From the air, Tuktoyaktuk looks like a paper-thin slice of land floating steadily in the Arctic Ocean. The Northwest Territories hamlet is home to about a thousand residents, the majority of whom are Inuit. They live in colourful houses pressed up against the coast, surrounded by little lakes and short tundra shrubs. In the winter, when temperatures can dip below -30 degrees, the community becomes brilliantly white, coated in snow and ice. The swathe of terrain appears to be calm and solid. But if you visit the coast, you’ll see signs that the ocean has been swallowing parts of the land whole.

Each year, Tuktoyaktuk loses about a metre of shoreline due to erosion from waves and storms. This erosion has worsened as local sea levels rise due to climate change. As the planet heats up, glaciers and ice sheets melt; the ocean also warms, causing seawater to become less dense and expand. In turn, sea levels rise. This phenomenon is happening in many places across the world, but Tuktoyaktuk is one of the most vulnerable communities facing sea level rise in Canada, according to a 2022 report from the National Collaborating Centre for Environmental Health and CLIMAtlantic, an information hub on climate change in Atlantic Canada. This vulnerability is partially due to the ground in Tuktoyaktuk sinking, as the land continues to respond to the melting of a nearby ice sheet that had lifted the area during the last ice age.

The collapse of Tuktoyaktuk’s coastline has posed a major threat to the community. Over the past few years, local contractors have scrambled to relocate houses that were close to falling into the ocean. Community art educator Brian Kowikchuk grew up on the Point, a small peninsula in Tuktoyaktuk known for its panoramic ocean views. He says that many of the houses that were there have now been moved further inland, and their former location has become an expanse of water. “As that land is receding, that means that a part of us is disappearing,” says Kowikchuk. Even the main cemetery in Tuktoyaktuk, which is located near the coast, is at risk of being washed away. Tuktoyaktuk Island, located off the coast of the hamlet, acts as a barrier that helps shield the community from waves. At the current rate of erosion, without significant intervention the island will be destroyed by 2050, adding to the risks Tuktoyaktuk faces.

Kowikchuk is keen on exploring these drastic threats as the creative lead of Carving Out Climate Testimony, a research initiative that launched last year. The project uses storytelling to document climate change and its impacts on Tuktoyaktuk. Scholars from Canada and the UK work closely with an advisory council of young Inuit leaders on the ground, supporting the youth in developing art projects meant to help the community process the shifts in the landscape. The team also works with a committee of Elders who provide guidance on the project. At the end of the project’s three-year run, the academics will share their research with policymakers.

Jen Bagelman, a principal investigator on the project and a human geography professor at Newcastle University in England, explains how Carving Out Climate Testimony centres an Inuit approach to unikkausivut, the word for storytelling in Inuktitut, an Inuit language. Inuit stories have long been passed down through Elders’ oral narratives, or art forms such as carving, printmaking, song and dance. These stories, many of which explore how humanity is intertwined with nature, are living records of Inuit culture and a way to convey lessons to future generations. By embracing this tradition, Carving Out Climate Testimony allows Tuktoyaktuk's community members to document the dramatic environmental changes happening around them using their own mediums.

So far, the project team has held community workshops and designed a mural for the school in Tuktoyaktuk that unpacks climate grief. The youth and academics are now working to update the documentary Happening to Us, which was made by teens in the community in 2019 to examine how Tuktoyaktuk has been impacted by climate change. The new version of the film—which features additional interviews and details new developments—will be released later this year. The team also plans to create a children’s storybook called The Lost Inukshuk, in which a time-travelling inukshuk, a figure made of stacked stones, guides readers through a timeline of climate change in the North.

In many communities like Tuktoyaktuk, Inuit are facing the potential disappearance of their homelands. While the environmental reasons for this threat are well-documented, the effects on people’s emotions and mental health are often missing from the conversation. Carving Out Climate Testimony makes space for the residents of Tuktoyaktuk to process climate change together, and to ensure the human impacts of the crisis aren’t overlooked. Unlike the extractive practices behind much of the research and art that has historically depicted the North from a colonial perspective, this project seeks to take a more collaborative approach, and empower Inuit youth to transform their eco-anxiety into community action.

