A Bit More Detail

• APTN is broadcasting NHL hockey games with Cree-language commentary, a first. Global News reports.


• New funding and authority has been given to Nova Scotia's Mi'kmaq educational authority. Global News reports.


• The National Observer notes the significant damage that the Trump border wall could cause indigenous peoples bisected by the US-Mexico frontier.

A school in Melbourne, Australia, is doing interesting work trying to help Aborigine children bridge the cultural divide in their lives. The Toronto Star reports.

• Natan Obed writes in MacLean's about how the press following Trudeau in Iqaluit failing to deal with his apology to the Inuit reflects a failed implementation of reconciliation.

• This CBC feature on the Indigenous martial art of Okichitaw, and of leading teacher George Lepine, is fascinating.


• Facing an intensified suicide crisis among its young, Nunavik is looking for a way forward. CBC reports.


• Chelsea Vowel at CBC writes about how giving her children Cree names is a profound act of reclamation.


• NOW Toronto takes a look at the emergent field of indigenous architecture.


• National Observer reports on what Justin Trudeau learned from a recent meeting of apology and reconciliation with the Tŝilhqot'in of British Columbia.

• Samantha Edwards at NOW Toronto writes about Tunirrusiangit, the new Inuit art exhibit playing at the AGO, here.


• National Geographic reports on the discovery of the royal home of a Floridian king known for opposing Spain.


• An app that tells one about the indigenous history of the place where one lives is really quite useful. Yes Magazine has it.


• Smithsonian Magazine examines the question why it takes so long for scientists to verify indigenous knowledge, here.


• This Stephanie Nolen report from The Globe and Mail takes a look at the struggle of descendants of the Charrua, the indigenous people of Uruguay, to gain official recognition.

• Inuit oral historian Louie Kamookak gathered vital information in the recent recovery of the ships of the Franklin expedition in the Arctic. The National Post reports.


• A journalism class at Corcordia University is assembling a multimedia project to try to help the Mohawk language. Global News reports.


• The older article from the New York Times tracing the sad life of the last speaker of the Taushiro language, from the Peruvian Amazon, is tragic. The article is here.


• Jezebel notes that many recent migrants to New Mexico have, in their production of jewelry incorporating indigenous themes and materials like turquoise, harmed indigenous jewelers.


• I have to agree that the continued insistence of Elizabeth Warren that, contrary to all manner of genealogical proofs, she can lay claim to a Cherokee ancestor speaks poorly of her. If she has problems with facts as applied to her family ... Jerry Adler writes here.

• The fact that a jury--carefully selected to have no jurors of First Nations background--found the killer of Cree man Colten Boushie innocent is a horror. The Toronto Star < a href="https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2018/02/09/hanging-over-my-familys-head-colten-boushies-family-await-verdict-in-gerald-stanley-trial.html">reports.


• MacLean's takes a look at the reasons for Cree sensitivities regarding the inclusion of Chief Poundmaker as a character in the new iteration of Civilization.


• The Inuit of the northern Québec region of Nunavik, when sent south to Montréal for medical treatment, have an enclave in the city, the building of Ullivik. The Toronto Star reports.


• This opinion piece in The Globe and Mail makes an excellent case for the removal of the statue of General Cornwallis from Halifax. Societies evolve; statues, alas, cannot.

• Anthropology.net looks at the genetics of how the Inuit have adapted to cold weather.


• 'Nathan Smith's Apostrophen shares the author's plans for the coming year.


• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling shares Margaret Atwood's commitment to fighting for freedom of expression.


• Crooked Timber asks its readers for recommendations in Anglophone science fiction.


• D-Brief notes the discovery of the human mesentery.


• The Dragon's Gaze looks at the protoplanetary disk of LkCa 15 disk.


• Far Outliers looks at some lobsters imported to Japan from (a) Christmas Island.


• Joe. My. God. notes Janet Jackson has given birth.


• Language Hat examines the contrast often made between indigenous and immigrant languages.


• Language Log looks at the names of the stations of the Haifa subway.


• Steve Munro notes Bathurst Station's goodbye to Honest Ed's.


• The Planetary Society Blog examines the Dawn probe's discoveries at Ceres in the past year.


• Window on Eurasia looks at how the permafrost of the Russian far north is melting and endangering entire cities, and contrasts the prosperity of the Estonian city of Narva relative to the decay of adjacent Ivangorod.

In 2009, Alicia Aragutak finished high school in her hometown of Umiujaq, on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay. She was one of three students to graduate, and one of two from the remote, fly-in-only community of 400 people to study in Montreal, 1,245 km away.

