Inuit give lessons on securing Arctic
RANKIN INLET, Canada — A moon dog hung low over the horizon. It showed up on the first day of the Canadian soldiers’ patrol, and the Inuit rangers guiding them in the country’s far north spotted it right away: Ice crystals in the clouds were bending the light, making two illusory moons appear in the sky.
It meant a storm was coming, despite the forecast of fair weather. The Inuit rangers told the platoon to pitch their tents and hunker down.
“If it gets worse, we’re going to be stranded,” said John Ussak, one of the Inuit rangers, recalling how the soldiers wanted to keep going but backed down. They awoke to a blizzard.
Canada is on a mission to assert its hold on its Arctic territory, an enormous stretch that was once little more than an afterthought.
As Russia and China focus greater attention on the region’s military and commercial potential, Canada’s armed forces are under pressure to understand its changing climate, how to survive there and how to defend it.
The contest is a global one, with the American secretary of state, Antony Blinken, having paid a five-day visit to Northern Europe last week to rally allies against Russian and Chinese ambitions in the Arctic.
Canada’s mission to secure the Arctic means relying more heavily on the Inuit, the only people who have lived in this austere part of the world for thousands of years, keeping watch over the country’s vast, isolated stretches in the far north.
It also means dredging into the country’s colonial past, changing hard-wired ways of thinking and undoing generations of mistrust. The Canadian government has a long and ugly history of abusing the Inuit, including misleading families into moving to the High Arctic to cement its hold on the territory during the Cold War and refusing to let them leave.
But in recent years, Canada has embarked on a wide-ranging attempt to come to terms with and atone for its colonial history. Efforts to secure Indigenous Canadians’ rightful place in the country have filtered through different levels of governments, schools, the arts and business.
Canada is also focusing on the most intractable element of postcolonial relationships — people’s way of thinking — by emphasizing learning from the Indigenous. On Arctic patrols, that brings practical benefits.
“Leaders need to show humility and understand it’s more important to acknowledge what you don’t know than what you do know,” said Maj. Brynn Bennett, the army commander who led the patrol in March with the Inuit rangers, part of a military exercise called Operation Nanook-Nunalivut.
Before the soldiers ever landed in Rankin Inlet, the hurdles were clear. Like nearly all other Canadians, most had never been this far north.
Military exercises between the Inuit rangers and the army have been held for decades, but the stakes have gotten higher as the world’s superpowers vie for preeminence in an Arctic made more accessible by climate change.
Russia is rapidly building up its military and partnering on commercial ventures with China, as thawing ice provides access to vast natural resources below the Arctic seafloor and unlocks new shipping lanes. Even Canada’s closest ally, the United States, disputes Canadian claims of sovereignty over the Northwest Passage.
While the exercise took place on uncontested Canadian territory, it is also part of a broader effort to build up Canada’s military capacity in the Arctic and to fend off any potential rival claims on the increasingly navigable waterways.