Voices of Thunder

Point of beginning

This manuscript/cut and its related work emerges from five years of ongoing conversations between representatives of the Gjoa Haven’s Hunters and Trappers Association (HTA) in Gjoa Haven, Nunavut (figure 1) and Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario researchers. It is based on a series of community-based workshops conducted in the summer of 2019 for a ‘Genome Canada’ sponsored large-scale polar bear monitoring project entitled “BEARWATCH: Monitoring Impacts of Arctic Climate Change using Polar Bears, Genomics and Traditional Ecological Knowledge” – hereafter, simply, BW.

A central objective of BW was to combine Inuit Knowledge with western science to develop a community-based, non-invasive, genomics-based toolkit for the monitoring and management of polar bears. Several Inuit communities across Inuit Nunangat (homeland of Inuit of Canada’, ITK, 2018) have collaborated to this end with the BW project. Including the community of Gjoa Haven, who have an ongoing research relationship with BW co-PI Peter Van Coeverden De Groot, who has been working with the Gjoa Haven HTA over the past 20 years. Over the years, one issue that was brought up repeatedly by Gjoa Haven community members and HTA representatives, concerned the effects of severe polar bear hunting quota reductions introduced to the community between 2001 and 2015.

The M’Clintock Channel (MC) Polar Bear Management Unit (PBMU) used by hunters from Gjoa Haven, Cambridge Bay and Taloyoak (see figure 1), was in 2001 subjected to a three-year polar bear moratorium (a full suspension of hunting). Although this moratorium was lifted in 2004, the total quota available for the M’Clintock Channel PBMU was still substantially reduced from an average of 32 to 34 bears annually before 2000 (US FWS, 2001), to often only 1 or 2 bears annually for Gjoa Haven over the past two decades (NWMB, 2005). No other community in Nunavut or the Northwest Territories has experienced such a (near) moratorium over such an extended period of time. After two generations of hardly being able to hunt polar bears, Gjoa Haven hunters still seek recognition for the impacts such quota-decisions have had in terms of lost income, loss of culture, and loss of intergenerational knowledge transfer. These impacts continue to be felt today, despite a rise in tags in 2022.

This work provides possibilities to perform a response to such calls. It invites you to accept testimony to the ongoing impacts of such severe quota reductions through the recorded experiences of Gjoa Haven hunters and other community members. Such accepting testimony, however, isn’t limited to a ‘passive reading’ of the quota impacts on the community. You are rather invited to explore, alongside several other agential forces, your own positioning- as a reader, a scientist, and collaborative meaning-maker, in terms of what it entails for you to respond to these narratives in accordance with the guiding principles of the Ethical Space of Engagement (Ermine, 2007).