Arriving in a huge metropolis “was a rather shocking experience for me, since I lived in one of the smallest towns in Nunavik,” says Aragutak, now president of the non-profit Qarjuit Youth Council. She enrolled at the English-speaking John Abbott College, a Montreal CEGEP with close to 600 students at the time, which was more people than Aragutak had ever seen.

Nunavik, the northernmost region of Quebec, is home to more than 12,000 people, the majority of them Inuit. Many young people like Aragutak, now 25, have never been away from home, let alone lived in residence at a college. But getting a post-secondary education, she explains, is expected. “I knew at that time my future would require some kind of education.”

Every year since the formation of the Kativik School Board (KSB) in 1975, Inuit students from all over Nunavik have travelled south to a CEGEP. More than half of the 100 students currently away from home for school ended up at John Abbott, which offers a two-week college preparatory program to help introduce young Inuit to life in the city. It also helps Inuit students form connections. “You get to know your classmates, but it’s not as close-knit as it is up north. So when you’re in the same environment as people who are going through the same changes as you, it’s comforting,” says Aragutak, who studied youth and adult correctional intervention. “And you feel like you’re not alone.”

Now, thanks to a $667,000 federal grant, the Kativik School Board is going a step further, introducing a one-year, general education pilot program in September 2017 called Nunavik Sivuniksavut.

Retaining nurses in any remote community in Canada is a challenge, but it’s particularly true in the Far North. To ensure that the most basic health needs are being met, governments must fly registered nurses up a few weeks at a time, so that there is a rotation of nurses working with the local population. Some of these communities have only a few hundred residents, no road access, and only visiting physicians.

The rotation of RNs is essential to the community, and so they are paid generously. For example, salaries of RNs in Ontario range between $21 and $40 per hour, while in the hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk on the coast of the Beaufort Sea in the farthest corner of Northwest Territories, RN jobs can pay in the range of $70 per hour, a percentage of which is a northern allowance provided by the government.

[. . .]

The best way to keep nurses in remote communities is to educate and train the people who already live there. This is precisely the role of Arctic College in Iqaluit, which offers both a two-year diploma for licensed practical nurses, and a four-year bachelor degree for registered nurses. Many of the students enrolled at Arctic College are Inuit, and some of the classes are being taught in Inuktitut. However, Arctic doesn’t graduate a high volume of nurses: in both 2011 and 2012, no nurses graduated at all.

To track how glaciers grew and shrank over time, the scientists extracted sediment cores from a glacier-fed lake that provided the first continuous observation of glacier change in southeastern Greenland. They then compared the results to similar rare cores from Iceland and Canada's Baffin Island for a regional view.

"Two things are happening," said study co-author William D'Andrea, a paleoclimatologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "One is you have a very gradual decrease in the amount of sunlight hitting high latitudes in the summer. If that were the only thing happening, we would expect these glaciers to very slowly be creeping forward, forward, forward. But then we come along and start burning fossil fuels and adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and glaciers that would still be growing start to melt back because summer temperatures are warmer."

Glaciers are dynamic and heavy. As a glacier moves, it grinds the bedrock beneath, creating silt that the glacier's meltwater washes into the lake below. The larger the glacier, the more bedrock it grinds away. Scientists can take sediment cores from the bottom of glacier-fed lakes to see how much silt and organic material settled over time, along with other indicators of a changing climate. They can then use radiocarbon dating to determine when more or less silt was deposited.

Sediment cores from the glacier-fed Kulusuk Lake allowed the scientists to track changes in two nearby glaciers going back 9,500 years. Before the 20th century, the fastest rate of glacier retreat reflected in the core was about 8,500 years ago, at a time when the Earth's position relative to the sun resulted in more summer sunlight in the Arctic.

"If we compare the rate that these glaciers have retreated in the last hundred years to the rate that they retreated when they disappeared between 8,000 and 7,000 years ago, we see the rate of retreat in the last 100 years was about twice what it was under this naturally forced disappearance," D'Andrea said.

The ink hasn’t yet dried on the UN climate accord and one of the territories most at risk from global warning is already demanding an opt-out.

“We still have the option of making a territorial opt-out to COP21," Kim Kielsen, the prime minister of Greenland, said during a visit to Copenhagen on Monday. "We have an emissions quota of 650,000 tonnes of CO2, which is the same as a single coal-fired power plant in Denmark, or a minor Danish city."

Kielsen oversees a self-governing territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. With a size roughly that of Mexico and a population that’s smaller than the Cayman Islands’, Greenland is the least densely populated country in the world. More than 22,000 people live in the capital Nuuk, while the remaining 34,000 are dispersed over an area of 2.2 million square kilometers.

As a result, the most common way for locals to traverse its icy expanses is via highly polluting planes.

"We want to solve that issue as we have considerably larger geographical distances to cover,” Kielsen said after a meeting with Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen and their colleague from the Faroe Islands, another autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark.