I went to the edge of the world to see the very near future of climate change
March 6, 2025
INUKJUAK, Nunavik— The choppy gray waters of the Hudson Bay are numbingly cold in the days before the season’s first snow in the Canadian Arctic. As our speeding canoe slams against the rolling waves, sending frigid sprays of salt mist across my face, I grip the wooden seat bottom with all my might.
“I used to be afraid of canoe surfing, too,” says Willia Ningeok, 40, the captain and leader of this mid-October hunting expedition. He stands in the stern of the 24-foot motorized canoe, opposite two young hunters with rusty rifles and harpoons. As he weaves between the maze of shifting swells toward nearby Harrison Island, where the waters teem with beluga, walrus, seal, and arctic char, he breaks into song. “It’s the most wonderful time … of the year!”
There is palpable excitement this week in Inukjuak. This Inuit community of about 1,800 in Nunavik, the northernmost region of Québec, is preparing to celebrate the premiere of A Century After Nanook with a village feast. The film is a collaboration between residents and Kirk French, an assistant professor of anthropology, film production, and media studies at Pennsylvania State University. It looks at how life has changed in Inukjuak since the world’s first feature-length documentary, Nanook of the North, was filmed here in 1922 on the frozen banks of the Ungava Peninsula.
The movie’s primary focus is the danger of climate change, a global threat that puts Inuit people on the front lines. This community survived thousands of years north of the arctic tree line as nomadic hunters and gatherers. A lack of wood for fire explains why their traditional meals, known as “country food,” revolve around wild caribou, fatty marine mammals, and fish that are largely eaten raw, frozen, or cured. Today, isolated 900 miles north of Montréal, residents still depend partly on hunting for subsistence on an ice-based landscape that is melting away at a pace nearly four times faster than the rest of the world.
The fact that we are still traveling by boat in mid-October, as opposed to crossing frozen sea ice by dogsled or snowmobile, is typical of the warming trend: “It used to be winter by now and we could go trick-or-treating by Ski-Doo,” Ningeok says. “But now there is no snow until November.”
Their way of life in Inukjuak has been endangered in other ways. The new film also examines the multiple traumas that colonialism has wracked upon generations of this community since 1922, including the residential school system largely run by religious organizations that stripped young Indigenous peoples of their culture and subjected many to sexual abuse, for which Pope Francis apologized in 2023. It also depicts the forced displacement of families to the High Arctic as “human flagpoles” to assert Canadian sovereignty there during the Cold War. It revisits the Inuit’s anguish over the slaughter of thousands of sled dogs by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a multi-decade effort to forcibly convert nomadic peoples to a sedentary life that only just prompted an apology from the Canadian government this past November, some 50 years after it ended.
The ability to endure those harsh circumstances has shown this community to be remarkably resilient. But climate change is a new kind of existential threat. “It’s country food that drives the narrative,” French says, “because being out on the land and hunting also helps the Inuit define who they are.”
What climate change is doing to Inukjuak is not just an Inuit problem. As the carbon-laced permafrost melts and the protection of the ice cap diminishes, rising sea levels and accelerated warming are upending food systems across the globe. “What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic,” says Sheila “Siila” Watt-Cloutier, an Inuk activist and author who was a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize nominee for connecting climate change to human rights. “The Arctic is the air-conditioner cooling system for the entire planet and it’s breaking down.”
The outside world can visit Inukjuak only by air or boat — and permission. (My presence, along with Inquirer photographer Monica Herndon, was approved by a vote of elders.) “This is the least trusting group I have ever worked with in my life and it’s understandable, the way they have been treated,” French says.
To many, French was yet another Qallunaat — the Inuktitut name for a white person from the south — who wanted something from them. On the cusp of his movie’s premiere, after four years of collaboration and forging relationships, “I finally feel like I’ve been welcomed in,” French says.
Our Air Inuit prop plane descends through the clouds six hours after leaving Montréal. A cluster of colorful, boxy homes hugs the coastline where the Innuksuak River flows into the Hudson Bay. They’re surrounded by a rocky expanse of scrubby brown tundra and meandering waterways with not a tree in sight.
