Ideas - The Meaning of Ice: Arctic research embracing traditional knowledge

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

Climate change has transformed the Arctic faster than most places on the planet. Inuit know this better than anyone. But as Arctic ice researcher Dr. Shari Fox argues a colonialist approach to Arctic research by academia has largely disrespected and sidelined traditional knowledge. She's working to change that. *This episode originally aired on Jan. 11, 2023.

Every language is a note in the symphony of our heritage. Together they create a harmony that cannot be silenced. Discover your voice on the new APTN Languages TV channel. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayyad.

For climate scientists, the Arctic is now one of the world's hotspots. As glaciers disappear, permafrost melts, shorelines erode, and sea ice breaks up. Inuit people, who live in a close relationship with the land, water, ice, and wildlife have been watching climate change unfold over the decades in real time. But the vast majority of scientists doing climate research in the Arctic have been non-Indigenous and not from the Arctic. They do their fieldwork, make observations, collect data, and then take it all back with them. I learned on my first visit to Nunavut that Inuit call researchers siksiks, ground squirrels. You only see them in summer.

They scurry around in the tundra doing who knows what, and then they disappear and you have no idea what they were up to. As Arctic ice researcher Dr. Sherry Fox points out, scientists from the South have too often ignored or discounted the scientific value of the lived experience and traditional knowledge of the Inuit. To be clear, colonialism in science and research is not history. It's a system of relations of power and we're still dealing with this ongoing legacy. Sherry Fox is working to change that legacy. She's a senior research scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado

and the director of the Northern Program at the Genomics and Cartographic Research Center at Carleton University in Ottawa. at the Genomics and Cartographic Research Center at Carleton University in Ottawa. For over 25 years, she's been working with Inuit collaborators in the Baffin Island community of Clyde River. What you're hearing are excerpts from a public lecture Sherry Fox gave called The Meaning of Ice, Coproduction of Knowledge and Community Action in a Changing Arctic. ICE, co-production of knowledge and community action in a changing Arctic. The lecture drew its name from an award-winning book called The Meaning of ICE, which she worked on with Inuit collaborators from Greenland, Alaska, and Canada,

as well as visiting scientists. The book opens with two word clouds. I'm sure most of you are familiar with word clouds. They're tools to help us examine text. You select a bunch of text, you put it in the computer program, and it spits out the cloud. And the cloud is made of words. The bigger the word, the more often it appears in that text. So from that, we can infer the relative importance of words. One word cloud was compiled from abstracts of scientific papers on Arctic sea ice. It was dominated by words like thickness, snow, model, extent, water,

data, measurements, and climate. Words are powerful. The clouds speak for themselves. About the different ways that visiting scientists think, see, write, and talk about the sea ice, and the ways that Inuit think, see, write, and talk about the sea ice. The other word cloud was drawn from Inuit hunters, elders, and others on their experience of living with sea ice. their experience of living with sea ice. The most prominent words here were dogs, hunting, bear, time, food, seal, water, clothing, and skin. But overwhelmingly, these clouds are a reminder that there's different ways of knowing, of seeing the world, of experiencing and responding to change, holding knowledge and expertise, different worldviews, priorities and perspectives, in this case about the Arctic.

They're also a clue, a reminder of how challenging, interesting and powerful it can be if we bring them together, different ways of knowing, seeing and doing. Sherry Fox delivered the T.D. Walter Bean Environmental Lecture at the University of Waterloo in December. So in this talk, we're going to explore climate change, the Arctic, sea ice, weather, research, and transformation, and thinking and an action about research with a focus on the Arctic. I want to set some context first, look globally and Arctic-wide, and then take you to the community level to learn about how one community is leading research and action

in their own lands and their own ways. And then we'll come back to these bigger issues we had a look at here at the beginning and raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities that we all have, the work we do as researchers, educators, collaborators, community members, and people sharing the planet with other humans and other than human beings. This is an Arctic story, but the lessons we can apply them well beyond. And with only 45 minutes, like an iceberg, we can only look at what's on the surface.

