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Eye on the Arctic brings you stories and newsmakers from around the North. 

As global players ramp up interest in the Arctic, the organization representing the world’s Inuit wrapped up their general assembly in Alaska in July with a pledge to amplify their voice on the international stage.

The Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) represents the approximately 160,000 Inuit from Canada, Greenland, Russia and the United States.

The Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) represents the approximately 160,000 Inuit from Canada, Greenland, Russia and the United States.

The ICC meets every four years to elect a new chair and executive council and to establish the organization’s focus for the next four years. The theme of the 2018 Utqiaġvik Declaration is "Inuit – The Arctic We Want." In it, the document outlines human rights, education, health and wellness, and food security as among the top priorities.

Dalee Sambo Dorough, an associate professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage's department of political science, who specializes in international law and human rights, was also elected ICC chair for the next four years.

Feature Interview with ICC Chair Dalee Sambo Dorough

To better understand the ICC’s vision for the next four years, Eye on the Arctic reached Dalee Sambo Dorough, in Anchorage, Alaska.

Q: Tell us about ICC’s priorities for the next four years.

The overall message from Inuit, to the rest of the global community, is the need to honour, respect and recognize the rights of Inuit as distinct peoples within this distinct region of the world.  It’s important that the rest of the world recognize our responsibilities as landholders and as rights holders. Our homelands mean everything to us, both the land and the coastal seas in the Arctic Ocean. I want to stress how important honour, respect, human rights, and our homeland, are to Inuit.

The new ICC executive council (l-r): ICC Canada President Monica Ell-Kanayuk; ICC Chukotka President Lobov Talian; ICC Greenland President Hjalmar Dahl; ICC Russia Vice President Elena Kaminskaya; ICC Chair Dalee Sambo Dorough; ICC Greenland Vice President Nuka Kleemann; ICC Canada Vice President Lisa Koperqualuk; ICC Alaska Vice President Vera Metcalf; ICC Alaska President James Stotts. (Kelly Eningowuk/Courtesy ICC Alaska)

Q: The ICC is forty years old now, how effective do you think it’s been at amplifying Inuit concerns on the international stage?

We’ve been able to infuse international intergovernmental organizations with the views and perspectives of Inuit. We’ve been active within the United Nations and for the adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. We’ve been very active in the Arctic Council, participating in a wide range of working groups but also with the senior Arctic officials from each of the Arctic states.

Now, one of the objectives will be to infuse other intergovernmental fora with our views and perspectives, especially as they become more active in our homeland.  I think it’s important to state that Inuit are experts on the Arctic. Our profound relationship has been highly developed over centuries and our distinct knowledge about the region is quite significant.

Q: The ICC was also created to build greater links between the world’s Inuit regions on matters like economy and education. Are there still challenges to moving forward on those issues, or has that changed?

Challenges remain. Just on language alone, we know that we are in a state of crisis as far as preservation of language. Just the practical side of establishing and controlling our own education institutions is a huge challenge and a major hurdle that has to be overcome.

Though we’ve made extraordinary progress in a wide range of areas, challenges do remain.

Eye on the Arctic brings you stories and newsmakers from around the North. 

Sometimes it's seals with amputated flippers.

Or even a sea lion snatched seemingly out of thin air.

But for at least 10 years, subsistence harvesters in Alaska's coastal communities have occasionally encountered mysterious injuries on the marine mammals they rely on for food.

The wound patterns suggest shark attacks. And community members, researchers, biologists and veterinarians are monitoring the situation to find out what's going on, how it's happening, and most importantly, why now.

Researchers examine a seal with an amputated flipper and puncture wound. (Courtesy Gay Sheffield)

Brandon Ahmasuk, the subsistence resources program director at Kawerak, a non-profit corporation in Alaska's Bering Strait region, says hunters contact him and even send  pictures, when they encounter the strange injuries.

In most cases, it's unclear where the original attacks took place. But the reports have come in from subsistence hunters everywhere from the city of Nome to the Arctic Alaskan city of Utqiaġvik.

"A seal harvested with an amputated flipper isn't normal," said Ahmasuk in a telephone interview from Nome with Eye on the Arctic. "Some of the amputations were clear up to the hip area of the seals. And again, not normal.

"There were one of two seals with their heads completely bit off (that) washed up on the beach. There were one or two that had bite marks out of their sides in the rib cage area, and again, clean cut, semi-circle bite marks."

