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January/February 2010 issue	In this issue Table of Contents IPY: What is IPY? IPY: Kluane research station IPY: Inuit health IPY: Arctic mercury mystery IPY: Arctic scientist IPY: Future Arctic research IPY: Multimedia The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations À la carte Mosaic Book Reviews

Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory of Iqaluit, toting her son Igimaq, prefers to feed her family traditional Inuit fare.
Photo: Benoit Aquin

• PHOTO ESSAY
• VIDEO
• INTERACTIVE

Inuit health: Meet the people and communities taking part in the checkup

Melting lands: An Inuit community strives to keep its traditions
Altered life: More about changing traditions part 1, part 2 and part 3

Living with change: Discover more about the Inuit and IPY

As a mother of two young children, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory insists on feeding her family caribou, char and ptarmigan. The daughter of an English anthropologist who spent much of his life in the Arctic and an Inuit immigrant from Greenland, Bathory is firmly attached to her roots. “Hunting is a lot more difficult than it used to be,” she says, while keeping an eye on her youngest child in their home in Iqaluit. “Most of us work nine to five. That leaves weekends for hunting and fishing. We have to go farther and farther to hunt. The city has grown; there are more vehicles and snowmobiles. That chases the animals away.”

Luckily, Bathory can count on a dependable network for traditional food. A friend gave her the beluga steaks that are on tonight’s menu. Sharing food is solidly entrenched in Inuit culture. Most villages still have community freezers, where hunters store their surplus meat for others.

Aficionados of fish and game can also stock up at Jim Currie’s shop in Iqaluit — if they can afford it. A piece of smoked Arctic char sells for up to $20. Yet despite the steep prices, Currie easily sells out of his stock, and his freezers are often empty. “There were fewer hunters last year,” he says. “Many were discouraged by the price of gas. Filling up a snowmobile or motorboat has become unaffordable for many of them.”

Aside from work schedules and the price of gas, many Inuit have given up regular hunting and fishing since the 1980s because of the widespread news of the contamination of marine mammals by heavy metals such as mercury or persistent organic pollutants (POPs) such as polychlorinated biphenyls. But the concentration of POPs in the Arctic has recently declined, and small fish, including the prized Arctic char, are virtually mercury-free.

“From a health perspective, there is absolutely no reason to drop traditional foods,” stresses Isaac Sobol, who worked as the manager of a rock band in San Francisco and as a wildanimal caretaker in European safari parks before becoming a doctor at 41 and practising medicine in aboriginal communities in Canada. He is now Nunavut’s chief medical officer of health. “The benefits of Inuit food easily outweigh any disadvantages,” he says, “especially when we compare it with food from the South.”

Sobol’s department is working with the territory’s grocery stores to help customers understand which foods are safe, neutral or detrimental to their health. “We are a trusting people,” says Mayor Sheutiapik of Iqaluit. “Elders who speak only Inuktitut cannot read the labels and take it for granted that what you find on supermarket shelves is, by definition, good for your health.”

Public health messages are starting to gain ground. In her 71 years in Kimmirut, Annie Ikkidluak has seen the lives of her people completely transformed: increasing contact with southerners and sedentariness in the villages, the arrival of the telephone and the internet. But she has never lost her taste for seal or caribou meat or Arctic char. “It’s better for your health,” translates Ikkidluak’s niece Leevee Temela.

Ikkidluak supplements her diet with food bought at the local co-operative. She makes the best bannock in town, and children flock to her kitchen table for a nibble. A little bit of flour, powdered milk, a pinch of salt and, acknowledging my interest in health issues, she glances over as she picks up Crisco to add to the mix. “I cook everything else with margarine that has no cholesterol,” she assures me.