But I hope what you see and hear tonight will go with you when you leave and get you thinking about what lies underneath. Part of what we're going to be talking about tonight is frozen things trying to endure in a world that's dramatically warming. As the UN Secretary General has said, we're in a climate emergency, a code red for humanity. I'm sure many of you are familiar with graphs like this. It's showing our global temperature change. Averaging data from NOAA and NASA, 2021, was 1.1 degrees Celsius warmer in the early industrial baseline. This is dangerously close to the global goal in the Paris Agreement of limiting the world to 1.5 degrees Celsius warming above pre-industrial levels. We're almost already there. We're all

aware by now that the increase in temperatures is caused by human activities that emit greenhouse gases that trap heat in our atmosphere, and these gases are continuing to rise, like carbon dioxide and methane concentrations had their largest annual increase in 2021. And climate change is not a future problem. The impacts of temperature and climate change are being felt now and all over the world. More severe storms, more drought, loss of species, food insecurity, ocean changes, like changing sea levels. In the Arctic, it's warming at an alarming rate. Various studies report that the Arctic is warming at more than twice and up to four times faster than the rest of the globe.

And this warming is having a wide range of impacts, and not least on sea ice. One of the ways we can see the impacts on sea ice is through satellite observations of changes in sea ice extent. We can see that the extent of sea ice has dropped 12.6% per decade since 1979, which is the start of the satellite record. You can see that there's variability year to year, but overall, we're losing ice. And it's not just extent that's changing. We also know the sea ice is getting younger.

There's less multi-year ice. That's the sea ice that survives the summer, survives the melt season, and lasts into the next sea ice season. The age of sea ice is a key indicator for different physical properties about the ice. Multi-year ice tends to be thicker. It has more resilience to changes in ocean and atmosphere compared to younger ice. And it also has important roles to play, for example, in wildlife habitat and travel for communities. The oldest ice, ice over four years old, was once a major component of the Arctic Ocean sea ice cover, but now makes up just a fraction of the ice pack.

For example, looking at March for the Arctic Ocean, in 1985, 33% of the ice pack was over four years old, compared to 4% by 2020. For over 5,000 years, Inuit and their ancestors have lived in the Arctic, occupying a vast territory across Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and the Chukotka Peninsula of Russia. The Arctic region is homeland to approximately 180,000 Inuit. The Arctic region is homeland to approximately 180,000 Inuit. In Canada, Inuit call their homeland Inuit Nunangat, and most of Canada's 65,000 Inuit live in 51 communities across four regions, Nunatsiavut, Nunavik, Nunavut, and the Inuvialuit settlement region. Inuit Nunangat is huge. It's 35% of Canada's landmass and it's 50% of our coastline.

So we just saw a very brief overview of the dramatic changes in global temperature, arctic warming, declining sea ice, through the eyes of satellites and other data. These observations are invaluable sources to understanding this story, but Arctic Indigenous peoples have been sounding the alarm for just as long, if not longer, and their knowledge base far extends the satellite record. For decades, Inuit elders, hunters, and other experts have been observing and sharing their knowledge about the changes in their homeland, the impacts on the environment, wildlife, and their livelihoods. Leaders like Sheila Watklutzie have been fighting for decades to not only raise awareness about the impacts of climate change, but for the rights of Inuit. She led the first international legal action on climate change, among the very first to link climate change and human rights.

Inuit, as you'll see, are leaders in advocacy, activism, science, and solutions to climate change, and this is where we'll focus. Looking toward real understanding and action in terms of how the sea ice is changing, weather and climate are changing, and what it means in the north. At regional and local scales, what we're learning about climate, environmental, and ice changes from Inuit knowledge is critical. Again, focusing on sea ice as an example, in the Meaning of Ice book, we have a series of maps made by Inuit hunters and elders that document ice changes. They give a picture of some of the on-the-ground ice changes and the resulting impacts for communities. For example, in Greenland, hunters mapped many examples of how sea ice changes have impacted their travel.

Sherry Fox's talk was accompanied by photographs showing the landscape, the people, and daily life around Clyde River. This is a photo of one of the Meaning of Ice editors, Tuku Oshima. She's a respected hunter from Conlock, where dog teams are still the main form of travel, especially for hunting. The ice you see her standing on is called the ice foot, and it's literally a meters-wide platform of ice on the ocean attached to the land, and it's used by people to travel on the coastline. This ice foot travel is normal, but only in certain areas, and it's becoming more and more necessary to use the ice foot. It's becoming more risky with some parts of the ice foot falling off or disappearing at all. And this forces people up onto the land to travel, and it turns into glacier travel, which is also risky, comes with its own risks.

travel which is also risky comes with its own risks. So sitting here in Waterloo or wherever you are online maybe you're still wondering what does this all mean? Ice, these places with ice, why should I care? Well I want to start to head in that direction and show you. I hope we can transform what might be your go-to thoughts of ice and the Arctic, white, cold, to actually things full of color, of activity, even evoking warmth, smells, textures, and sounds. We want to show you why you should care. What's at stake when we're losing ice and witnessing dramatic changes in the Arctic? There's the critical role of the Arctic and the polar regions in our global physical system, but we want to focus on the Arctic as the critical homeland of intellectual traditions and knowledge that are key to addressing our current crisis.

And it's not just going to be a story about the ice, the climate or the weather. It's also a story about the ways we know these things, the way we do science and research, the way we generate and treat knowledge and come to understand our world. Understanding how we know has influence on decisions that affect the everyday lives of people. We need to acknowledge not only our history of what we've done to the planet, creating a society that depends on activities polluting and warming our world,

but on what we've done in the history of research and science. So, remember the word clouds? They actually give us some direction here. For so long, one word cloud has dominated the approaches to Arctic research and knowledge generation. In recent times, there's more and more work bridging Inuit and Western scientific knowledge systems in practical and on-the-ground ways.

And increasingly, in communities, people, organizations, projects, they're directly supporting Inuit self-determination and research and Inuit-led science. Okay, before we get to all that, there's one more piece to our foundational discussion here. And that's, who the heck is this person talking to? Does it matter who I am? Does it matter why I'm talking to you tonight? It does. Positionality and being human. We're taught, or at least many of us were taught in our days, that research is objective or neutral. The reality is it can never be. or neutral. The reality is it can never be. We all carry our identities and experiences with us, and these shape our research in so many ways. And it's part of what gives us our unique insights.

It's just common sense. As researchers, who we are really matters. And we're getting used to talking about that. Who we are impacts our work and our relationships, the research questions we ask, the methods we choose, how we do our analysis, and how we share. It's so important to the people who we work with and to the people who are seeking to learn from our work. I'm a kid from southern Ontario. My family is of mixed settler descent and I was a child of the 70s and 80s. I liked school, animals, nature and winter. I liked to dig snow caves in the drifts

to the house and crawl in for naps, much to the alarm of my mother. I was always into the cold. I have one younger sister. My mother was a nurse, my father a heavy machinery mechanic. We lived just outside of Windsor, one of the most industrial places in Canada. My biggest influence growing up and well into adult life was my maternal grandparents, in particular my grandfather Chuck. My grandfather grew up on a farm near Sparta, Elgin County, Ontario, and he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War II, where he served as a tail gunner in Halifax bombers with the famed 426 Thunderbird Squadron out of Yorkshire, England. After coming home, he worked for decades as a border customs officer.

Being raised in large part by my grandparents, my grandfather's weekly phone calls, his knowledge, his way, had a huge impact on making me. High school was difficult and uninspiring. It wasn't long before I was trying to figure out how I could get out into the bigger world. Still just a kid, I thought maybe somehow I could follow others who were out there in the big world, seeing and learning other places.

I read books, magazines, I followed TV. I thought, you know, like run away with Jacques Cousteau and join the Calypso, and that didn't work out. But instead, I found a path through school. I ended up going away to university, here to UW, as my ticket, which in many ways was unexpected. I was the first person in my family to get a university degree, to go to graduate school, to get a PhD,

which I found out is an intense period of four years or more of hard work, heartbreaking challenges, life-changing experiences. I'll be rewarded with the most ridiculous hat. I did all of my university fieldwork in Nunavut, in the communities of Igloolik, Baker Lake, and Clyde River. My undergraduate honors thesis when I was a student here at UW was the first time I went to Nunavut on my own, and that's when I first started working with elders and hunters on their knowledge of climate change. I have no doubt that the love I developed working with elders was heavily influenced by my strong connection to my grandparents.

And that first trip and project was 28 years ago, and it's the work I've continued to today, and it's evolved over that time. When I started working with the community of Clyde River, there was something special, a connection I can't explain, but to the people and the place right away. Working and living in Clyde River changed my life. I started working with Clyde River in 1999 and I've lived there as my home for most of my adult life since 2003. A few years ago I created a new home base in Alberta and I split my time

to Nunavut but I still spend a lot of time in Nunavut. The population of Clyde River is about 1,100 people and 97% are Inuit. There's one school, one store, one church, a wellness center, and a community hall with a hockey rink. It's tucked inside a bay in the mouth of a fjord called Clyde Inlet on the northeast coast of Baffin Island and it's surrounded by spectacular mountains. The Inuktitut language is strong in the community and so is Inuit culture. In 2011, Clyde was chosen to be the location for Pikkosilirvik, which is the Inuit cultural school for the territory of Nunavut. Clyde River is only accessible by small airplane

or a ship in the summertime. Clyde's backyard is home to some of the world's most spectacular scenery, including some of the tallest cliffs in the world. Some of the most important animal species and those harvested by Inuits in this region since time immemorial include ring seal, narwhal, that was polar bear, not a narwhal, polar bear, caribou and arctic char, and this is bearded seal. I'm privileged to live and work in Inuit homeland, and I can't express in words or photos the impact this experience has had on my life, nor can I express my gratitude. Also gratitude to the University of Colorado, who took a chance on me and agreed many, many years ago now, long before we all became familiar

with remote work due to COVID, supported my working as a researcher from Clyde River. And that was back when it was dial-up, and there's probably young people there who don't even know what that is, but it worked. And so many people have played a part in supporting my learning through all of this, but there's one teacher I just have to introduce you to briefly and spend a minute to round out this part of the story. Meet Nasilik. Nasilik was a wheel dog on my dog team. In dog sledding terms, wheel dogs are the ones closest to the sled. And for over 12 years, I ran a team of Kimmeet, Canadian Inuit dogs, Nasilik included, and it was absolutely one of the greatest experiences of my life working with these dogs. It was through many years and literally thousands and thousands of kilometers

traveling the land and ice with my dogs, these teachers, that I truly gained a new education, a re-education, and I learned from other Kimoksukdi, other dog teamers, hunters, elders, who showed me how to work with these dogs, train dogs, make equipment, sew harnesses, travel safely on the land, and they generously shared their knowledge and skills. It's through working with the dogs that I learned to love the land and that's played directly into my science and in my research. And working with the dogs, I learned about so many other things, not least about myself. There's so many lessons to learn from dog teaming like trust, humility, discipline, patience. It's physically and emotionally

exhausting. It schools you in mental toughness, perseverance. You learn how and when to be a teacher, how and when to be a learner, how to use strength-based approaches. For example, Nasalik, his strength is physical and his happy-go-lucky attitude. As for being the smartest, well, we had other people on the team for that, other dogs. But we can never be a team without Nostelic, and each one was a unique contributor. So just the ever-shifting team dynamics, the social life of the team created constant lessons. Dog teaming is the instruction book for collaboration and co-production. I hope it comes across, but this isn't just an opportunity to show you cute dog pics, although maybe a little bit. But seriously, working with these dogs is a fundamental and ever ingrained part of my identity.

And I don't take it for granted. It's led to my unlearning and relearning, living and working in the Arctic alongside Inuit. And I feel I would be disrespecting the dogs if I didn't acknowledge them as a huge part of my research process. Working with dogs like these, working dogs, they give and give so much. And shifting from taking to giving is a way to reframe how we do Arctic research. And it's one of the themes I hope comes through tonight. Teachers don't always come in human form. And for me, my dogs have been some of my best professors. Sherry Fox, delivering the 2022 T.D. Walter Bean Environment Lecture at the University of Waterloo.

Her talk was called The Meaning of Ice, Co-Production of Knowledge and Community Action in a Changing Arctic. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also download ideas on your favorite podcast app and the CBC Listen app. I'm Nala Ayed. Every language is a note

in the symphony of our heritage. Together, they create a harmony that cannot be silenced. Discover your voice on the new APTN Languages TV channel. Essential reading for everyone. Health for All is the instant number one national bestseller by Jane Philpott, former federal minister of health and Ontario lead on primary care. With over 6 million Canadians lacking basic health care, Philpott offers a prescription for a healthier society

focusing on hope, belonging, and purpose. Available in hardcover and audiobook. Narrated by Jane Philpott. Forty percent of Canada's landmass is in the Arctic, yet only half of one percent of its inhabitants live there, and half of them are Indigenous. Meanwhile, three-quarters of Canadians live within 100 miles of the U.S. border. Sherry Fox grew up in southern Ontario, close to that border. But she's made the Nunavut community of Clyde River her base for more than 25 years, as she researches the effects of climate change on Arctic sea ice. One of her closest colleagues is Robert Kautuk, an award-winning photographer, videographer, and drone pilot from Clyde River. His work provides a stunning visual record of the landscape and daily life in the Arctic. His photography was on display during Sherry Fox's

