envisioned being welcomed with gratitude, after traveling thousands of miles to record personal accounts of meatless hunts, starving wildlife, and perilously thinning ice. In my year-plus vacation from number crunching, I would become the Anna Politkovskaya of Arctic climate change.
In retrospect it’s a bit embarrassing. Instead of gratitude I got a resigned look and the tired recitation of stories told once too often. Often I was the third, fourth, or tenth outsider interrupting someone’s busy summer, demanding to know how climate change was destroying their life. In airplanes and hotels I bumped into camera crews and book authors, all asking for leads to a stricken hunter to interview, a melting lump of ice to film.
I got all of those stories of woe. My notebooks are overflowing with them. Our Sami reindeer herder is now spending a bundle on hay, because bizarre winter rains have made her animals unable to scrape through the ice- crusted snow to eat.444 There is no question that climate change is wreaking havoc upon northern peoples, as described in earlier chapters. These problems will only get worse in the future. But to isolate climate change, and portray it as the sole concern facing northern societies is disingenuous. It is but one part of a much bigger story.
Across a vast chunk of Canada’s bitterly frozen extreme north, a place with no permanent roads and too cold even to grow wood, a remarkable political experiment is unfolding.
The new Nunavut Territory—the first redrawing of Canada’s map since 1949—has just celebrated its first decade. With 1.9 million square kilometers, approximately the size of Mexico, Nunavut is geographically large enough to be a good-sized country. But if it were, with barely thirty thousand people it would have the lowest population density on Earth.
Its residents are hard at work changing that. Nunavut has the fastest population growth rate of anywhere in Canada, and it isn’t relying on foreign immigrants to do it. It is birthing twenty-five babies per thousand people versus the national average of eleven. With a median age of just twenty-three years (Canada’s average is forty), Nunavut is extraordinarily youthful. More than a third of its population is under the age of fifteen.445
As of Canada’s last census in 2006, Nunavut’s population had leapt more than 10% in just five years. Iqaluit—its new capital sprouting from the site of an old Cold War U.S. Air Force base—jumped nearly 20%. With vacancy rates near zero, new housing can’t be built fast enough in Iqaluit to keep up with demand. Apartments go for two to three thousand dollars per month, and the city vies with Fort McMurray for the dubious distinction of being the most expensive rental market in Canada.
I first met Elisapee Sheutiapik, Iqaluit’s mayor, in 2007. She bubbles with enthusiasm about Nunavut’s potential. It is a very exciting time for northern aboriginal people, she explains. We are regaining control of our homeland. There are more jobs and new opportunities. The whole world is watching.
She’ll also describe its problems—soaring food prices, the housing shortage, substance abuse, and climate change. Nunavut’s main travel platform—sea ice—is becoming unreliable. Various other problems commence if temperatures go above 21°C in summer. With a contagious laugh she explains that Iqaluit’s new buildings are being built with air-conditioning, something never seen before by the Inuit. Then, getting serious, she’ll talk about plans to convince the Canadian government to build a deepwater port for its newest capital city.446
She just might get one. With two giant military neighbors and virtually no presence in the region, Canada suffers deep insecurities about Arctic sovereignty and knows that her aboriginal settlements are key to shoring it up—even to the point of past abuses like relocating Inuit families to bleak High Arctic outposts in the 1950s. While Canada’s Inuit are a tiny people—only fifty thousand in 2006 (up from forty thousand in 1996), mostly in isolated villages scattered across the Arctic coast—they are the dominant human presence in such a vast empty place. In the Arctic, small numbers of people gain outsized importance. A village of two hundred becomes a major destination, two thousand a metropolis.
From all current appearances Canada’s sovereignty anxiety is sharper than ever. The world is staring hard at the Arctic in general and the Northwest Passage—which actually contains several possible routes—in particular. Like everywhere else Canada’s rural areas are depopulating; her fast population growth is fueled mainly by foreign migrants flocking to southern cities. Canada knows that the remote Inuit towns are her essential outposts, and that without them her entire northern front would be empty. But after decades of ham-fisted treatment, like discouraging native languages and yanking kids off to residency schools to be assimilated, the relationship between Canada’s central government and her northern aboriginal citizens is finally on the mend, an improvement that seems unlikely to reverse course.
One big example is Nunavut. With a population that is 85% Inuit, its creation marks the first time in history that an aboriginal minority has formed a standard governance unit—in this case a territory447—within a modern western country. Imagine creating a new U.S. state seven times bigger than Nevada, with the small aboriginal population of Nevada building its entire new state government from scratch. That is the scope of Nunavut.
It is a process wracked with false starts and growing pains. The Inuit people have milled across this tundra for millennia, but today’s permanent towns and institutions are very new. Nunavut’s evolving government is being invented and used at the same time, rather like assembling a truck while driving it. It is challenged by far-flung settlements unconnected by roads, high suicide rates, not enough educated workers to fill the new jobs, and an increasingly risky winter travel platform. But optimism abounds. A brand-new northern society is being built from scratch, and the Inuit are in charge. They know this is a grand opportunity—not simply to re-create the old ways, but to build the new.
Aboriginal Demographics
The NORCs hold between 6 and 20 million aboriginal people, depending on how the Russian population is counted.448 The Russian Federation probably has about 20 million, but only about 250,000 are legally recognized as such, so officially that’s 0.2% of Russia’s total population (unofficially 14%). The United States has 4.9 million (1.6% of total population), Canada 1.2 million (3.8%), Denmark 50,000 (0.9%), Norway 40,000 (0.9%), Sweden maybe 20,000 (0.2%), and Finland 7,500 (0.1%).449 Iceland, discovered empty by the Vikings in the ninth century A.D., has none.
Clearly, aboriginal population percentages in the NORC countries are small. Why, then, an entire chapter dedicated to their status and trajectories? Because aboriginal people are a key component of our northern future.
First, the national statistics above mask the importance of geographic distribution. In the coldest, most remote territories of the NORC countries—the same places where many of the more extreme phenomena described in this book are happening—aboriginal populations are disproportionately large, capturing
Second, in North America aboriginal populations are growing very quickly. As of Canada’s last census it had ballooned 45% in just ten years—a growth rate nearly six times faster than the country’s population as a whole. U.S. aboriginals, currently totaling 4.9 million, are projected to rise to 8.6 million by 2050.451
So we see that the fast population growth of Iqaluit is not unusual but simply reflects a much broader demographic trend. Yet, a serious attitude contrast exists between the people of Iqaluit and the far larger numbers of aboriginal groups scattered in hundreds of impoverished reservations throughout southern Canada and the conterminous United States. Why are the people of Iqaluit bustling while those living on reservations are depressed? What are the implications for the future of the Northern Rim? The answers start across the border to the west and invoke a theme that is by now, I hope, familiar.
The state of Alaska was barely eight years old—even younger than Nunavut is now—when the largest oil