Feature Interview Listen here for Eye on the Arctic‘s conversation with Brandon Ahmasuk  for more on climate change, how it’s affecting Alaska’s subsistence hunters, and the details reported by St. Lawrence Island hunters after witnessing a shark attack on a 600-kilogram sea lion:

https://www.rcinet.ca/eye-on-the-arctic/wp-content/uploads/sites/30/2018/07/Brandon_Final.mp3

“I don’t want cause region-wide, state-wide panic, just awareness that climate change is here, we’re seeing it,” says Kawerak’s Brandon Ahmasuk. (Courtesy Kawerak Subsistence Program)

Mystery cause

Subsistence harvesters and researchers can't say for sure that sharks are the culprit, but the injury patterns strongly suggest these ocean predators from further south, not sharks native to the region, are responsible for the injuries, probably moving North as the climate warms.

“We do have sharks in the North but they are primarily thought to be scavengers, not active predators," Gay Sheffield, the Bering Strait agent for Alaska Sea Grant, a research, education, and outreach program headquartered at University of Alaska Fairbanks, said in a phone interview.

"There are not many marine animals that we have here that would want to cause these injuries, so, it seems as if we have new players. For example, we're getting more of the typical prey of the central Bering Sea in our region, like steller sea lion activity. We wonder whether they're bringing some of their predators, like the white shark, up with them as the climate warms."

Killer whale attacks have also all but been ruled out.

“We're talking about amputated back flippers of large, up to 280-pound seals," Sheffield said. " The bones are sheared.  We see triangular shaped avulsions and the penetration marks aren’t the round peg of an orca whale tooth, but more as if a knife blade was stabbed in the seal."

Looking for clues

Could great white sharks be responsible for the mysterious injuries on marine mammals near coastal Alaska? (Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)

No research project is currently underway to get to the bottom of what the coastal communities are seeing, or give precise injury numbers,

Eye on the Arctic brings you stories and newsmakers from around the North. 

Arctic glaciers are shrinking at an alarming rate and show no signs of regeneration, says a recent study conducted in Canada.

The research looked at glaciers between 1999 and 2015 and focused on Ellesmere Island, the most northern region of the country.

During that sixteen-year period, researchers noted over 1700 square kilometres of ice  lost - a change in area of six per cent.

"That shows that over 75 per cent of glaciers have lost area and no glaciers are increasing as far as we can see," said University of Ottawa Phd student Adrienne White, who authored the paper Area change of glaciers across Northern Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, between ~1999 and ~2015 with Luke Copland which was published in the Journal of Glaciology in June.

'Big shock' for researchers

The disappearance of several smaller ice caps and the amount of open water were things that surprised even experienced researchers like White.

"We have three small ice caps - their areas were less than 1.5 square kilometres - but they completely vanished which is something I've never really seen before," White said.

"Another big shock was to see how much open water we now have along the northern coast of Ellesmere Island. In an area where we used to have glaciers flowing into the ocean and having a floating terminus - anywhere where we have that - much of that ice has actually broken off and become icebergs. So in an area that used to be completely covered in sea ice and glacier ice we're now seeing open water each summer."

Feature Interview

For more  on how climate change is transforming Canada’s Arctic, listen to Eye on the Arctic‘s feature interview with Adrienne White, a Phd student from the University of Ottawa’s Laboratory for Cryospheric Research:

https://www.rcinet.ca/eye-on-the-arctic/wp-content/uploads/sites/30/2018/07/A_White_Final.mp3

“We’re in a feedback cycle, where because of the loss of sea ice we are now absorbing a lot more warmth into the Arctic region. It’s going to be very difficult to reverse,” says Adrienne White, pictured here on Ellesmere Island with the Milne Glacier in the background. (Dorota Medrzycka/Courtesy Adrienne White)

Dangerous feedback loop

Although Ellesmere Island may seem remote to many Canadians, what's happening to its glaciers is already having implications on the environment. There's been significant increases in sea levels in the Canadian Arctic since 2005 says White, nothing that what's going on with the Ellesmere glaciers is a contributor.

Researchers say they saw no evidence of glaciers regenerating and that that is unlikely given the island's sensitive environment.

