Powell Inlet and Croker Bay

Bruce misses the zodiac.

Standing on the old rocks looking up at the younger ones.

Walrus

The face of the tide water glacier of Croker Bay.

It was late and the light was failing but it was stunning.

Friday, September 8^th. Powell Inlet and Croker Bay, south shore of Devon Island

I woke up quite tired this morning but found us in an incredibly beautiful fjord on the south coast of Devon Island with mountains draped in the first snows of the season. We are at Powell Inlet and are sheltered from the stormy conditions on Lancaster Sound. After breakfast I went out on the deck to take a few photos. The temperature is hovering around the freezing mark again. We took the zodiacs to shore and were told where we could go and what to see. The Inlet is stunningly beautiful with huge wide-open vistas. I found some very small plants that were struggling to survive, including a little fern. The rocks were wet and had beautiful colours running through them. We learned from Dr. Marc St-Onge, the geologist, that we were standing on the great ‘uncomformity’ and that the rocks we were standing on and scrambling over were 3.5 billion years old. On the mountains around us Marc pointed out to us that the snow line was the delineation between the old rocks and the younger rocks which were above the snow line. They are from the Silurian Period and are only 500 million years old. The gap between the two layers is the Great Unconformity, when there was no new rock forming all around the world. Why? Well, I didn’t know this but apparently the Earth was a large frozen snowball for all those years in between. A little way along the walk there was a herd of walruses in the water. They were a bit far away, but I did get some shots and it was great to see them as they were one of iconic animals I was hoping to see. We were on shore for about four hours, then back to the ship. After lunch there were two talks. The first was a presentation about walrus by Suzie, the biologist, who explained that the walrus we saw are the Atlantic species which are a bit smaller and less abundant than the Pacific variety. Then we had a presentation about the history of the Inuit and how they, like every other indigenous culture that met Europeans, were used and abused by the colonial British. They were treated poorly and thought of as subhuman. The fur trade caused many of them to leave their traditional lifestyle and become trappers. Then when the fur trade in Europe collapsed, they were abandoned and left to fend for themselves. This was followed by a tuberculosis epidemic that killed many Inuit. During the Cold War of the 1950’s the Canadian and American governments worried about Russian missile attacks, so they built the DEW line as an early warning system for incoming missiles. Many workers came from the south for the construction and there were actually more white men than there were Inuit in the north. They brought along new problems for the Inuit with the introduction of alcohol, and sexual and physical abuse. The Canadian government wanted to show that the Arctic was inhabited, so they forced Inuit families to move from northern Quebec to up to Ellesmere Island’s Grise Fjord far from family and friends. It was a much colder and harsher place to live, and their traditional hunting animals were not available. They were not allowed to hunt muskox. They suffered and starved through two winters after which they hoped to return to their homeland but the government reneged on their promise to allow them to go back and said they had to pay for their transit home. The Inuit were forced into Residential schools where they were forced to adopt customs and traditions of the white people and forgo their language and culture. From 1950-69 there was another tuberculosis epidemic where one in seven of all Inuit got it and 1/3 of all Inuit children were infected and moved south for up to 2 years for treatment – long enough to change them and take them away from their culture. The Inuit claimed that the RCMP killed most of their sled dogs in the1950’s as a way of keeping the Inuit in an area, preventing their traditional hunting and emasculating the men. One of the Inuit who lived through all of this was John Amagoalik. He was instrumental in the founding of Nunavut and is known as its father. Today Canada has compensated the Inuit for the abuse but has never apologized or lived up to their promises. Here are a few disturbing facts: today 70% of Inuit households are food insecure; tuberculosis is back infecting up to 10% of the population; ¾ live in overcrowded housing with up to 18 people in small homes; 1/3 to 1/2 of all kids suffer with hearing problems – a result of overcrowding. There are few permanent doctors, dentists, nurses, or teachers, and the rest are itinerant and Western and fly in from the south; suicide is an epidemic 40 times higher than in the south and increases by latitude north. There is an education crisis –because they don’t relate to most of the white teachers from the south. The teachers mean well but don’t really understand the culture. There are some positive signs of progress as some Inuit are becoming better educated and beginning to show up in various areas of expertise and are beginning to become key players on the world stage. Then we had another talk about the climate of the Arctic and how the ice and cold are the air-conditioners of the earth, and how the dense cold airmasses and water currents flow south where they are heated as they get closer to the equator where they rise in the atmosphere or in the water, and float back north to be cooled again. The planet is always trying to keep a balance, high pressure flows into low pressure, cold pushes warm up and the cycle repeats. With the temperature of the air and the water changing some of those cycles are being threatened with unknown consequences. After that we had dinner before we sailed up Croker Bay on the south shore of Devon Island to a tide water glacier that is flowing off the Devon Ice Sheet into the bay. We sailed slowly by the face of the glacier and saw a couple of small calving events. The captain seemed to enjoy pushing right through the growlers and bergerbits (pieces of ice of various sizes) as we sailed past the face of the glacier from left to right and then back again. Absolutely stunningly gorgeous. Bruce and I had a small drink of mulled wine and talked to a couple from Victoria before heading off to bed.