lecture. Again, like I'm just so happy to have Robert's work all around us tonight because I think I read a statistic that less than 3% of Canadians ever go to the a sense of what it's like a little bit the colors the people how they move a sense of the environment so I think that visual representation is is really important and it especially when it comes from people like Robert this is his home. So what he decides to capture, in what way, and then interpret it is so important. But then also in research, for example, Robert does some really technical mapping with drone photography and can make drone maps. And that's an amazing methodology in science to do things like study ice, study tundra changes, study wildlife habitat. So it has like so many applications. And I'm just talking about photography because I think there could be links with other kinds of

art, even performance art. And I think art and science could work together way more than we do. You can see a sample of Robert Kautuk's photography on our website, cbc.ca slash ideas. Community and collaboration, bridges between the cultures of science and traditional knowledge. That was the focus of the second half of Sherry Fox's lecture, The Meaning of Ice. So living in Clyde River with a unique university appointment, learning from hunters, elders, and the dogs, I've had the opportunity to work alongside a community to co-develop a range of projects and programs, and that work is ongoing. Part of that work has been confronting the history and the ways that Arctic research has been traditionally carried out, which is not a good legacy. Linda

Tuhiwe-Smith, in her seminal work, Decolonizing Methodologies, she says, the term research is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. The word itself, research, is probably one of the dirtiest words in the Indigenous world's vocabulary. When mentioned in many Indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful. It's so powerful that Indigenous peoples even write poetry about research. The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world's colonized peoples. I learned on my first visit to Nunavut that Inuit call researchers siksiks, ground squirrels.

You only see them in summer. They scurry around in the tundra doing who knows what, and then they disappear and you have no idea what they were up to. To be clear, colonialism in science and research is not history. It's a system of relations of power, and we're still dealing with this ongoing legacy to he way smith also writes about a comment she's heard frequently from several different indigenous communities we're the most researched people in the world she says the truth of such a comment is unimportant what does need to be taken seriously, she says, is the sense of weight and the unspoken cynicism about research that the message conveys.

And often people will confront that weight with cynicism, humor, funny stories shared about researchers and research as a way to deal with what lies underneath. The broken cultural protocols, the disrespected values, and people ignored. And the greater danger, she says, is in the creeping policies that intruded into every aspect of our lives, legitimated by research, informed more often by ideology. Science and research certainly shape Arctic policy, and research has also had a role to play in things like perpetuating stereotypes and stereotypical imaging of the Arctic as well. How the Arctic has and is visually portrayed and imaged is an important and related context, which is why part of having Robert Kautuk's accompanying photography here tonight is so important and so eye-opening. Because visual storytelling and portrayal of the Arctic, most often by people from outside of it, often as a vast and barren landscape,

a frozen emptiness, a laboratory to be used or a frontier to be conquered. This is why we need Indigenous artists and I think more links between art and science and research. Art can help us enhance science, do science, express science in so many ways, technical, scientific, but also creatively and with heart. That's where wonder exists. It makes us feel, and it can pull out emotions that can even be at conflict. But when we feel, we act. So if we as scientists can work more with artists, maybe together we can help people understand, feel, and act, which is what we need right now. And through art we teach, we change minds. So from the colonial approaches of how Arctic research has and is being conducted, to how the Arctic has and is imaged, we're confronted

with this terrible history. But in research, things are changing globally, and Inuit are doing some of the most innovative work in this area and leading some of the most profound work. Inuit have been working for a decade to change governance of federal research and funding programs in Canada. In 2018, ITK released their national Inuit strategy on research, and this year the Inuit Circumpolar Council released its Ethical and Equitable Engagement Synthesis Report, a collection of Inuit rules, guidelines, values, and protocols for engaging Inuit communities and knowledge. And if you look at funded research and in the literature, you'll find growing examples of Inuit and non-Inuit researchers