"For things to reverse, we would need dramatic climate cooling," says White. "At this point, we're in a feedback cycle, where because of the loss of sea ice we are now absorbing a lot more warmth into the Arctic region.

"It's going to be very difficult to reverse."

A glacier in Yelverton Inlet in the Canadian Arctic. Researchers there did ground penetrating radar measurements via helicopter. (Luke Copland/Courtesy Adrienne White)

Write to Eilís Quinn at eilis.quinn(at)cbc.ca

Related stories from around the North:

Canada: Feds announce funding to tackle climate change in Inuit region of Atlantic Canada, Eye on the Arctic

Greenland: Glacier half the size of Manhattan breaks off Greenland, CBC News

Norway: Northern Barents Sea warming at alarming speed, The Independent Barents Observer

Russia: Densely-packed ice makes navigation difficult in Russian Arctic, The Independent Barents Observer

Sweden: Swedish icebreaker heading for North Pole to st...

A photographer renowned for his images documenting the human face of seal hunting in Quebec and Newfoundland will spend at least another two years chronicling the Inuit seal hunt in Arctic Canada.

"I've been hunting there and became passionate about the North," said Yoanas Menge.

Since 2012, Menge's photography project Hakapik took him to chronicle the life of commercial sealers in the Atlantic Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec's Magdalen Islands; and to Nunavik in northern Quebec, and Canada's eastern Arctic territory of Nunavut, where he chronicled the Inuit subsistence hunt.

Menge, whose mother is from the Magadalen Islands, says he grew up hearing stories about the seal hunt.

"The seal is not an endangered species," he said in a telephone interview from his home. "Since there has been people on the island, there has been seal hunting, because it was the only fresh meat they could get in the winter. It's still a big part of the tradition and a way to feed us and get nice pelts to make mittens and hats and boots."

Menge says understanding the human story behind seal hunting is a key part of his work. (Courtesy Yoanis Menge)

He got the idea for Hakapik,  after seeing anti-sealing posters in the Paris metro in 2009 depicting an adult seal trying to crush the head of a human baby on the sea ice.

"I was really shocked about that image," he said. "I was (also) a little bit bored of all those  pictures of propaganda against the seal hunt and wanted to see what it really was."

Menge moved back to the Magdalen Islands, learning how to seal hunt himself, and began working on Hakapik, named after wooden club used to kill seals,  in 2012.

A new colonialism?

In Inuit communities, the anti-sealing campaigns were economically and psychologically disastrous.

Although Greenpeace issued an apology in 2014 for failing to consider the impacts their anti-sealing campaign would have on Indigenous communities, many Inuit leaders say it is not enough to compensate for the repercussions still felt in their communities.

Menge says anti-sealing campaigns have distorted the role of both the subsistence hunt in the northern Canada and the commercial hunt in the southern Canada, without engaging with the communities or cultures.

"I what to know what seal hunting means to those people," he said. "That's what anti-sealing groups never did. They look at the seal hunt from helicopters, really far away, but never go to meet those people and to talk with them. There's something wrong with that."

"It's a colonialist attitude about those cultures and those peoples," he said. "It's moral decisions on the cultures of other people."

Feature Interview: The human story behind seal hunting in Canada

“It’s a colonialist attitude about those cultures and those peoples,” says Menge, pictured above, of the anti-sealing campaign. “It’s moral decisions on the cultures of other people.” (Courtesy Yoanis Menge)

For more from Eye on the Arctic‘s conversation with photographer Yoanis Menge, listen here:

https://www.rcinet.ca/eye-on-the-arctic/wp-content/uploads/sites/30/2018/05/Hakapik_Menge.mp3

Going beyond cliché

But despite the controversial subject, Menge says he has yet to receive negative feedback on Hakapik, named after wooden club used to kill seals, and plans to spend another two years travelling to the North to chronicle the lives of hunters.

He says the reaction of sealers or Inuit hunters to his photographs is one of the most satisfying parts of his job.

"For the first time they see the real seal hunt not the propaganda images that they always saw before... That's the power of the work. It's close to the people."

Each week, Eye on the Arctic brings you news and views from around the North

A book showcasing the recipes of  Indigenous peoples from across the Arctic took the day at the Gourmand International Cookbook Awards in Yantai, China.

EALLU –Food, Knowledge and How We Have Thrived on the Margins won in the Best Food Book of the Year category, beating out 15 other finalists from places like Canada, the U.S., Japan, Germany, Colombia, China and South Africa.

