I’D BEEN LIVING ON MAUI FOR ABOUT a month before discovering the cowboys. Not far up the Haleakala volcano, off Olinda Road, there’s a ragged little rodeo-arena called Oskie Rice, and there they are, all belt buckles and spurs, roping cattle on a quiet hillside barely 30 kilometres from the stacks of beach condos below. Continue reading
Why a Francophone circus performer moved to Igloolik, Nunavut to build a troupe at the top of the world
IGLOOLIK’S COMMUNITY POOL IS A CONCRETE PIT littered with lumber scraps and a peculiar number of legless foosball tables. It has the chilled air of a cellar and the oppressive lights of a prison. It also happens to be the only place for circus practice. The instructor is 36-year-old Guillaume Saladin, a francophone acrobat who is flitting around the pool with the haste of someone unprepared for guests. Still in his coat, he kicks aside rubble to make room for a few battered gym-mats. Continue reading
Winding down the Yukon’s Big Salmon River, I discover my inner hunter
SEEING ANIMALS IN THE WILD HAS ALWAYS made me feel better about the world, a reassurance that despite the planet’s ecological woes, there are still patches of wilderness humans haven’t trampled. But standing here watching a moose lazily blink and chew grass, my heart is breaking. My hunting guide, Clayton White, is a few metres ahead, tiptoeing across the hummocky slough with his .300 Winchester Magnum slung over his shoulder like a guitar case. He looks back and motions for me to keep up. There’s a steady drizzle so I’m in full Gore-Tex regalia, probably the noisiest outfit I could’ve chosen. To keep from swishing, I walk slow and exaggerated, like I’m a teenager sneaking past my parents’ bedroom at 2 a.m. As Clayton and I inch closer, the moose periodically pricks up his ears. We freeze. He freezes. Then, when he’s satisfied he’s alone, he resumes chewing. Apparently moose can’t see well, but have bionic skills when it comes to hearing and smelling. Luckily on this cool September afternoon our prey is upwind and, so far, unsuspecting. I secretly hope it somehow hears us and bolts. Though I’ve come to these Yukon wilds to experience my first-ever hunt, I don’t feel ready for what comes next. Continue reading
Downriver from northern Alberta’s oilsands, the people of Fort Chipewyan have been taking ill and dying. The province says nothing’s wrong. The community’s residents beg to differ.
THE CATHOLIC CEMETERY IN FORT CHIPEWYAN, Alberta is not grand or granite-studded, but it is getting full. Steve Courtoreille tells me this on a cold April morning as he leads me through the picket-fenced plots in search of his nephew’s grave, which isn’t immediately apparent after the previous night’s snowstorm. “It used to be that we buried our old people,” he says, “but now we’re burying the young.” We stop at an unvarnished wooden cross hung with fake-flower wreaths. Pressed into the wood, a gold plaque reads: “Grant Sterling Remi Courtoreille: Only the good die young.” Continue reading
At the biennial Arctic Winter Games, the Inuit sports can cause competitors to scream in pain
MINIK RASMUSSEN AND HIS TWIN BROTHER, Pilo, sit side by side at the first-aid station, wincing as the medic applies bags of snow to their bloody knuckles. The Greenlandic brothers – identical right down to their sparse mustaches and tattoos – have just been knuckle-hopping. It’s a traditional Inuit sport that mimics the way seals shuffle across the ice, which, for humans, means bouncing forward on knuckles and toes, straight as a plank, until collapsing in agony. Continue reading
NWT’s music darling Leela Gilday talks about her new album, winning a Juno, and the perks and perils of being an aboriginal artist
ON A COOL NIGHT AT A PUB IN HANOI, VIETNAM, Leela Gilday rekindled an old love. It was jam night at The Labyrinth, a popular tourist bar in the city’s Old Quarter. She knew a pile of people and they all sang and played guitar until 2 a.m. Warmed by the place and the spirit of the night, Gilday decided then that she couldn’t quit playing music. “To my immense relief, I seem to have found my passion again,” she later wrote in her email travelogue. “I do want to be a musician.” Continue reading
As Arctic temperatures climb and sea-ice retreats, biologists are sounding alarm about the health of polar bear populations. Inuit hunters, meanwhile, are worried about the fate of the lucrative sport-hunt industry they’ve come to depend on
AFTER SPENDING $25,000 AND 10 DAYS on the frozen Beaufort Sea, Lester “Rusty” Pride didn’t get his polar bear. He was after a nine-footer, with paws the span of hubcaps and giant maiming incisors. “I wanted a big one,” says Rusty, an affable and freckled RV-park owner from Delaware. “We saw two, but they were too far to shoot.” Rusty still managed to return with a muskox – an extra $8,000 for his Inuvialuit guide, Boogie Pokiak. Continue reading
UNLESS IT’S MINUS-40 OR SQUALLING, Richard Carbonnier spends most every spare moment on a tundra hill hammering, digging, drilling and trying not to get frostbite. For the past two years, the 52-year-old architect has been single-handedly slogging away on his tubular eco-home in Pond Inlet, a hamlet of about 1,300 people on Nunavut’s Baffin Island. “It’s painful at times,” he says of winter work. “When you touch a tool, it freezes to your fingertips.” Continue reading
The world-renowned Orchestre symphonique de Montreal opens its Canada-wide tour at a Yellowknife high school
IF YOU IGNORED THE BASKETBALL NETS folded into the rafters and the championship flags peeking out from the velvet drapes, a Yellowknife gymnasium effectively became a concert hall Monday night. The world-renowned Orchestre symphonique de Montreal opened its Canada-wide tour at St. Patrick High School to a crowd of 850 symphony-starved locals. Yellowknife, population about 19,000, had never hosted musicians so prestigious, and the orchestra had never travelled so far north in its own country. Continue reading
Two decades ago the anti-fur movement killed the sealskin market and the Arctic economy. Once again, animal-rights activists have sealers in their sights. Will the Inuit take another hit?
IN THEIR MATCHING RED JUMPSUITS, Sir Paul McCartney and his then-wife Heather Mills took to the sunny ice floes off Prince Edward Island last spring to loll with seal pups. They posed on their bellies for a scrum of photographers, just centimetres from a button-eyed baby. In his thick Liverpool brogue, McCartney pleaded before the cameras: “Unless something’s done about it, he’s going to be clubbed to death in the next few weeks.” Canada’s annual seal harvest was around the corner, and the U.S. Humane Society’s star-studded contingent had arrived early to drum up publicity for what it calls a cruel and unnecessary slaughter. Continue reading
Jasmine Budak 