In the last scene of the original version of Happening to Us, Inuit youth Nathan Kuptana and Eriel Lugt have a candid conversation about their feelings toward the climate crisis. “Does climate change make you sad about the land around here?” Kuptana asks Lugt. “It really does make me sad because people down south don’t even acknowledge climate change, ‘cause they can’t even see it,” says Lugt. “What they’re doing is really affecting us here.”

It’s a moving moment in a film that captures how a younger generation is grappling with the realities of the climate crisis. Throughout the documentary, there are beautiful shots of Tuktoyaktuk’s rugged landscape paired with interviews featuring Inuit youth and community members discussing the changes that are happening to the land. The film documents the impacts on the Inuit way of life, and on culturally important sustenance practices such as hunting and fishing.

In one scene, community Elder Randal Pokiak recounts how his ability to travel across the land for trapping has been reduced over the years. He used to be able to cross the frozen lake as early as September and build igloos in October, but the timeline has since shifted because of the warming climate. Later on, Natan Obed, the president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami—a national organization representing Inuit across Canada—says he wants future generations to be able to feel awe for the natural spaces they’ve inherited. He worries about what will happen over the next few decades. Will there even be Arctic char left in the waters of Nunatsiavut, a portion of Inuit territory located in northern Labrador? Will the population of caribou remain stable in the region? Both species are important food sources for Inuit communities, and their migration patterns may be threatened by human activity. “I think of how important it is that [all living things] have the right to live in their traditional habitats,” Obed says in the film. 

The potential forced displacement of Inuit in places like Tuktoyaktuk echoes the High Arctic relocations of the 1950s. At the time, the Canadian government had hoped to build sovereignty in the Arctic, particularly as the United States strengthened its military presence in the region. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police moved Inuit from their communities in northern Quebec and present-day Nunavut to two High Arctic islands further north. Though the relocated families were promised a better life, they struggled to adapt to a harsh, extremely cold environment that lacked many food sources. Today, the threat of climate migration that is faced by many Indigenous communities is largely due to harmful land management by settlers who have rejected traditional Indigenous knowledge. Colonial forces have built pipelines, destroyed old-growth forests and exploited natural resources, destroying ecosystems and driving climate change. Yet it is often Indigenous people who are forced to face the dire consequences of this crisis.

According to a 2022 Health Canada report—in a chapter developed by the National Collaborating Centre for Indigenous Health—Indigenous people are “uniquely sensitive” to climate change’s effects because of their deep connection to and reliance on the land, and because they often live in places that are particularly affected by these changes. A 2020 research paper published in the journal Environmental Research Letters examined the specific impacts of the climate crisis on the mental health of Indigenous people across the world. The paper located connections between acute weather events and psychological impacts like suicide, depression and anxiety. The researchers also found that environmental changes can negatively impact Indigenous peoples’ identities, disrupting livelihoods, traditions and social connections. Bagelman says the impacts of government policies such as the residential school system can’t be disentangled from the environmental threats that Inuit face today. Both are rooted in a colonial legacy and extractive practices that have harmed and marginalized Inuit communities for decades.

The ecological shifts in Tuktoyaktuk can be particularly impactful for young people in the community, as the Northwest Territories recently grappled with an increase in youth suicides. Across the territory, thirteen people under the age of thirty died by suicide in 2022, compared to only six youth suicides in 2021 and two in 2020, according to the Office of the Chief Coroner. In Tuktoyaktuk, four people died by suicide over a few months in 2022. Community leaders connected the crisis to a lack of mental health resources and systemic issues including addiction, housing problems and isolation. The need for spaces to gather inspired some residents of Tuktoyaktuk to start a youth-led program called the House of Hope, where young people, Elders and other community members can play games and make crafts together. Carving Out Climate Testimony has provided another way for young Inuit leaders to connect with each other and process rapid environmental changes. It has also allowed youth to demonstrate leadership on climate issues, promoting their agency as they challenge feelings of hopelessness and climate despair.