"I got tears in my eyes,"  Maret Ravdna Buljo, a Sami reindeer herder and one of the book's contributors, told  Eye on the Arctic in a telephone interview from her home in Norway's Lofoten Islands this week. "When we made this I never thought we'd be going to the Gourmand awards with it. I am very happy and grateful also for that."

Entries for this year's awards came from 215 regions around the world.

Over 50 authors from the Arctic and sub-Arctic contributed to the winning cookbook. The award was given out on May 26 in Yantai, China. (Courtesy International Centre for Reindeer Husbandry)

“To receive such an award from the mainstream food publishing industry is a powerful recognition of the richness and depth of a focal point of our cultures, our relationship to food," said Mikhail Pogodaev from the Association of World Reindeer Herders in Yakutsk, Russia and one of the book's project leaders.

“This is much more than just a book of recipes," he said in a news release.  "This is about Arctic Indigenous peoples´ deep knowledge about food, raw materials, processing and conservation, food security, health and wellbeing – It’s about our food traditions, our traditional nomadic lifestyles, our local economies, our philosophy and our worldviews."

Feature Interview: The Sami Family Meal

Listen to our Eye on the Arctic conversation with reindeer herder and cookbook contributor Maret Ravdna Buljo, for more on Sami cooking and Indigenous food culture can serve as a bulwark against climate change and industrial development in the Arctic:

https://www.rcinet.ca/eye-on-the-arctic/wp-content/uploads/sites/30/2018/05/Buljo.mp3

From stomach soup and reindeer yoghurt, to caribou stew and bearded seal

The book is split into sections examining the plants, animals and recipes that different Arctic Indigenous peoples rely on. It includes maps,  photos and notes from the recipe authors, as well as sections on food culture, customs and beliefs.

The recipes include everything from ones found in Arctic Canada, like nilii gaih (dry meat), made by the Gwich'in,  and caribou meat gravy made by Inuit, to Saami techniques for smoking reindeer and a detailed explanations of the seaweed and plants used by the Yup'ik and Chukchi people of Siberian Russia.

Sea squirts pictured in the Russian Arctic. The Chukchi eat them raw, boiled and frozen. The sea squirt, also known as upa, is also used for medicinal purposes. (Elena Kaminskaya/EALLU –Food, Knowledge and How We Have Thrived on the Margins)

Ravdna Biret Marja Eira Sara, a Sami reindeer herder, PhD student and cookbook contributor, said she hopes the award shows Arctic Indigenous youth that their knowledge is important and valued.

"It gives us more  motivation to work on this topic," Sara told Eye on the Arctic from her home in Norway. "It's a very big part of our daily lives and we really see it's important to document and maintain the way our ancestors have been living for generations.

"It's of great value and importance for us, and also of the rest of the world."

Feature Interview:

“I grew up in this livelihood , says Ravdna Biret Marja Eira Sara. “Reindeer herding is still a big, big part of my life. (Courtesy Ravdna Biret Marja Eira Sara)

Canada's department of Fisheries and Oceans has announced it will give $1,261,890 over 5 years to help solve the mystery of dwindling char numbers near the Arctic Canadian community of Kugluktuk.

The money will go to a University of Waterloo research project created after hearing the community's concerns about the changes they were seeing in fish species in their area.

The Kugluktuk Hunters and Trappers Organization said chair Larry Adjun wasn't available for an interview when reached by Eye on the Arctic this week.

But University of Waterloo researcher Heidi Swanson said better understanding char in the region is important from both a scientific and food security perspective.

" What folks have been telling us is that there's been major declines in the numbers of char in the past few years ," Swanson said in a telephone interview. "And nobody really knows why. It could be water temperature. Maybe it's increased shipping traffic. Maybe some of their stream habitat is drying out."

The research project will focus on better understanding the migratory patterns and overwintering habitats of char. This summer and next summer, fish will be tagged to track where they go in the winter. The results will then be used to see what obstacles may be impeding migration and causing fish to get stuck or stranded and what restoration work can be done to remove any obstructions.

Feature Interview: What's happening to the char?

