By Rosemarie Kuptana & Suzie Napayok-Short Inuit Ilitqusia, or the Inuit Way of Knowing (Inuit Qaujimaningit, IQ), is the vast body of scientific knowledge of the Inuit. What is this Inuit Ilitqusia? It is a living entity. As Jaypetee Arnakak explains,  “It is a means of rationalizing thought and action, a means of organizing tasks

By Wilfrid Greaves In April, the United States marked the midpoint of its two-year term as chair of the Arctic Council. Unlike the country’s first chairmanship shortly after the Council’s formation in the mid-1990s, this time the United States has used its leadership position to set an ambitious agenda for political cooperation in the circumpolar

By Ashley Chappo What is it about the Arctic that inspires such human flights of fancy? For the past several hundred years, writers and artists have turned to the region in their work, creating fictional and imaginative realms vastly different from the true Arctic. Perhaps the most well known of these daydreams was the tale

By Jon Rahbek-Clemmensen The Arctic is the new black in Copenhagen. Over the past decade, the region has gone from being a peripheral issue and a career dead end for Danish diplomats, best left for a few die-hard Greenland nerds in the Office for Nordic, Greenlandic, and Faroese Affairs, to becoming a top priority on Denmark’s

From April 27-28, World Policy co-hosted a conference on the Arctic at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. in collaboration with the University of Washington and Trent University. The conference was the first to examine the theme of the U.S. chairmanship of the Arctic Council: “One Arctic: Shared Opportunities, Challenges and Responsibilities.” During the conference,

By Ashley Chappo Last week, the One Arctic Workshop was held at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., co-hosted by Trent University, the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, and the World Policy Institute’s Arctic in Context initiative. The conference was unprecedented in that it was the first workshop

By Sébastien Duyck On April 22, leaders representing 175 governments convened in New York to sign the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Never in the history of the United Nations had an international treaty secured so many signatures on a single day. The unprecedented number of national climate commitments submitted prior to the Paris conference further

This article was originally published in Up Here Magazine. By Samia Madwar When Alesrine Andre flies from Norman Wells to Inuvik, NWT, she looks out the window to watch the hills, valleys, rivers, and lakes below her. To most passengers, the features appear as little more than a sprawling, natural canvas. To Andre, it’s like

“In the Arctic, roads are magical. They appear in the fall and melt in the spring. Others, buckled by permafrost, undulate in the snow. Many are invisible to the naked eye — caribou migration routes that exist only by instinct. During the sunless, frigid winter, the Arctic Ocean becomes one vast road for polar bears

By Erica M. Dingman The word “Arctic” evokes a feeling—it sparks images of pristine, wide-open spaces blanketed by the purity of ice and snow. Its unfettered beauty serves as a source of human wonderment, filling our dreams with thoughts of wanderlust and solitude removed from the drudgery of everyday life. For most, a voyage to