U of A grad student helps map out future for Arctic
LANCASTER SOUND – It is 2 a.m. The sun has set, a thick fog has rolled in and it’s miserably cold sailing into a stiff wind in the choppy waters of the Northwest Passage.
Down below, University of Alberta biology graduate student Vicki Sahanatien is in her bunk recovering from a bout of nausea, just as others have done on this rough part of our journey from Grise Fiord to Pond Inlet in the High Arctic.
Our expedition, funded by Canon Europe, is intended to give scientists and members of the World Wildlife Fund a chance to explore and map out a future for the Arctic.
At the helm of this 47-foot sloop, I am prepared to extend my watch so Sahanatien can continue to sleep. But she has no interest in me doing that.
Ten minutes before it’s her turn to take over, she is on deck offering me a cup of hot tea. “Better being cold up here than getting tossed around down there and feeling sick,” she says.
Sahanatien, 53, is an enigma — a Wahtu Mohawk from Georgian Bay living in the land of the Inuit and studying polar bears for her PhD.
“Vicki is one of the strongest willed people I’ve worked with,” says University of Alberta professor Andrew Derocher, who took her on as a PhD student several years ago. “I can’t really call Vicki ‘my student,’ and I think right from the start she made it clear that we would be co-operators.”
Derocher first met Sahanatien at the federal-provincial Polar Bear Technical Committee meetings in 2002, when he had just come back to Canada after serving as Norway’s chief polar bear scientist for several years.
Sahanatien was working for Parks Canada in the Arctic at the time, and it wasn’t long after that she contacted Derocher about doing a polar bear project in the new national park at Ukkusiksalik in Wager Bay.
“I agreed right away. Vicki’s experience was the No. 1 reason why,” he says. “She has a huge diversity of experience in the North and is clearly committed to making a contribution.”
In the end, Sahanatien raised much of the funding and did the planning and logistics for the project, which was of great interest to Derocher because there is a healthy population of polar bears in and around Wager Bay that has not been the subject of close study.
The project almost killed her though. Nobody knows what she picked up along the way, but the drug-resistant respiratory infection was so severe that air traffic controllers had to close Winnipeg Airport to landings while the plane that transported her from the Arctic came in on priority.
She was in intensive care for longer than she cares to remember.
“Had it not been for her partner Jim coming up for a visit to Wager Bay, I’m not sure she’d be around today,” says Derocher. “Once he got a look at her, he arranged for her to be flown out immediately.”
Sahanatien is a descendant of Chief Louis Sahanatien, the man who founded the Wahtu Reserve near Bala, Ont., in 1881. She was the first person from her small community to go to university. She did her BA at the University of Guelph before doing a master’s degree in environmental studies at York University a decade later.
“I wanted to do a university degree every 10 years,” she said jokingly when I asked her why she decided to do a PhD at the University of Alberta.
“Who would not want to contribute to the conservation of the high Arctic ecosystems …?”
VICKI SAHANATIEN
Sahanatien was the first woman to become a chief park warden when she got the job in Ivvavik National Park in the northern Yukon.
“The reality is that the U of A has the world’s two finest polar bear scientists in Andrew Derocher and his mentor Ian Stirling. I wanted to get the chance to work with them.”
It was always Sahanatien’s intention to go back to the Arctic. So when the World Wildlife Fund was looking for a credible scientist to open up their new office in Nunavut, she applied.
“I wasn’t sure initially until Andrew Derocher told me ‘Hey, this is the perfect job for you.’ When I think about it now, who would not want to contribute to the conservation of the high Arctic ecosystems, focus on sea ice dependent species and to work with Inuit communities on this effort?
“That said, WWF must demonstrate that we can be helpful, more than helpful.”
Sahanatien’s experience working in the Arctic and her PhD research will no doubt help.
“We did well in getting Vicki to accept this challenge” says Martin von Mirbach, the Arctic program director for the World Wildlife Fund. “I can’t think of anyone who is better qualified in doing what we hope to accomplish working with the Inuit in the Arctic.”