By Heather Exner-Pirot When Shell announced last month they would cancel their Chukchi Sea operations “for the foreseeable future,” many southern environmentalists were jubilant. As Greenpeace U.K. executive director John Sauven said, “Big oil has sustained an unmitigated defeat. They had a budget of billions, we had a movement of millions. For three years we

This article was previously published by Barents Observer. By Maura Forrest and Lily Haines A new crop of students is about to graduate from the Sámi Education Institute’s Inari Sámi language class. Inari Sámi is one of Finland’s most threatened languages, with just a few hundred native speakers remaining. But these language classes promise to turn students into fluent Sámi language speakers in just eight

By Lou Del Bello Tikigaq is one of the longest continuously inhabited communities on the North American continent. Its people are so ancient that their local language has a word for the woolly mammoth, which shared their small peninsula in northwestern Alaska before it went extinct over 11,000 years ago. In the not-so-distant future, some

By Uiloq Mulvad Jessen Greenland is the world’s biggest island with its 2,166,086 square kilometers, which is about the same size as Alaska and California together. In Greenland, there are approximately 56,500 inhabitants, compared to California and Alaska with about 39.5 million. The people in Greenland are spread throughout 17 towns and 58 settlements. The

This article was previously published in the ICC Alaska June Newsletter.  By Jim Stotts In mid-May the U.N. agency that regulates the world’s oceans adopted rules aimed at preventing pollution from ships sailing in Arctic and Antarctic waters. The London-based International Maritime Organization (IMO) approved the so-called ‘Polar Code’ that comes into effect in January

World Policy On Air is a podcast from the pages and website of World Policy Journal. The Arctic is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the globe. On today’s episode of World Policy On Air, Subhankar Banerjee details the plight of the Arctic’s indigenous population, who are witnessing the disastrous effects of

This article was originally published in Inukitut Magazine.  For two weeks during September and October 2014, Nunatsiavut elder Johannes Lampe retraced the footsteps of a group of Labrador Inuit who died more than 100 years earlier in Europe. He navigated the Elbe River to better understand what those men and women first saw when they landed

By Will Becker In 1990, Isuma Igloolik Productions was founded by Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn in Nunavut, Canada—shortly before Nunavut became an officially recognized Canadian territory predominantly inhabited by the Inuit. The company created a legacy with 2001’s, “Atanjurat: The Fast Runner,” winner of a Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It was

By Nikki Wiart In a culture that thrives on oral history, there are some stories that are never told. Inuit youth are dying by suicide at an alarming rate in northern Canada — over the past 20 years, Inuit suicide rates have been about 10 times 110 deaths per 100,000 people the Canadian average, or

By Will Becker On Tuesday June 23, World Policy Institute and the Government of Québec held a private breakfast and discussion featuring the Premier of Québec, Philippe Couillard. The event was part of the Arctic Deeply Roundtables initiative, which seeks to engage leading experts and investors on the most pressing issues of our time, including sustainable development