A welcome party greets us at the airport, including Sarah Samisack, a municipal project coordinator who coproduced and shot footage for the film with French and his collaborator, the Emmy-winning documentarian Neal Hutcheson. French’s wife, Laurel Pearson, an anthropologist who also teaches at Penn State, is here with their 10-year-old daughter, Viola. Inside their luggage is the step and repeat banner for the premiere and a 25-pound headstone.
There are no restaurants in Inukjuak, so we head to the village’s two small grocery stores for food. At a branch of the Northern supermarket, the produce section is bare of fresh ingredients save for a handful of mangoes, a few plastic-wrapped Napa cabbages, and a small clamshell of old raspberries for $8.99. The dry-goods section is near empty, with a lonely box of Hostess cupcakes and a single bundle of toilet paper anchoring a shelf. A few packs of pork chops are the only nonfrozen meats available.
The selection is equally threadbare and expensive at Inukjuak’s other market, the Co-Op. “Now you see,” Ningeok, the hunting guide, tells me, “this is why we still need to hunt!”
Ningeok is a general manager for Unaaq, the Inukjuak men’s association that organizes hunting trips and other activities to pass on traditional Inuit skills to youth, including igloo building and running dogsleds. Unaaq is Inuktitut for “harpoon,” an essential tool for Inuk hunters. The program was launched in the early 2000s as a response to a mental health crisis that saw suicide rates among the Inuit rise to more than 10 times the Canadian average, especially among men, which left a generation of children being raised by single parents and at risk of losing skills that were traditionally passed down, says Tommy Palliser, 49, president of the Pituvik Landholding Corp., the Inuit-owned company that manages logistics for community projects. Palliser, whose own mother died from alcoholism, helped launch Unaaq.
“It was not being taught by many people like English or mathematics,” Ningeok says. “I had to step up.”
A few miles away by boat from the supermarket aisle, our hunt takes a fortuitous turn.
There has been a run of luck lately with the hunt for belugas, the small white whales that have been a staple of the Inuit diet for at least 4,000 years. They are endangered and protected elsewhere from commercial harvest, but the beluga is also a “cultural keystone species” for the Canadian Inuit, who remain among the handful of Indigenous communities in the world permitted to catch them, within quota limitations.
The whale nets are all empty in the multiple spots we visit on barrier islands flanking the coast. But as we drift into a cove, we see animal heads break the water’s surface 50 yards away from our canoe — a bob of ringed seals briefly coming up for air.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The guns echo like cannon fire inside the cove, followed by a hush. Then cheers. Each 150-pound seal can feed 20 community members for a week, and they have killed two. We approach the floating bodies with hooks attached to long poles, the gray water blooming scarlet with blood. It’s my first time witnessing the reality of a hunt in person.
Hosea Aculiak, 21, a member of the group, eagerly chats about his love of the hunt while butchering one of the seals on the rocks, skinning the animal with a white kitchen knife and meticulously harvesting every part — organs, flesh, fat, and bones. “My mother makes clothing out of the skin,” he says, turning to show us pants sewn with spotted fur that keep him warm and dry during the expedition.
Last year, Aculiak tried to leave Inukjuak. A budding hockey star, he went to play left wing for a semipro team in Ontario. He returned six months later. “Southerners’ food was too different for me and I missed being out on the land,” he says. “It was my dream [to go to the NHL]. But now my dream is to hunt and to build a family here.”
Aculiak rinses the seal intestines in the bay and swiftly crochets them with his fingers into a long chain to be dried and eaten. All that’s left is the hollow carcass cradling a pool of blood. Aculiak scoops his cupped hand through for a sip, a tradition rooted in practicality. “Drink the blood,” Ningeok says. “It will keep you warm.”
I hesitate, but am reminded of something said by Watt-Cloutier.
When we see blood on the white ice and on our hands, it’s not a confirmation of death for us, it’s an affirmation of life.”
There were just a few dozen nomadic people living along the banks of the Hudson Bay in 1920 when Inukjuak was a trading post known as Port Harrison and a former iron ore prospector named Robert J. Flaherty, financed by a fur company, began filming Nanook of the North, which follows the lives of an Inuk hunter and his family as they travel by kayak, hunt for seal and walrus, and trade polar bear and fox furs along the Ungava Peninsula.
Released in 1922, this black-and-white silent film became the first commercially successful full-length documentary, giving the wider world its first images of Inuit (then referred to as “Eskimos,” a term no longer used) building igloos and riding dogsleds. It was chosen in 1989 by the Library of Congress for the United States National Film Registry as “culturally significant.” Nanook has also found its way into enduring pop culture references, from a Frank Zappa song to Fred Armisen’s mockumentary series Documentary Now!
Nanook of the North has also been widely criticized for its racialized portrayal of the Inuit as “happy-go-lucky” savages struggling in a bleak landscape — and for using actors, staged scenes, and historical pastiche. Nanook was played by a hunter named Allakariallak, and his “family” was unrelated. Allakariallak died of tuberculosis barely two years after the film debuted — Flaherty told people it was from starvation to embellish his narrative — and was buried in an unmarked grave.
“There’s always been a bit of resentment for making us look like buffoons,” says Adamie Delisle-Alaku, the elected vice president of Makivvik, an Indigenous political and landholding organization that legally represents Québec’s Inuit people.
The choice to take on such a controversial film was not taken lightly by French, who is best known at Penn State for an anthropology of alcohol course regularly attended by over 700 students each semester. He first teamed up with Hutcheson for a project out of Mexico calledLand and Water Revisited, an Emmy-nominated film that considered dramatic changes in the Teotihuacan Valley in the 50 years following a documentary made there by another Penn State archaeologist. The duo believed a similar concept would be just as powerful with Nanook.
“We thought we could set the record straight together as to who the Inuit really are,” French says. “By working with the community, you’re taking into account how they see themselves now.”
The notion of an updated film that reveals the full history of what has happened to this community over the past hundred years appealed to Delisle-Alaku. “Some of those truths are hard to swallow, but we want the world to know,” he says.
Another key advocate for French’s project was Inukjuak’s longtime former town manager, Shaomik Inukpuk, 65, who acknowledges the colonialist portrayal of Nanook, but also reflects the complicated legacy of the original film for many in Inukjuak. “People around the world used to think that we were extinct,” he says. “Nanook was proof to the world that we existed.”
But we “never had a chance to speak for ourselves,” he continues. “So it was important for me a century after the original that a new film would be made.”
The enormity of the transition over that century has often been traumatic. “We’ve gone from the Ice Age to the Space Age in just one or two lifetimes,” Watt-Cloutier, 70, says. “Most societies have taken 350 years to try to adapt to this modern setting … but the speed in which things have happened has contributed to health and social upheaval.”
One constant across the generations amid all the change, though, has been country food. “We get food from the outside world now — but that food freezes inside of you,” Inukpuk says.
There is a chill inside, even though a pot of seal meat stew is bubbling gently on the stove and the fried bannock bread is still warm when Anna Ohaituk welcomes us into her kitchen. Her cloudberry jam lights up each crusty morsel of the crispy, coil-shaped bannock fritter with a tart, musky sweetness that captures all the arctic sunlight of summer, when the orange berries were harvested at peak ripeness.
“It’s not too warm in my kitchen on purpose,” says the apron-clad Ohaituk, 70, who was born in an igloo when it was minus 32 degrees outside.
Ohaituk is making jerky from beluga that two of her 40-plus grandchildren had caught earlier that week. The uluk knife, a half-moon-shaped tool traditionally used by Inuit women, glides through the chunks of inky purple meat. She peels off wide ribbons of flesh, salts each side, then lays them on a wire rack beneath a fan.
Our good country food doesn’t freeze in your system. That’s why, after thousands of years in this place, we are still here.”
Ohaituk hands a piece to French, who chomps into a morsel and nods with appreciation. She hands me a chunk. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever eaten, with a noticeably gamy quality, and a persistent marine tang, like a cross between beef and tuna, with echoes of berries, seaweed, and liver.