working together on collaborative research efforts on a wide range of topics across Inuit Nunangat. This type of research, much of it being coined co-production of knowledge, is now strongly taking hold in Arctic research. Defined by Elamua and co-authors in 2022, co-production of knowledge, it's a process that brings together Indigenous peoples' knowledge systems and science to generate new knowledge and understanding of the world that would likely not be achieved through the application of only one knowledge system. And it emphasizes the importance of attaining equity in research relationships. It's important to recognize here that there's much more thinking around co-production,

collaboration, decolonization, what those mean and don't mean, thinking that should be explored, and I encourage you to do that. Educating ourselves is part of this process. On the ground, in the community, we don't talk about our work in the latest academic language or terms like co-production, at least while we're doing it. But co-production of knowledge can characterize a lot of the kind of research we do in Clyde River and at our local research center. And by sharing some specific examples of our projects on the ground, I think we can hopefully really tie together some of what we've talked about so far. How are communities responding to the impacts of climate change and ice changes? What are some examples of co-production? change and ice changes? What are some examples of co-production? How do they work and what are they working on? What does community-based research look like and how does this change the way we do

research? In Clyde River, we have the Itok Heritage and Research Center. It was founded in 2005 by a small committee of community members, including myself. And it initially started as a reaction to the constant parade of researchers from the South coming to communities to do their projects with ideas they already had, questions they had already formed with their own teams, taking what benefited them and not leaving much behind that benefited the communities.

Itok has evolved since then. We've since got a small building, have grown our projects and programming, and we center around four key themes. Inuit-led research, land-based programming, Inuit culture and heritage, and multimedia. And these aren't standalone at all, but work across all of our projects and interlink, and we're always bringing them together in different ways. One of our flagship programs at ITAK right now is called the Engunasukti program. Engunasukti means hunters. Engunasukti, running now for almost three years, is a full-time land-based program that takes place all year long.

In the program, there's four full-time hunter instructors. Each day, the instructors meet for coffee. They assess the weather, the ice, the ocean conditions, and decide what's best to do for the day, for that time of year and season, or sometimes for multiple days if they're going to go out for more than the day. They work in a one-on-one program, one instructor to one student. They travel by ski-doo, boat, dog team, walking, four-wheeler, whatever's appropriate for the weather conditions. The participants learn all

kinds of knowledge and skills related to life on the land. How to assess the weather, how to be safe, travel, survival skills, prepare food, hunting, language, place names, food sharing traditions, and so much more. The program is a demonstration of how Inuit knowledge is a practice including not only practical skills but also linking into deeply held relationships, responsibilities, beliefs and values with the land. And the program works in the community too. Students repair equipment, make tools, help elders and other hunters. And at the center of our work with the Anguna Sukti is demonstrating how full-time land programming and harvesting is an essential service in communities like Clyde River and should be supported full-time. River and should be supported full-time. It's also about reclaiming the role of the hunter in the community, reclaiming and strengthening traditional roles, knowledge, and values, and passing those on

to the next generation. It's an education program, training other hunters. It's a healing program through strengthening land relationships. And critically, it's a program making strong impacts on community food security and food sovereignty. Providing food for the community is one of the most important aspects of the Anguna Supti program, and it's at the very heart of it. Like many cultures, Inuit culture centers around food, especially traditional healthy foods from the land. Clyde River only has one store, and as you may have heard in the news, the costs of store-bought food are outrageous. Beyond high costs, most store-bought food is processed and of low nutritional value. Angunasukti is a critical program addressing food security by increasing the access to healthy

country foods. Okay, but what does Angunasukti have to do with research? That's the beauty of it. This is research. It includes Inuit ways of researching, constant interaction with the land, constant interaction with the land, constant observing, consistent monitoring, maintaining and teaching deep intimate relationships with the land, animals and environment, maintaining language. This is Inuit methodology for researching and building knowledge of the environment and observing and monitoring how it's changing. The Anguna Sukti are a critical research and monitoring system, not only because of the year-round all-condition consistency of monitoring, which is any scientist's dream, and none of us hardly ever get to do that, but the expert knowledge available to plan, to do it, to analyze what they're observing.

