The Inside Story: Canadian Geographic Magazine December 2009

HISTORY
Northern exposure
For 80 years, the RCGS has been a driving force in the Canadian Arctic
By Mary Vincent with research by Wendy Simpson-Lewis

The Society’s work in Northern Canada was launched by Camsell’s guiding hand. This self-described “son of the North” was born in Fort Liard, N.W.T., in 1876, the son of a Chief Factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Arctic was in his blood. A visionary geologist and map-maker, Camsell was the Geological Survey of Canada’s Geologist in Charge of Exploration and had the monumental task of overseeing the exploration of vast northern tracts covering 1.4 million square kilometres, or about 25 percent of the country. He was an early advocate of using airplanes to survey the Arctic and, throughout his lifetime, travelled to many areas still unexplored and unmapped.

In the 1980s, Richard Harington, the 1987 Massey medallist, led work on climatic changes of the past 20,000 years, just as climate change was emerging as an environmental issue. Archaeologist Robert McGhee, recipient of the award in 2000, has pioneered studies on the development of Inuit cultures. One of the world’s most respected experts on the Arctic Ocean is Eddy Carmack, who won the medal in 2007. Like the Society, he strives to make science and geography accessible, and as a volunteer on Students on Ice expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic, Carmack has introduced teens to the complexities of ocean currents. For International Polar Year, he undertook the most ambitious study yet of Canada’s oceans (CG July/Aug 2007).

As the North plays an increasingly important environmental and economic role in Canada’s future, the Society is committed to promoting geography’s importance in understanding the region’s evolving issues, such as climate change, Arctic sovereignty and resource development. For its 80th anniversary, the Society, in partnership with the Canadian Museum of Nature, launched a travelling photography exhibit on the Canadian Arctic, which opened in June in London, England. It’s a retrospective of some of the best images of the landscapes, wildlife and people of the North to have been featured in Canadian Geographic over the past eight decades. Taking a cue from its goal to make Canada better known to Canadians and to the world, the Society is putting the Arctic in the global spotlight with this photographic showcase.

Mary Vincent is a writer in Ottawa. Wendy Simpson-Lewis is the Society’s historian.

Camsell’s cure for loneliness
By David McGuffin

Charles Camsell (at left), shown at a survey camp in the Tazin-Taltson watershed, N.W.T., explored vast areas of the North as a geologist. (Photo from Canadian Geographic, Dec 1989/Jan 1990

Society founder Charles Camsell’s tales of growing up in Canada’s Far North in the late 1800s helped stave off homesickness for a young girl living away from her parents for the first time. My mother, Lynne McGuffin, was that girl. Starting at the age of seven and for most of the Second World War, she lived with Camsell, her grandfather, to attend school in Ottawa.

He was one of Canada’s most senior bureaucrats at the time, part of a small team running the country’s wartime economy. She remembers the leadership exhibited by her grandfather, the man whose drive and vision also inspired him to establish the Society in 1929. She describes him as having piercing blue eyes and the ability to command the attention of any room into which he walked.

And yet, as my mother recalls, “Every night, he would totally cut his workday off, sit at the dining room table and talk about his life in the North.”

He would tell her stories of growing up in Hudson’s Bay Company trading posts his father ran in the Northwest Territories. His narratives were filled with danger and excitement. How he nearly died of starvation as he made his way to the Klondike Gold Fields. How he ran traplines, taught school at a trading post and delivered mail by dogsled to remote communities.

The account of the start of his schooling especially fascinated my mother. It involved a three-month journey from Fort Simpson, west of Great Slave Lake, N.W.T., to Winnipeg. Camsell and his mother, father and five siblings travelled by York boat and canoe. His youngest brother died en route and was buried by the side of a river in a quick ceremony.

Joining them on the voyage was a man who had been convicted of cannibalism. It was a fascinating crime for an eight-year-old to ponder. With a smile, he told my mother: “I always made sure he got enough to eat at dinnertime.” Camsell stayed on in Winnipeg, separated from his family in the North for 10 years.

“I think he shared his stories because he knew that he’d lived in a time and place that was disappearing,” says my mother. “But I think he also told them to help me. He understood how hard it is to be away from home.”

David Robert Camsell McGuffin, CBC’s Africa correspondent, is also inspired by Camsell’s stories.

Turpin is one of many scientists whose early career development was supported by The Royal Canadian Geographical Society (RCGS). In 2005, she received the $5,000 James W. Bourque Studentship in Northern Geography, sponsored by the Society and awarded by the Canadian Northern Studies Trust, for her doctoral study on the influence of climatic changes on caribou populations in Canada’s Low Arctic. This year, she is one of 80 new Fellows to be inducted in honour of the Society’s 80th anniversary.

Turpin works at Parks Canada in Gatineau, Que., developing policy for Canada’s new northern national parks. She has also served as the manager of the Climate Change Programme for the British Council in Canada, leading their Cape Farewell Youth Expedition to the High Arctic (CG July/Aug 2008).

As an RCGS Fellow, Turpin is excited to be given the opportunity to raise awareness about the importance of Arctic geography. She is particularly passionate about mobilizing students on climate change. “The best way to protect something,” she says, “is to get people to become passionate about it.”

To mark its 80th anniversary, The Royal Canadian Geographical Society (RCGS) is launching “Return to the Wild,” a virtual exhibit featuring wildlife species found throughout North America.

The exhibit will include 24 species representing six ecozones which range from the aquatic (Pacific salmon) to the terrestrial (grey wolf) and the airborne (honeybee). Each species profile will be linked to maps and to a series of articles on that animal from Canadian Geographic’s archives to show the evolution of conservation in Canada and the RCGS’s involvement in wildlife issues over the decades.

The exhibit is produced in collaboration with Canadian Heritage, as part of an initiative to provide access to museum collections across the country via the internet (www.virtualmuseum.ca).

This vivid portrait of a katydid (right) will soon grace a new stamp. In honour of the 80th anniversary of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society and Canadian Geographic, Canada Post will issue stamps of the winners of the Canadian Wildlife Photography of the Year Contest. In May 2010, five stamps — one for the winning entry in each of the contest’s categories — will be available in booklets of 10 at postal outlets across Canada.

Back home in White Rock, B.C., Coleridge launched the Summits of Canada Expedition, a Royal Canadian Geographical Society-sponsored effort to reach the highest peak of every province and territory — a feat that has never before been accomplished.

In June, Coleridge ascended British Columbia’s Fairweather Mountain, on the border with Alaska. The scenery surrounding the six-day climb, he says, was perhaps the most jawdropping in the world. “You can actually stand at the top of the mountain and watch the surf break on the shore below.”

This marks Coleridge’s fifth successful climb since 2006 in his Summits of Canada bid, having reached the highest points in Alberta, Ontario, Manitoba and the Yukon. Still facing him and his team are the climbing and logistical challenges of Nunavut’s Barbeau Peak — just reaching its foot on Ellesmere Island could be dangerous enough. “But it’s all part of what makes this the most challenging geographic quest in the world,” says Coleridge.