The blubber cut of the beluga, or maktaak in Inuktitut, is sliced into small chunks of fatty skin. They’re more about texture than flavor: The thick tab of fat melts away after a couple chews, and a nutty richness lingers. Then my teeth crunch into a tougher layer, over and over again, like biting through cartilage.
“A lot of people come to my kitchen for country food,” says Ohaituk, who regards her home as a haven for preserving culinary tradition.
“Before we had modern houses, which only came to Inukjuak around 1960, it was very hard,” she says. “I think many prefer to be under a roof with electricity.” But her community is still underserved. The permafrost requires all plumbing to be aboveground, and when household tanks are full, nothing functions until they’re emptied. “We have three new sewage trucks and not one has visited me yet. So I have no running water this week.”
Maintaining ancestral foodways — and sharing them with as many people as possible — is partly a response to being sent to one of the government-sponsored residential schools. From the 1950s through the early 1970s, thousands of Inuit children were indoctrinated into Western society, a demeaning, culture-stripping initiative recognized in 2019 by the Canadian government as a national historic event. “I was sent to a residential school when I was 8 where they made me eat Qallunaat food,” Ohaituk says. “I didn’t like it — especially spinach.
“In my family it’s always our tradition to eat country food,” she says. “Even the babies like it.” She points to a grandchild who tugs on my pant leg, then crawls across the floor lined with cardboard and raw meats to a bowl of beluga bones and reaches for a gleaming blade.
“Baby with uluk!” she cries, hustling over. While there, she gestures to a white bucket with cut-up raw maktaak submerged in a pool of whale oil that’s been fermenting for several days into a condiment known as misiraq. The aging process is one reason she keeps her kitchen cool. Ohaituk brings me a spoonful of the golden misiraq. It tastes just like blue cheese. I. Loved. It.
Aside from being a coproducer and videographer on A Century After Nanook, Samisack, 32, is a woman of many talents. She’s a skilled seamstress with her own clothing business specializing in intricately embroidered Inuit clothing. “I always say it’s part of my DNA as an Inuk that you have to know how to make things for your family,” she says.
She brings us to a stretch of rocky fields beside the Hudson Bay, just north of the village. The water washing over the smooth round stones at our feet seems moments from freezing. Beneath overcast skies, the undulating hills appear like a stark moonscape to my eyes.
Samisack and Annie Kasudluak, wearing her baby inside the embroidered amauti robe Samisack had made for her, crouch close to the ground. They pull back the tightly woven turf and vines. There’s a trove of tiny berries. Within moments, their hands are brimming with fruit. Jewel-like red kimminaqutik, or mountain cranberries, more tender and sweet than the southern variety, are used to make tea for sore throats.
The extended warm weather also means there are still crowberries. These juicy black beads have a dark, musky sweetness that’s ideal for suvalik, a dessert that blends them into a creamy emulsion of whitefish caviar. Samisack and her oldest daughter are making it for the coming feast at the movie premiere. “When we eat together as a big family for a feast, we stay connected through food,” she says.
Samisack and her spouse, Brian “Billy” Kasudluak, 34, a hunter, are known for the impressive variety of country foods regularly on offer in their home. “We’re Inuits, so of course we eat food raw, smoked, and dried,” she says, welcoming us into her house with a spread that had been laid out atop a cardboard box flattened across the kitchen floor, where the Inuit traditionally eat. (“We don’t have to do the dishes,” Brian quipped.)
A frozen haunch of raw caribou anchors the middle, from which Samisack’s family uses uluks and knives to sliver red hunks of flesh still crackling with ice crystals. Brian’s sister, Annie Kasudluak, 31, shows me how to pair the lean meat with a morsel of seal fat, adding richness and a whiff of sea salt.
Caribou, seal, and beluga have become essential to the Inuit’s nutritional needs, says French’s wife, Pearson, 46, a molecular anthropologist at Penn State specializing in genetics and human variation. The Inuit descend from East Asian populations that migrated to the Americas thousands of years ago, she says, and have developed unique genetic adaptations for a diet that allows them to metabolize nutrients they need solely from hunted animals and wild berries. That includes vitamin D from fish and marine mammals that other populations closer to the equator would typically synthesize from sunlight.
