result a great simplification is coming. One way or another, we will have to manage a return to a lower energy, lower materials input way of living. That is the reality of living on a planet of finite natural resources. This has nothing to do with human ingenuity, it is simply pure physics, biology, and geology. We can ignore reality all we like, but reality never goes away. There is so much we can do. As Daniel Wildcat, a professor at Haskell Indian Nations University and a member of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma says, “There are many paths, each situated in the actual places, such as prairies, forests, deserts, and so forth, and environments where our tribal societies and cultures emerged. The experiences of time and history are shaped by places. This is not a pre-or-postmodernist or deep ecologist position. It is an indigenous realist position, one that increasing numbers of ecologists, such as Wes Jackson at The Land Institute, are recognizing as crucial if we human beings are to learn how to live in healthy sustainable communities utilizing appropriate technologies.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1715962671624-Y0R2SBOAR0KMLSGLO49A/Whiteout+on+the+Plateau.jpg Exhibition Photographs - Heading Home Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway, 2022 Sami reindeer herders head back to migration camp immersed in a total whiteout. In a true whiteout such as this, the horizon disappears and both the sky and all landscape features vanish. There are no points of visual reference by which to navigate; even shadows disappear because the light arrives in equal measure from all directions. There is no up or down, no forward or backward. Being in a whiteout is like floating inside an opaque white room. A whiteout is completely disorienting, most people suffer from vertigo in these conditions, and yet Sami know exactly where they are and how to get home. Many in modern industrial society find themselves rootless and directionless, as though lost in a dizzying whiteout. Trying to navigate our complex circumstances we are confused, unsure of who and where we are, and unable to find our way home. To get there we need all the help we can get. We need new stories, new narratives, and new guides to lead us back. We need inspiration and imagination, and we need an enlarged sense of what’s possible. https://www.thewayhome.world/about-stephen-gorman-copy daily 0.75 2023-05-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1449242931919-M8BCI7IV9QF42KU1W99H/image-asset.jpeg About Stephen Gorman (Copy) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1458063912789-W2ZC19ZE4N1DDKGNO5PY/Stephen+Gorman+and+Inukshuk+-+Puvirntituq%2C+QC.jpg About Stephen Gorman (Copy) Stephen Gorman on a winter expedition along the northeast coast of Hudson Bay, Nunavik, Canadian Arctic (click to enlarge). https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1458930346503-K4G7CD811JBQKNGWJ614/image-asset.jpeg About Stephen Gorman (Copy) Stephen Gorman at the floe edge off Bylot Island in the Canadian Arctic 450 miles above the Arctic Circle (click to enlarge). https://www.thewayhome.world/installation-photographs daily 0.75 2023-11-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/50ddac53-6f37-4b82-bba6-34dc4aed3140/Gallery+Mockup+1_TWH.jpg Installation Photographs - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/759bc135-86c6-4d64-b2a3-434ec142e882/Gallery+Mockup+2_TWH.jpg Installation Photographs - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/74bfe605-e13a-4621-9f36-a68c0373df21/Gallery+Mockup+3_TWH.jpg Installation Photographs - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.thewayhome.world/the-way-home daily 0.75 2024-08-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/43d62e0b-7e74-4bb4-84dc-625b86902c7e/Howard+Yezersky+Gallery-10+copy.jpg The Way Home - Make it stand out Homeward Bound: Fresh Tracks Upon The Sea Ice - Thule, Greenland https://www.thewayhome.world/home daily 1.0 2024-08-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683131037674-ZWQEXY1ZFGCL4MAKYUPS/Heading+Home.jpg Home - Make it stand out Polar Inughuit Family Heading Home Over the Sea Ice - Qaanaaq, Thule, Greenland https://www.thewayhome.world/why-learn-from-indigenous-cultures daily 0.75 2024-07-31 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/5fafb320-4a7b-43ea-a8b5-a8bf84bcfb8a/Sami+-+People+of+the+Reindeer-15.jpg Modernity - Make it stand out A Contemporary Sami Reindeer Herder, Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway https://www.thewayhome.world/another-way daily 0.75 2024-07-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/1683130994665-0AKSVS30D23B0EKVKD6B/LastDays+Website-29.jpg Another Way of Knowing, Another Way of Being - Make it stand out Emily Searching for Seal Breathing Holes in the Sea Ice, Baffin Bay, Nunavut, Canada https://www.thewayhome.world/a-final-thought daily 0.75 2024-07-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/71b6a3d1-b8c8-4b3a-b90a-bb9555bf4941/Sami+-+People+of+the+Reindeer-4.jpg Final Thoughts - Make it stand out The Summons, Finnmark Plateau, Arctic Norway https://www.thewayhome.world/the-stories-we-tell daily 0.75 2024-08-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/12a55f1d-d0e2-4644-b687-c5b6872448cf/Tomas+and+Tobias.jpg The Stories We Tell - Make it stand out Tomas and Tobias Taking a Trail Break, Thule, Greenland https://www.thewayhome.world/representation daily 0.75 2024-03-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/8e42ede3-a94c-4157-8319-a5009ef89678/andreabrown_social-media_highres.jpg Representation - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/ea77a918-d4a1-490c-9bc9-e4c347e45159/AYG+Logo.jpg Representation - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.thewayhome.world/about-stephen-gorman-1 daily 0.75 2024-08-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/564cb807e4b0f2d68305e9a1/c0116604-c0b7-4922-959a-d7f04bd827c9/Kaktovik+Selects-2.jpg About Stephen Gorman - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.