“We should always ground our science in what the community’s concerns and questions are,” says University of Waterloo researcher Heidi Swanson of working in the Arctic. (Courtesy Heidi Swanson)

Listen here for more of Eye on the Arctic‘s conversation with researcher Heidi Swanson:

https://www.rcinet.ca/eye-on-the-arctic/wp-content/uploads/sites/30/2018/05/Swanson_Interview.mp3

Indigenous knowledge and science working together

Swanson said working with Inuit hunters in Kugluktuk is key to better understanding the pressures Arctic fish species are under because of environmental change.

"Across the Arctic, char numbers will go up and down in cycles," she said. "But the thing is, the people that have been living up there know what those cycles usually  look like and (what they're seeing now) is a change from the normal cycle.

"Food security, as many people know, is really tough in the Canadian Arctic and fish is a major source of food. People are really worried about Arctic char.

"We really want to get a handle on what these char are doing so that we can better manage them as we go into future scenarios of climate change and resource development."

Oceans protection plan

The government's investment in the research is part of the $75-million Coastal Restoration Fund, established to finance multiyear projects that look to protect the coastline and marine species. The fund favours projects that also include Indigenous participation.

The fund was put in place as part of Canada's  $1.5 billion Oceans Protection Plan, launched in 2016.

Write to Eilís Quinn at eilis.quinn(at)cbc.ca

Related stories from around the North:

Canada: Which fish live in Arctic Canada? Thanks to new book, we finally know, Radio Canada International

Finland:  Endangered Finnish seal population slowly recovering, Yle News

Norway: Fishing rights: Norway takes tough line against EU in Svalbard waters, the Independent Barents Observer

Russia: Russian salmon farmers buy Norwegian smolt company, The Independent Barents Observer

Sweden:  Record numbers for Swedish wild salmon, Radio Sweden

United States:  America’s most toxic site is in the Alaskan Arctic, Cryopolitics blog

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Hockey is just, well, so Canadian.

Sure the Russians, Czechs, Swedes, Germans, even Americans are pretty darn good internationally, and many do end up in the National Hockey League, but the NHL is still considered rightly or wrongly as Canada’s league. (Though now headquartered in the U.S the “national” in NHL originally meant Canada, as the NHL grew out of the National Hockey Association- a Canadian league prior to 1917).

Canadian Senator David Richards recently gave a speech in the Senate denouncing Americanisms in hockey language and a general lack of understanding in play by play and analysis by American announcers.

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Canadian Senator and award winning author David Richards of New Brunswick- Photo: Senator Richards website

Senator Richards, himself an author and so quite aware of the significance of language laments –admittedly slightly tongue-in- cheek, the use of words like “jersey” to describe a hockey “sweater”. It’s a hockey sweater he says, every Canadian knows that, there was even a famous Canadian short story written about “the hockey sweater”.

As for “half wall”, you get hit hard into the “boards”, or get a penalty for “boarding”, there’s no “half wall”. He  grates his teeth at American descriptions of a shot as a “wrister” or a “slapper”.

The famous Canadian short story by Roch Carrier about "The Hockey Sweater" Photo-Tundra Books-Penguin Random House

But not only the use of American words, he says that most American announcers just don’t know or understand the game. He says Canadian announcers do, mainly because they grew up watching and playing hockey.

While Canadian teams haven’t won the Stanley Cup (championship) since 1993, he points out that almost three-quarters of players on American teams are in fact Canadian.

He wonders what happened to the "deke" or the "spin-o-rama" (Doug Harvey, Serge Savard, Bobby Orr)  or the dipsy doodle (Max Bentley ‘the dipsy doodle dandy’, and others).

In any case, he'll be watching to Stanley Cup playoff broadcasts, even if he has to tune in to Canadian radio announcers at the same time.

additional information

PostMedia: MD Smith: May 2/18 odious American sports commentators

One out of ten children fleeing a vicious flare up of fighting in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) say they were raped during their journey to Uganda, according to a new assessment by Save the Children.

More 73,000 refugees have fled the gruesome and escalating conflict in DRC to Uganda, including nearly 2,800 unaccompanied or separated children since the beginning of this year, according to the charity.

An overwhelming majority - some 77.5 per cent - are women and children.

“The conflict in DRC is one of the world’s forgotten crises,” said in a statement Johnson Byamukama, Save the Children’s Emergency Response Director in Uganda. “We see child refugees arriving in Uganda every day in desperate need. Every one of them has a horrific story to tell, including of rape, of parents being killed, of witnessing extreme violence.”