The Inuit’s fat-rich traditional diet also might cause elevated cardiac disease in populations without their genetic adaptation. “They had to adapt to a diet from their environment that is mostly animal products that aren’t being cooked, either,” Pearson says.
The shift to more carbohydrate-rich diets since the 1950s — when processed Western foods were introduced — has resulted in negative health impacts, such as a rise in diabetes, among Inuit who have reduced their reliance on traditional foods. Several residents of Inukjuak told me they can feel the difference. “You lose your energy when you haven’t had country food for two weeks,” says Samisack, who felt that effect while studying in Montréal.
The hunt for country food has been impacted dramatically by the warming environment, says Delisle-Alaku, who focuses on food security and climate change advocacy for Makivvik. The later freeze and earlier spring thaw have essentially eliminated two months of winter hunting, with an increasingly long transition period when the waters are too frozen to pass by boat, but not solid enough to traverse by sled or snowmobile. “Even when it freezes I sometimes feel this warm air brushing in,” says Palliser, who is also the executive director of the Nunavik Marine Wildlife Board. “There’s no trust on the ice.”
In 2022, the ice did not freeze until late January. By May, it was already melting, as French’s film shows in a time-lapse sequence in which the ice completely disappears within a week, faster than any thaw in recent memory, and a month earlier than usual.
The ripple effects on the local food ecosystem have been profound. Warming waters have shifted arctic char to the north and pushed more killer whales into the Hudson Bay, where they compete with the Inuit for fish and seal.
More rain in the fall has created icing, rather than the desired snow, making it harder for caribou to access the lichen and berries that are their primary food source. The premature thaw also creates puddles that draw mosquitoes, which attack caribou calves at a more vulnerable age, adding to the mortality of a population already stressed by disruptive mining activity and overhunting by trophy seekers from the south. The two primary herds that roam the Ungava Peninsula have been devastated: The George River herd, nearly a million two decades ago, crashed to just 8,600 in 2024, while the Leaf River herd plummeted to 200,000, a third of its number over the same period, according to a government survey.
Hunters must travel farther afield to find diminishing stocks of prey. Our canoe journey to Harrison Island, for example, cost $200 in fuel alone. It’s a challenge that is affecting the sustainability of their way of life. “It’s going to be really difficult because we’re so used to being reliant on our fish and caribou and beluga whales,” Delisle-Alaku says, but “we’re going to have to adapt.”
The Innavik Hydro electric dam, which opened in 2023, is one of the boldest manifestations of Inukjuak adapting to climate change. This eight-megawatt power plant, the product of a $130 million investment and a 20-year effort, is the first of its kind in the Canadian Arctic. It channels the Innuksuak River — the same river Allakariallak navigated on his kayak a century ago as Nanook — to generate enough electricity to transform a community that previously ran on diesel fuel into more than 90% renewable energy.
“They have reduced more greenhouse gases per capita than any community in Canada ever has,” says Chris Henderson of Indigenous Clean Energy, a nonprofit that advised the Inukjuak community. “Indigenous communities are at the center of the next energy revolution.”
The power plant will create enough energy to generate $1 million in annual revenue for the community for the next 40 years. As a 50-50 partnership between the Inuit-owned Pituvik Landholding Corp. and Innergex Renewable Energy, the money will be earmarked for reinvestment into economic development and programs like Unaaq that preserve traditional practices.
The next phase will be to electrify boats and snowmobiles, outfit hunting cabins with solar kits, and use energy from the dam to warm a new $5 million greenhouse under construction to grow fresh produce. Using modern technology with an eye toward fostering tradition aligns with the community’s ideal approach toward innovation. “We want to merge traditional knowledge from our harvesters and fishermen with science,” Delisle-Alaku says.
“I hope they’re proud of this film,” French says as we’re preparing for its debut at the village community center. He’d spent the previous day with Hutcheson and members of the village’s film advisory board refining the many captions between Inuktitut and English.
