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Better Than A Duck Face

July/August 2019

Why your cell phone is a must-have in any on-the-land camp kit.

By Beth Brown

PHOTO COURTESY PUVIRNITUQ SNOW FESTIVAL/KATHERINE DAPHNE

COURTESY PUVIRNITUQ SNOW FESTIVAL/KATHERINE DAPHNE

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Scores of academics and scientists descend on the territories each year to poke, probe, and proselytise. It’s not all the stuff of dry dissertations. Some of it is weird. All of it is wonderful. This issue, Up Here is documenting some of the wildest research happening in the North. 

There’s a science to the Northern hunting selfie, specifically when it comes to seals.

Spurred by a trending #sealfie movement—social media photos of Northerners using seal—long-time Inuit cultural anthropologist Edmund Searles sought to explore the relationship between the selfie and subsistence hunting.

“The Inuit economy has been hammered by animal rights activists criticizing and demonizing the hunting of seal and marine mammals,” says Searles, who recently published the paper, “Fresh seal blood looks like beauty and life: #sealfies and subsistence in Nunavut.” 

Searles, a Bucknell University professor who has studied Inuit relationships to the land for around three decades, says his research has a lot to do with hanging around and being a good listener. This study is rooted in a 2014 social media post by musician Tanya Tagaq that shows a photo of her infant daughter lying on the tundra next to a hunted seal—that’s after the #sealfie movement was formed to combat an anti-seal-hunting environmental selfie trend spearheaded by Ellen DeGeneres.

“There’s a lot of misunderstanding of what hunting is among non-agricultural-based communities,” he says.

In the North, subsistence hunting is about more than physical sustenance—it’s about community, collective labour and coming of age.

“It’s an art, it’s a cosmology, it’s almost a religion,” Searles says. “It’s a way of connecting to the universe. Inuit need seals and seals need Inuit.”

Searls says the #sealfie is now a modern hunting tool for self-expression and identity, especially for youth. “It’s a source of activism, a source of social justice” and a way to give voice to harvesters and foragers when they are politically vilified.

July/August 2019

PHOTO BY JIMMY THOMSON

Niki Mckenzie and Jared Bihun are the (Culinary) Wild Ones

With caribou rillettes, grated bison heart and foraged herbs, these chefs are creating ambitious food.

By Jimmy Thomson

PHOTO BY JIMMY THOMSON

January 22nd, 2021 January 22nd, 2021

July/August 2019

PHOTO BY JIMMY THOMSON

How To Grind Out a Business With Matthew Grogono

How a small protest to prove a point about recycling led to a business that practices and teaches the art of turning old bottles into decorative glasses.

By Jimmy Thomson

PHOTO BY JIMMY THOMSON

January 22nd, 2021 January 22nd, 2021

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How a storyteller and an astronomer named five of the ringed planet’s satellites after Inuit legends.

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There’s still a lot of mystery and intrigue about the time Cosmos 954 crashed into the Northwest Territories.

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