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February 26, 2021
If you can’t stand the Arctic heat, stay out of the Arctic Kitchen. Plus, hidden histories, frozen food, and wooden crates. All in this week’s Up Here newsletter.
During the past summer, Peter Mather counted 16 dens and over 100 foxes making their homes among the urban landscape of Whitehorse, including this family who dug out a den in the McDonald’s parking lot. (photo by @matherpeter)

UP HERE IN THE NORTH 


New issue just dropped. Inside the pages of our March/April edition, we head back to school as YukonU celebrates its first year as the North's first university. But what comes next for post-secondary options in the territories? Then, find out why educators in remote communities must be willing to learn as much as they teach. Also in this issue, we've got the importance of Indigenous names on northern maps, the past and future of climate change research, the education of a lifetime with author and Arctic adventurer James Raffan, and we travel back to old Old Town to re-discover Yellowknife’s former red-light district. Available on newsstands and out to subscribers starting next week. Until then...

Thanks for reading,
Jacob Boon 

Editor

March/April cover of Up Here
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KD and hot dogs from a 2015 Global News story
Do you put hot dogs in your Kraft Dinner? If you don’t, “them’s fighting words up North,” says CBC’s Arctic Kitchen. A post in the broadcaster's northern recipes Facebook group prompted this story about adding wieners to “mac and cheese.” The original post collected 224 comments while the CBC story generated nearly 600 comments and almost 1,000 “related discussions” (whatever that means).

“The number of appropriate things to add to boxed mac ’n’ cheese is 0,”
tweets CBC Yukon’s Chris Windeyer. To which @nuliayuk replies: “This is like when the missionaries came up here and told us our ways were wrong.”

I don’t have much of a (hot) dog in this fight other than that, as an east coaster, I’m not sure there’s anything particularly northern about this combination of affordable and easily prepared foodstuffs. I grew up on similar recipes originating from what I can only assume were the all-too-common struggles of two working parents on moderate incomes trying to provide a full and satisfying meal for their children. 

Recently, there have been several
bizarre food-shaming videos going around the internet and I really don’t have an appetite for it. Look, make whatever silly combo of foodstuffs you (and your family) enjoy eating and to heck with anyone giving you grief over it. Hot dogs and KD? Sounds great. Hot dogs and KD separate? Also great. My mom knew I liked hamburgers more than hot dogs so she would cut little half-slices along the length of the dog and they’d curl while they were frying. Put that on a burger bun and you’ve got a circle dog. 10/10. 

It’s been a rough last 12 months for everyone so I say just enjoy and be thankful for what food and family we have—especially in the North, where groceries are expensive and shipped-in produce is already at the end of its shelf-life. (Various)

In news that's actually disgusting, Toiletgate has refloated. Two years ago a horrific photo of an overflowing public washroom at the Visitor Information Centre near the NWT-Alberta border caused more than a little debate in the halls of power (purposefully not linking to the photo for your own good). This week, MLA Kevin O’Reilly once again asked the territorial government to clean its crappers along the NWT’s highways. While the borders remain largely closed for visitors, all those essential workers trucking in supplies still need somewhere dignified to do their business. (
Cabin Radio)

Arviat is still battling its COVID-19 outbreak. The community declared a state of emergency this week to deal with the growing number of cases (86 since late January). Since the virus arrived in November the community of under 3,000 has seen more than 300 cases and one death. (
CBC)

The Arctic Inspiration Prize announced its winners last weekend. Over $3 million was given to organizations across the North that aim to improve the communities they live in. We’ve got a writeup on the winners at the link. (
Up Here)

Inuk artist Germaine Arnaktauyok has
won the Governor General’s award for visual and media arts. The celebrated printmaker and painter, originally from Igloolik but now residing in Yellowknife, is perhaps most recognizable to southern Canadians for her illustration, The Drummer, which was chosen by the Royal Canadian Mint for the first-ever commemorative edition of the toonie, back in 1999. I spoke to Arnaktauyok about how the coin came to be a couple of years ago for Nunavut's 20th birthday. (Various)

