Indigenous Guardians protect their culture of cold in a heating world
Masked against the Arctic glare in orange-tinted sunglasses, Tad Tulurialik is a modern conservation “Guardian” of his fast-melting homeland.
At the start of an early summer workday that never sees the sun set, he kicks his all-terrain vehicle into gear. Safe in his ancestors’ knowledge of sea currents and ice fissures, he navigates a course right off the edge of the Canadian shore onto the aqua iridescence of the frozen Arctic Ocean. He’s following older Guardians to a manmade hole in the ice shelf, a window toward understanding climate-related changes in the sea.
Even out on the ocean surface, his rifle is always swung over his shoulder. Wherever he sees a caribou or musk ox, it’s an existential given that he’ll take it. Food security isn’t found in a grocery aisle in this northernmost Canadian mainland settlement, tellingly named with the Inuktitut word for a caribou hunting blind.
In some ways, as a government-paid conservation Guardian in training, the 24-year-old Mr. Tulurialik is doing what he’s done his whole life. Like most Inuit boys, he was “on the land” as soon as he could walk. His childhood was spent on tundra and on sea and lake ice to hunt and fish with his grandparents, who raised him. His life was marked not by school grades but by first fox trapped, first polar bear shot. These were such priorities that he dropped out of high school.
That could have made him part of Canada’s persistent social inequality – Indigenous youth in some of the remotest parts of the country, undereducated, underqualified, and often losing touch with rich traditions and fleeing homelands for economic opportunity. Except today, he’s part of a solution, as a member of Canada’s Indigenous Guardians, a conservation corps working in 170 far-flung Indigenous communities.
Guided and taught by elders, he and other young Inuit born since 1989, when warming of the Arctic turned precipitous, are part of an effort to safeguard their homelands and their cultural “right to be cold.” They’re also helping Canada achieve international conservation commitments made last year, when it led a global pledge at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference in Montreal to protect 30% of its land and oceans by 2030.