to plan, to do it, to analyze what they're observing. Hunters are the original researchers of the environment and they have always observed and analyzed all the time. And their methods for how they do this are applied, practiced, and passed on. At the same time, as the hunter instructors are researching, practicing, and teaching Inuit ways, we're co-developing and implementing with them other approaches to research and creating and applying new tools, building and linking with their knowledge. So we've been working with hunters on research for decades, well before Angunasukti has started as well. And one of the projects is our Kengiktugapik weather station network. It's a project we started back in 2006, and it was in response to what hunters and elders were saying at the time and for years before that, which is that the weather was increasingly

variable, becoming much more unpredictable. It was getting more difficult for elders and others to predict the weather using their own knowledge and weather prediction skills, and there was a dire need for more weather information and resources. So we've been working together with hunters and elders in the community to understand what weather information they need, from where and in what form, and we've built a network of weather stations to assist with that. Our fifth weather station is scheduled to go in this March. The stations are located in specific places on the advice of local expert elders and hunters and these locations are based on Inuit knowledge of the land and

weather. In places where if the weather is known at that location it gives really good information about what the wind and weather conditions might be like in other areas according to the Inuit expertise of weather patterns in this really complex topography in this area. The information is made available in near real time and our weather station website in Inuktitut and in English. And using web analytics, we know it's well used and especially by hunters, especially in the summer, especially on Fridays and before and after storms. We know elders and unilingual Inuktitut speakers, readers use the Inuktitut site and it's also accessed by many other visitors,

like pilots, researchers, teachers for other uses. And in terms of weather information needs, one of the biggest interests and priorities we heard early on, especially from hunters, was the need for weather information for boating season. Boating in the fjords and open water can be unpredictable and risky for hunters, and they're always carefully monitoring the winds, weather conditions, ocean currents, and taking in other information. Understanding winds and wave heights

is important for the open water season. So working with partners, including a snow hydrologist, an environmental modeler, we've built on our work with the weather stations and with elders and hunters in understanding how they understand weather patterns, weather forecasting, their ways of observing to create new understanding of local and regional weather patterns and changes and tools to help the community respond. So one of the really exciting developments is a new tool called Wavy. Wavy is a web application.

We're almost there, still in development. Using open source code, you can click on the map and you see a pop-up that appears with 250 meter resolution. It has information regarding the hourly wind speed and direction, along with the Inuktitut terminology that goes with that wind condition. And then if you click on the ocean, it will give you the wave height information presented in meters and feet. And you can change the information layers, change the colors, move around on the map and zoom in and out. Hunters have been a critical part of the development of Wavy.

They provide input into the environmental modeling that goes behind it. And they've added their knowledge of the regional weather patterns, gave feedback on the interface, and they just finished wave truthing this past summer and fall using in-reach devices to take direct observations of the waves when they're out in the boats to test against the model. WVY and the weather station, all these technologies, they're tools. They don't and they can't replace the expert knowledge the hunters already have, but they simply provide more resources that hunters and others can use along with their own knowledge and other tools they already use, like weather forecasts, marine forecasts,

satellite data, to add more information for their own decision-making, observations and monitoring the changes as they go about with their activities. Other kinds of research that Angunasupati do includes environmental monitoring using the traditional Inuit methods that we saw earlier. They also use other technologies. The inReach devices used for the wave truthing, the hunters also use those to keep track of all of their travel, which over time can be a powerful way to look at changes in ice conditions, land conditions, and travel routes. And they also have custom forms on the inReach devices where they're documenting and mapping their observations of wildlife, certain types of ice conditions, harvests,

and other observations. And the hunters were involved in designing all of the menus that they use. So again, these are all tracked and over time, working with the hunters, we can analyze the changes that they're seeing. So the climate is changing. For the Arctic, this means current and future dramatic changes in the region, not least in terms of sea ice and weather. To address these impacts, we need to understand them them which takes all of the best available knowledge including and especially indigenous knowledge to create knowledge includes research which unfortunately in terms of visiting science has had a pretty dismal history including in the arctic but this history is changing and in many parts of the Arctic Inuit are

leading the way in this shift at international, regional, and local levels. Some of the most exciting work and innovations are being carried out at the community level and we shared some examples with you tonight. More and more indigenous people are taking control of research, the research process, and we're starting to see more meaningful collaborations. But there's still much work to be done, so where does that leave us moving forward? And I think that's a good question to leave us with tonight as this lecture comes to a close, and specifically what are the roles and responsibilities of us as non-Indigenous researchers in working with communities,

in the work of co-production and community action in the Arctic or in any place, in the roles and responsibilities of our research institutions, like universities, we've seen some changes, some really good changes, but we're still at the beginning. What's needed in our teaching, publishing, funding, and other systems? How do we decolonize and how do we support to indigenize

these systems? What are the supports and resources necessary and how do we prioritize these? There's opportunities to change and all of us can play a part, including using our own strengths to support and advocate, use our platforms, and when we should, simply get out of the way. I've seen this quote circulating for a while now and shown in other talks, and I think about it from time to time. It's by Gus Speth, former administrator at the UN Development Program. And it says, I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and

climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science, we could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy. And to deal with these, we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we as scientists don't know how to do that. Working with the Anguana Supti, working on the Meaning of Ice project, unlearning and learning in Nunavut, and having the privilege to work alongside Inuit in research and action at community to international levels, I've witnessed the deep knowledge traditions that Inuit have from their relationships with their land to the ice to each other. Inuit not only

have deep technical scientific knowledge about the environment, but long-held and rich cosmologies and understanding how to live in relationship with the land. That Inuit are open to collaborate with other knowledge systems and share their expertise to understand and find solutions to these big global problems is an honor we're all fortunate to have. And I think taking time to assess how we can disrupt and transform our systems to support Indigenous leadership on a new path is a major step needed towards spiritual and cultural transformation that's so critical for our sustainable future now.

Thank you. Thank you. you. Sherry Fox and her talk called The Meaning of Ice. She delivered the T.D. Walter Bean Environment Lecture at the University of Waterloo in December. Following the lecture, she was asked about how universities are coming around to recognizing the kind of collaborative, community-based research she's doing and about the ways in which the groundwork of such research is very different from other scientific research. I think we're still learning. I mean, I've noticed a huge change from when I started, you know, 25 or more years ago. Like, I'll be honest, like I was told in the beginning that, you know, if I was going to work

with anecdotal knowledge, that I was probably headed down like a bad career path and I probably wouldn't have a career. 25 years later, I'm the Walter Bean professor. So, you know, things change and being the one to make change isn't easy.

But our institutions, they are changing. Even things like, you know, as academics, the way we're recognized is through our publications, our research grants. And another challenge I've had is in the past, the way I work, it was put in the category of outreach. Oh, that's excellent, outreach. And I'm like, it's my research.

And we're not rewarded for outreach. We get like, you know, that's good, but it doesn't count as like publications. But we're seeing that change now where there's serious conversations around like, wow, there's recognition that this kind of work takes time, which means you're not going to write as many publications, maybe as your colleague who can sit in front of the computer in the lab all the time. So starting to understand the value in different ways of working, I'm seeing that and it's really encouraging. So all of these things are starting to come together and I have a lot of excitement and hope that we're going down a much better path and I mean there's lots of things that go into trust right and all of our relationships um I think the one thing that most a lot of people will talk about is time and so it takes time all of us know that when you're meeting someone for the first time or getting into a group for the first time, it takes time to get to know

somebody, develop those relationships. So yeah, I don't know. There's a story that's popping up in my mind because I had this conversation just before the talk about, well, remember I talked about like it matters who you are. So I think, I don't know, just some of its personality. But I was just kind of kind of joke because the typical Arctic researcher is not this. It's often like, and I'll just say like, it's like the older guy with a beard. So when I first went to the community, and this is how it works. And I showed up and I was like, oh, I'd really like to talk to some elders or hunters or just meet people.

And so there's a woman I became very good friends with. She was kind of helping me meet people in the community and she would just call people and be like, there's a researcher and they want to meet you and talk to you. Can we come have tea or something? And we would show up and they'd start laughing and they're start laughing.

And they're laughing at me. And it's because when they answered the phone, and this goes back to the quote in the presentation, when they heard an Arctic researcher was coming, they expected an old guy with a beard to walk through the door. And here comes this blonde 12-year-old looking thing. And it kind of broke the ice. So in a way, what I was kind of put down for early on, like being a woman and looking a certain way, it kind of paid off for me a little bit in some of

the relationships. So I guess, you know, not being bothered, being made fun of, and I kept coming back, just kind of established a relationship. Sherry Fox is a senior research scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado and an editor of the book The Meaning of Ice. She's also the T.D. Walter Bean Professor of Environment at the University of Waterloo. And a reminder that you can see some of the photography that accompanied her talk on our website, cbc.ca slash ideas. This episode of Ideas was produced by Chris Wadzkow. ideas. This episode of Ideas was produced by Chris Wadzkow. Technical production, Danielle Duval.

Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.