Over the past year, Kowikchuk and the project team organized workshops and brainstorming sessions with Tuktoyaktuk residents to design a mural for the local school. During these sessions, a researcher from the project facilitated discussions around how the land is changing, how people feel about these changes and how they want to create a legacy in their community. Students and other residents were invited to share their ideas for the mural. The design process was interactive and collaborative: in one activity, called “Hands in the Pingos”—referring to the domed, ice-cored hills which can be found near Tuktoyaktuk—participants filled a big sheet of paper with their ideas about the connections between mental health and climate change. Phrases such as “waiting for something to happen” and “less animals” floated above a drawing of pingos and a bright yellow sun. Near the bottom of the sheet, multi-coloured outlines of kids’ handprints contained the words “stop suicide.”

The final mural is an explosion of colour on a series of weatherproof panels. A fuchsia-and-purple eroding coastline divides polar bears on ice and caribou on land. Pingos sit in the background, while the northern lights paint the sky green and pink. The mural is a vibrant, abstract interpretation of the landscape around Tuktoyaktuk, a collage of what community members see as important characteristics of the environment and an expression of what can be lost to climate change. As houses are moved and the physical landscape morphs into something new, perhaps it’s easier for residents to process these shifts as a community: to come together as active witnesses and talk about what is changing.

As climate change continues to transform northern communities, we need to pay attention to the experiences of those on the ground. Kowikchuk says that Carving Out Climate Testimony allows Inuit to take control of the narrative. “It’s a way for our people to be able to be part of a team, instead of being a guinea pig on the other side of the microscope,” he says.

For decades, Inuit perspectives have been sidelined as white filmmakers and researchers tell stories that don’t belong to them. These representations of Inuit communities are often riddled with clichés. Take, for example, American director Robert J. Flaherty’s famous 1922 film Nanook of the North, which depicts the life of an Inuit family in northern Quebec. The film was initially well-received, and is still celebrated by many cinephiles as a milestone in the history of documentaries. But it has also been met with waves of criticism for its fabrication of details and exoticization of Inuit life. Flaherty staged parts of the movie, asking an Inuit man named Allakariallak to play the main character Nanook (named after the Inuktitut word for polar bear) and casting other actors to play stereotypical roles. At one point in the film, Nanook bites a record while interacting with a record player. The scene mocks Nanook’s ignorance of the Western world and fuels the stereotype that Inuit belong to the ancient past. Having premiered at a time when many people around the world were unfamiliar with Inuit culture, Nanook of the North lodged itself in viewers’ imaginations of the North, creating a falsehood of Inuit life that has been difficult to erase—especially with the continued lack of mainstream coverage of Inuit realities.

A more recent example is of the North, Dominic Gagnon’s experimental 2015 movie about Inuit life. The documentary reinforces harmful stereotypes of alcoholism in Indigenous communities. While the film made the rounds of festivals across Europe, Inuit artists like filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril criticized Gagnon for painting a deeply inaccurate picture of Inuit culture. “That’s not what my life looks like, it’s not what my family’s life looks like,” Arnaquq-Baril said in a 2015 interview for the now-defunct online magazine Art Threat. “It is portraying Inuit society as the stereotype that we’ve been living with for so, so long.”

In the academic sphere, there are similarly extractive practices where researchers harvest knowledge from Inuit communities and fail to prioritize local perspectives. Building deeper engagement with Inuit means shifting the balance of power and inviting them to take charge. This requires acknowledging that Inuit are the experts on their land and its changes. Carving Out Climate Testimony tries to foster equitable and meaningful relationships by positioning Inuit youth as the driving force behind the project. The youth choose how they want to document their perspectives, and the researchers equip them with the resources to carry out their vision. The project also promises to build the youth’s leadership skills: Last summer, the young leaders travelled to Victoria, BC for an Inuit youth summit, where they shared some of their work and connected with local Indigenous communities.

For Tuktoyaktuk’s residents, there may be limited options in the fight against the forces of nature that morph their land day by day. But Carving Out Climate Testimony does not present a hopeless image of environmental disaster. Rather, it documents climate change through the perspective of affected community members, showing how those in the North and on the frontlines of the climate crisis are adapting to these realities. By coming together to talk about and mourn what’s been lost, Tuktoyaktak’s residents make space to imagine what’s necessary for a more hopeful future. ⁂

Neha Chollangi is a freelance journalist based in Montreal, where she covers social movements and grassroots activism. She previously worked as a reporter in the Okanagan Valley, and as an editorial fellow at Future of Good.