Speaking of 20-year anniversaries, for the last two decades the Yukon’s Hidden Histories Society has been uncovering the missing stories of Black and other racialized immigrants who helped build the territory in its early days. Here’s a look at some of their important work. (
Yukon News)

A “giant ice circle” has appeared on an NWT lake. (
Cabin Radio)

Nunavut’s government doesn’t track school violence,
so the CBC did it for them. Nick Murray is behind this important three-part investigation that counted over 1,000 violent incidents in the territory’s schools during the 2019-20 school year. Part two looks at the lack of counselling and social supports failing the territory’s children, and part three examines the limitations of the schools’ disciplinary system. (CBC)
Standing in solidarity with Wet'suwet'en on the steps of the BC Legislature last year. (Photo by Mike Graeme)
Though the blockade by Inuit hunters is over (for the moment), the fight to protect Indigenous homelands continues—whether at Baffinland or Wet'suwet'en. Our intern Anonda Canadien was down in Victoria last February where she and hundreds more gathered on the steps of the Legislative Assembly and for the first time in history cancelled the Throne Speech. She wrote about her experience that day for our website, and about the importance of being united in defending Indigenous lands. (Up Here)

Speaking of Baffinland, The National went North this past week to look at the iron ore mine’s fate. (
CBC)

Meanwhile, a new study from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego has found container traffic around the Mary River Mine has increased sixfold since operations began in 2015, and for the local narwhal population, that's a lot of noise and a lot of risk. (
The Narwhal)

Yellowknife’s aurora-themed Naka Festival returns for its third year next month, featuring both online and in-person events. (
Cabin Radio)

Whitehorse is famous for its frontier aesthetic of ramshackle log cabins and… cladded, glassy condos? (
CBC)

Here’s a paper about wooden crates in the Arctic and colonialism: “Tracing the intersection of crates, photography and ballot boxes in the [national] archive, the essay examines the settler-colonial state’s attempts at imposing and consolidating power, but also points to the practices of continuity and resistance enacted by Inuit subjects.” (
Settler Colonial Studies)

Miali Coley-Sudlovenick has a small Inuk accent when she speaks, the measured tone of someone thinking in English and Inuktitut,” writes Kent Driscoll. “She is Inuk. She is also Black.” A profile of the playwright raised in Iqaluit, who has a foot in two cultures. (
APTN)

A polar bear would need to eat 1.5 caribou, 37 Arctic char, 74 snow geese, 216 snow goose eggs, or 3 million crowberries to get the same caloric energy they get from the blubber of a single adult ringed seal. A new study finds the Arctic's apex predators are using four times more energy swimming for food between melting sea ice as they would have had to expend in decades prior. By the way, I did some quick math with the tables from the study and
this calculation of the nutritional value of an adult human male. A polar bear would need to eat about one and one-third people to get the same nutrition it gets from a seal. (Journal of Experimental Biology)
The setting sun lights up a melting iceberg on a beach in Jökulsárlón, Iceland. (Photo by Sophie Carr)

ELSEWHERE IN THE ARCTIC


The BBC has launched a new four-part podcast on “The New Arctic.” The episodes look at issues ranging from communities under threat, to resource extraction, tourism, and global politics. (BBC)

How the frozen food industry was inspired by Inuit. (
History)

Some tips on snowshoe running in Alaska. (
Snowshoe Magazine)

Sweden shows Texas how to keep wind turbines running in icy weather. (
Bloomberg)

Russia’s booming animal farms are a “ticking time bomb” for future viral pandemics. This warning after the recent first case of bird flu transmission from animals to humans. (
Moscow Times)

Hopefully unrelated: Russian scientists are trying to extract prehistoric viruses from melting permafrost. (
Interesting Engineering)

The easternmost point in North America is actually in Alaska. (
World Atlas)
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