There’s a life-size cutout of Nanook in his sealskin pants hurling a harpoon that village youths are lining up behind, poking their heads through his fur hood. A step and repeat banner emblazoned with the movie’s logo has been unfurled for local dignitaries and for stars of the film to pause for portraits. “We’ve got everything but a red carpet,” French says.
What they do have is a feast: a 210-foot strip of flattened cardboard that runs the length of the gymnasium three times over. Every inch of it is covered with a mosaic of cut-up chunks of raw game, amounting to five belugas and five caribou, along with Dixie cups filled with crowberries in suvalik.
The country food bonanza draws hundreds of people who file into the gym and take their seats on the floor. The scrape of knife blades being sharpened against metal uluk handles rings out as people eagerly dig in. Funded both by French and a government grant that supports hunters who provide the community with country food, the event is as much a celebration of the village’s consideration for feeding one another as it is the movie. “This is about food security,” says Ricky Moorhouse, 40, the current town manager. “There’s a lot of people that still eat country food every day.”
I sit down as residents invite me to share. Soon, my hands are shining from the unctuous feast. “Usuinangupunag,” says Sarah Lisa Kasudluak, who greeted us at the airport on our first day, teaching me the Inuktitut expression for “I’m covered in fat!”
Our identity is linked with sharing and preparing food. The connection we have to our ancestors is beyond time. We give thanks to them, and they bless us with food.”
Ohaituk sets herself down on the floor across the cardboard from me. I ask about the menagerie of meats arrayed before us. About why the meats are better after a few days of aging. And about the various sauces, spice powders, and seasonings people have brought to enhance the meal, including misiraq and an oniony avocado dip with Crisco and soy.
Ohaituk gives me a look, followed by a warm smile. “We’re always quiet when we’re eating,” she says. “Qallunaat always talk too much when they eat.”
Before long, the meal concludes and the cardboard is swiftly stripped from the floor. Then French takes the stage. “I have met so many wonderful people and friends that no doubt I will have for a lifetime,” he says. “So thank you for welcoming me into this community.”
The sentiment is reciprocated as French and his family are presented with Inukjuak’s flag.
The crowd takes their seats. A frozen white tundra flashes across the big screen and the camera is racing behind a dogsled with a musher’s eye view. The room erupts into cheers and applause, then falls silent for 90 minutes as a new view of their world plays out before them.
The early reviews are what French had hoped for.
“It’s much better than the 1922 film,” Moorhouse, the town manager, says when the lights come up. “It will show the world how far we’ve come.”
Encouraging comments on the audience surveys that had been handed out provoke a teary sniffle from French. “You really captured us,” read one. “I loved it! I cried, I laughed, I smiled the whole time,” read another. “Made me proud to be Inuk.”
When French started filming four years ago, Rhoda Kokiapik, 51, the executive director of the Avataq Cultural Institute, who also sits on the film’s advisory board, told French he “wasn’t very good at his job.” Now, she has a different opinion.
“Kirk came to learn,” says Kokiapik, “and blended in with us just like he’s part of the community.”
There was still plenty of work to be done back in Pennsylvania, where French would respond to community feedback on subtitles and other details in preparation for its American debut at State College on March 1. It is expected to also be broadcast on PBS and Canada’s CBC later this year.
On the morning before we board an Air Inuit prop plane to journey back south, with the threat of snow imminent, a dozen people gather in a chilly rain beside a pile of fieldstones ringed by a picket fence at the edge of the village. A town archaeologist has confirmed that this is the final resting place of Allakariallak, the actor who played Nanook.
Kokiapik carefully lays the granite headstone French had brought from Pennsylvania atop the pile of rocks. Allakariallak’s grave was no longer unmarked.
Ohaituk recites a prayer in Inuktitut “from the time before the Qallunaat came.”
Then Kokiapik declares, “this ceremony marks a conclusion to this project.”
There was a new sense of closure to the complicated legacy of Nanook of the North. French had worried the ceremony would be washed out by the weather. But, as the freezing drizzle turns into an all-out downpour beside the grave, Sarah Lisa Kasudluak says to me, “Rain or shine, we Inuit show up.”
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