A moon dog was low above the horizon. It appeared on the first day of the Canadian soldiers’ patrol, and the Inuit rangers leading them in the far north of the country spotted it right away: ice crystals in the clouds were deflecting the light, causing two illusory moons to appear in the sky.
It meant that a storm was coming, despite the forecast of good weather. Inuit rangers told the platoon to pitch their tents and hunker down.
“If it gets worse, we’ll be stranded,” said John Ussak, one of the Inuit rangers, recalling how the soldiers wanted to move forward, but backed down. They woke up to a blizzard.
Canada is now on a mission to assert its hold on its Arctic territory, a huge stretch that was once little more than an afterthought.
As Russia and China focus more attention on the region’s military and trade potential, Canada’s military is under pressure to understand the Arctic’s changing climate, how to survive there and how to defend it.
The contest is global, with US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken making a five-day visit to northern Europe last week to rally allies against Russian and Chinese ambitions in the Arctic.
Canada’s mission to protect the Arctic means relying more 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 expanses in the far north.
It also means delving into the country’s colonial past, changing established ways of thinking, and undoing generations of mistrust. The Canadian government has a long and ugly history of abusing Inuit, including tricking families into moving to the High Arctic to consolidate their 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 its colonial history. Efforts to secure Indigenous Canadians’ rightful place in the country have filtered through different levels of government, schools, the arts, and business.
Canada is also focusing on the most intractable element of postcolonial relationships – the way people think – by emphasizing learning from Indigenous people. On arctic patrols, this has practical advantages.
“Leaders need to show humility and understand that 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 with Inuit rangers in March, part of a military exercise called Operation Nanook-Nunalivut.
Before the soldiers landed at Rankin Inlet, the obstacles were obvious. Like most other Canadians, most had never been this far north.
Military drills between Inuit rangers and the military have been going on for decades, but the stakes have gotten higher as the world’s superpowers vie for pre-eminence in an Arctic made more accessible by climate change.
Russia is rapidly building its military and collaborating on trade ventures with China, as melting ice provides access to vast natural resources beneath the Arctic seabed and unlocks new shipping lanes. Even Canada’s closest ally, the United States, is contesting Canadian claims to sovereignty over the Northwest Passage.
While the exercise took place on uncontested Canadian territory, it is also part of a larger effort to bolster Canada’s military capability in the Arctic and to fend off any potential rival claims to the increasingly navigable waterways.
The Inuit rangers’ advice to delay the patrol – and, more than anything else, Major Bennet’s deference to them – not only protected the seven Inuit rangers and nearly 40 soldiers from a blizzard, it cemented the authority of the Inuit in a region that continues to confuse outsiders.
It hasn’t always been like this.
Around Rankin Inlet, a small subarctic town on the western shore of Hudson Bay, stories passed down through generations speak of Inuit advice and aid offered, and refused, by marooned explorers and whalers on Marble Island, about 30 miles offshore.
“My mom brought it up, even though I told her I didn’t want to hear about the past, because it really hurts me,” said Marianne Hapanak, 51, who has been a ranger for 24 years. “Our elders have tried to help white people,” she added. “Why didn’t they accept our help?”
“Maybe just to be tough?” she said.
Home to about 3,000 people, Rankin Inlet is the second most populated city in Nunavut, a Canadian territory nearly three times the size of Texas with a population of just 40,000, most of them Inuit.
For centuries, European colonial powers have led expeditions in search of a Northwest Passage, a shorter and faster sea route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the maze of islands and waterways in the Canadian Arctic.
In 1905, a Norwegian man, Roald Amundsen – who went to live among the Inuit to learn how to survive in the Arctic – became the first European explorer to cross the Northwest Passage. But some of the doomed efforts, most famously the Franklin Expedition, have become parables of colonial ignorance: European explorers who died of scurvy either by refusing the Inuit’s vitamin-rich diet of raw meat or after ignoring the Inuit and becoming lost.
Harry Ittinuar, 59, a former Inuit ranger who organized boat trips to Marble Islandhe grew up hearing stories of strangers stranded on the island, including James Knight, an 18th-century English explorer who was shipwrecked with his crew after failing to find the Northwest Passage.
“One of the stories I heard, they knew a crew was struggling, so they went winter with a team of dogs,” said Mr. Ittinuar of the Inuit.
“When they were able to cross the ice, they offered them help and food, but the sailors refused to eat seals, walruses, whales or caribou, or whatever was offered to them,” Ittinuar added. “That was their end.”
Some Inuit rangers say they have noticed a change in mentality among the soldiers from the “lower south”.
“They’re more respectful now,” said Mr. Ussak, 47, who has been a ranger for two decades. “Our culture is a big part of being a ranger because we teach our knowledge in exercises like this. We teach them what we have learned from our ancestors.
The Inuit Rangers who participated in the recent patrol are among 5,000 Canadian Rangers who are part-time reservists in the Canadian Armed Forces. Above the tree line, where it is too cold for trees to survive, most rangers are Inuit.
With the Canadian military reshaping its relationship with the Inuit by drawing on local knowledge, Canadian soldiers are heading north better prepared for patrols, according to Inuit rangers.
Jack Kabvitok, 83, an Inuit who served as a ranger in the 1990s, recalled how soldiers occasionally arrived without the proper gear for temperatures that dip to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter.
“They didn’t want to fire the rifles because they didn’t want to touch the steel,” Kabvitok said. “They didn’t have coats or boots for up here. When they were few, we could take care of them. We would give them our clothes because we always bring extra clothes when we go hunting.
Prior to their patrol, the Soldiers trained at Petawawa, a base in Ontario. They practiced driving snowmobiles and built traditional Inuit sleds called qamutik. Despite an unusually brutal cold snap at the Ontario base, the landing at Rankin Inlet came as a shock to some.
“It’s winter all over Canada, and you think you know it until you get to a place where you see no trees, just tundra,” said Corp. Simon Cartier, 30, of Montreal. “And if it weren’t for the buildings, you’d probably feel like you were on another planet.”
At their base in Rankin Inlet, the soldiers spent a day repairing their qamutiks, which Inuit rangers quickly noted were inadequate for the subarctic. As the Inuit soldiers and rangers set out on their five-day patrol, the weather, at least, looked favourable.
“We thought we were going to have good weather for the week based on the forecast,” Major Bennett said.
But on the first day, one soldier had to be evacuated after he slipped and sprained his ankle. Continuing problems with the qamutiks forced the Inuit soldiers and rangers to camp about halfway to their destination, at Chesterfield Inlet, a village 60 miles to the northeast.
Then later that evening, the moon dog, a rare optical illusion, emerged low above the horizon.
When Inuit rangers awoke the next morning — to the blizzard that made it impossible to see above 600 feet — they also saw a sun dog, a similar optical phenomenon that often precedes severe weather.
The oldest and most experienced Inuit ranger, Gerard Maktar, 65, and Mr Ussak went to a morning briefing with army chiefs. Mr. Ussak said he resisted when he advised soldiers to stay until the weather cleared.
Lieutenant Erica Rogers, 29, a soldier from Toronto, acknowledged there was initial skepticism about the Inuit rangers’ warning.
“We were going, well, it’s not that cold, we can still go out – if we went back to Petawawa, we would have gone out,” he said.
The delay prevented the soldiers from reaching their destination, but Major Bennet considered the patrol a success. His soldiers learned much from the Inuit, including building igloos, deciphering the meaning of snowdrifts, ice fishing, hunting and butchering caribou, and watching the moon dog and sun dog.
He added that his advice to the patrol commander after his was “Listen to Gerard,” referring to the elderly Inuit ranger.
At the height of the Cold War, in the 1950s, the Canadian government asserted its presence in the Arctic, not by listening to the Inuit, but by using them as human pawns. Officials misled 92 Inuit into moving away from longstanding families and communities to uninhabited areas in the High Arctic where they found little food, 24 hours of darkness in winter and an unfamiliar life that contributed to depression and alcoholism.
Inuit rangers on the patrol said they believed the joint mission would help Canada defend its great north, though they said they did not want to get involved in a larger conflict.
“I wouldn’t go to war,” Ms. Hapanak said.
Even as Canada tries to up its game in the Arctic, Ms Hapanak noted that the soldiers had a lot to learn – a point made clear with the start of the second patrol, a fresh batch of 36 Canadian reservists and 10 British rangers.
As novices, they rode their snowmobiles slowly, taking more than three hours to reach a firing range just six miles north of the base. A soldier had flipped onto his side.
The soldiers started pitching tents when it became clear they would have to camp just on the outskirts of Rankin Inlet.
“Boring!” said Ms Hapanak, who she had hoped to make more progress.
Inuit rangers were killing time. Mr. Maktar has carved a miniature igloo out of hard snow. Two burly middle-aged men were playing tag.
Ms Hapanak spotted a British ranger who was wearing a light coat and kept making big quick circles with his arms to keep warm.
“I tried asking him, ‘Where’s your big coat?’” Ms. Hapanak said. “‘I’ll be good,’ she said she.”
“I’m trying to be tough, I guess.”