The assessment by Save the Children, based on interviews of 132 refugee children aged 10 to 17, found that hunger was the biggest issue, affecting eight in 10 children fleeing the eastern Ituri region of DRC, said Rachel Logel Carmichael, the charity’ head of humanitarian affairs in Canada.

(click to listen to the full interview with Rachel Logel Carmichael)

ListenEN_Interview_3-20180420-WIE30

Surviving sickness and violence

Mave Grace, 11, who had part of her arm chopped off by militiamen when they attacked the village of Tchee, stands in an Internally Displaced Camp in Bunia, Ituri province, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, April 12, 2018. According to witnesses, militiamen killed her pregnant mother, her three brothers and injured her sister, Racahele-Ngabausi. (Goran Tomasevic/REUTERS)

More than half of children said they were affected by sickness along the way, and a quarter of children interviewed said they were assaulted by armed groups as they fled, Logel Carmichael said.

Having walked for days, refugees are primarily entering Uganda via Lake Albert on makeshift boats, a dangerous crossing that has already proved fatal for "several" people, according to the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR.

“As you can imagine those who have arrived on the Uganda side there is quite a bit of stress and trauma from that journey,” Logel Carmichael said.

Fighting in Ituri has involved the Hema cattle herders and the Lendu farmers who have a long history of violence over access to land.

UNHCR Babar Baloch said at a briefing in Geneva in March that armed men are reported to be attacking villages, looting and burning down houses, indiscriminately killing civilian populations and kidnapping young men and boys.

Separated from families

Rachele-Ngabausi, aged two, injured by militiamen when they attacked the village of Tchee, sits in an Internally Displaced Camp in Bunia, Ituri province, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, April 12, 2018. According to witnesses, militiamen killed her pregnant mother, her three brothers and chopped off part of her sister's arm. (Goran Tomasevic/REUTERS)

“One of the concerns for Save the Children is cases of the children who have been separated from their families or who are crossing the border on their own,” Logel Carmichael said. “So we ensure that in our programming on the Uganda side of the border that we’re addressing the specific needs of unaccompanied and separated children.”

These children are put in foster care provided by other refugees, but ultimately the goal is to reunite the children with their families, she said.

Another concern is the lack of services available to victims of sexual violence, Logel Carmichael said.

“We certainly must commend the government of Uganda for opening its doors to refugees in this area and across the country, but this is an area that whilst there were refugee camps they’re not a lot of ser...

Their exact location is a jealously guarded secret but a set of mysterious petroglyphs in the Eastern Canadian Arctic feature among Ottawa’s latest submission to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for consideration as a new World Heritage Site.

The so-called Qajartalik petroglyphs, highly stylized human faces carved into soapstone, are unique manifestations of Dorset Era artistic expression, said Louis Gagnon, a curator with the Avataq Cultural Institute, a non-profit group dedicated to protecting and promoting Indigenous language and culture in the Eastern Arctic.

(click to listen to the interview with Louis Gagnon)

ListenEN_Clip_4-20180316-WME40

Qajartalik appears to be the only place where Dorset Era peoples transposed onto soapstone, on a huge scale, the distinctive figures usually found on much smaller artifacts made of bone, ivory or horn, Gagnon said.

The Dorset people lived along the coasts of Nunavik from 2,000 to 1,000 years ago and disappeared before the arrival of the Thule Inuit, the ancestors of the modern Inuit inhabiting the area, approximately 800 years ago, Gagnon said.

Qajartalik, which means “the place where a kayak can be seen” in Inuktitut, is officially part of Canadian Arctic territory of Nunavut, but because it lies off the coast of the Inuit region of Nunavik in northern Quebec it is used by the Nunavik Inuit, said Gagnon.

While the Inuit – and the Dorset people before them – have used the island for centuries to quarry soapstone for their oil lamps and cooking pots, Bernard Saladin d’Anglure became the first Westerner to document 95 carvings at Qajartalik in the early 1960s.

During later expeditions to Qajartalik from 1996 to 1998 he discovered and documented an additional 70 petroglyphs, bringing the site’s total to 165. More carvings have been found since.

'Unique Arctic rock-art'

For the last decade, the Avataq Cultural Institute has been working with the federal government to have Qajartalik recognized as a world heritage site. (Louis Gagnon /Avataq)

The carvings, which have baffled archaeologists since their discovery in the early 1960s, range from a few centimetres in height to more than 30 centimetres, Gagnon said.

Qajartalik is not only the most northerly rock-art site on the continent; it is also one of a kind because it depicts only these stylized faces and nothing else, he said.

The faces are highly anthropomorphic and come in various forms: rounded, oval, square or triangular. Many have horn-like features on top of their heads.

“It’s probably why some people were talking about, ‘Oh, they are devil representations,’” Gagnon said. “Maybe, but this is a modern interpretation.”

However, the pointy features on the top of the carved heads could also represent a particular Dorset Era article of clothing, Gagnon said.

Dorset people wore parkas with very high collars, almost reaching the top of the head of a person, instead of the hoods preferred by the Inuit, Gagnon said.

“So maybe it’s just a representation of those two points coming from the collar,” Gagnon said. “We did some experiments and it looks pretty much the same.”

Scientists have been unable to date the site very precisely but experts believe the extinct Dorset culture created the carvings about 1,000 years ago, .

Scientists speculate that the decline of the Dorset people was triggered by a sudden warming of the climate in the Arctic around the 10th century. The Dorset people had a hard time coping with dramatic changes in their environment and that precipitated an increase in magical beliefs and shamanism, as well as artistic expression related to these spiritual practices, Gagnon said.

Nearly a year after a concerted humanitarian effort staved off a famine in South Sudan, the country is once again teetering on the brink of another catastrophic food crisis, the United Nations warns.

Almost two-thirds of the population will need food aid this year to stave off starvation and malnutrition as aid groups prepare for the “toughest year on record”, according to the estimates of a working group that includes South Sudanese and UN officials.

“The situation is extremely fragile, and we are close to seeing another famine. The projections are stark,” Serge Tissot, the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Representative in South Sudan, warned reporters last week.

FAO, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) warn that any progress in preventing hunger-related deaths made so far could be undone, and more people than ever could be pushed into severe hunger and famine-like conditions during May-July unless assistance and access are maintained.

People of South Sudan still need our help: UNICEF

South Sudan famine averted but millions still face hunger

Particularly at risk are 155,000 people, including 29,000 children, who could suffer from the most extreme levels of hunger.

Legacy of war

Children sit on the floor inside a classroom in Konyokonyo camp for the internally displaced people in Juba, South Sudan January 31, 2018. (Samir Bol/REUTERS)

Ross Smith, 41, head of programs for the WFP in South Sudan, said the country’s ongoing civil war is chiefly to blame.

“Over the past more than three years we had conflict spread throughout the country, affecting virtually all parts of the country,” said Smith, a Canadian who has been in South Sudan for nearly two years.

(click to listen to the interview with Smith Ross)

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The conflict has forced 2 million people to flee South Sudan to neighbouring countries, while at least another 2 million have been displaced inside the country.

The civil war has also caused widespread food insecurity in South Sudan. Over 5.3 million people, almost half of the country’s population, are already facing severe food insecurity according to the WFP estimates.

“Food insecurity means that they don’t have enough to eat on the daily basis for a household, especially for kids in a household,” Smith said in a phone interview from Juba. “People end up skipping meals or reducing the size of meals, they change the foods that they eat, often simplifying the diet to they’ll often eat one type of cereal, for example, like sorghum or maize.”

This kind of a diet is especially harmful for children, he said.

“A well-balanced diet and frequent meals are very important for growth and development in children,” Smith said. “And here you have kids eating sometimes once a day, sometimes once every two days.”

This can severely impair the growth and development of children and it causes both short-term and chronic malnutrition in children, Smith said.

The most dangerous country to be an aid worker

Minister of International Development and La Francophonie, Marie Bibeau visited WFP’s Rapid Response food distribution sites in Jonglei State, in South Sudan June, 2017 accompanied by WFP’s Head of Programme, Ross Smith. (Sabine Starke/WFP)

South Sudan is considered the world's most dangerous place to be an aid worker, with at least 95 killed since the conflict began.

The United Nations says violence against aid workers in South Sudan reached a new high in 2017, with 28 killed.

Nearly half of the 1,159 humanitarian access incidents reported last year by aid agencies involved violence including killing, looting and threats.

“For myself,