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Eric Ootoovak remembers a time when the icy waters north of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic were teeming with narwhals. The mythical-looking sea creatures are woven into the culture of Inuit hunters like Ootoovak, who have caught these marine mammals for millennia, eating their meat, blubber and skin, which are packed with vitamins Inuit rely on to get through the long, dark winters.
“The narwhals used to be abundant, by the thousands, and we don’t see that today,” says Ootoovak, the chair of the Mittimatalik Hunters and Trappers Organization, based in the Inuit hamlet of Pond Inlet on northern Baffin Island.
Things changed when the huge Mary River open pit iron ore mine started operations on Baffin Island in 2014, bringing dust, trucks and ships. Narwhal numbers dropped off, says Ootoovak, along with fish and seals. “What normally took us a couple of weeks to gather food for the winter now takes more than a month.” It’s a problem in a remote community with very little road access, where store-bought food is shipped or flown in, making it incredibly expensive.
For years, many Inuit communities have been raising concerns about the mine’s impacts on wildlife and their culture in this fragile Arctic region. Now they face a battle with even higher stakes.
Baffinland Iron Mines Corporation, the mine’s owner, wants to double iron ore production from six million to 12 million tonnes a year. If the proposal is approved, the number of ships transporting iron ore to Europe and Asia – many powered by climate-polluting heavy fuel oil – will increase from 85 to 168 each year. These shipping routes collide “with some of the most important marine mammal habitats anywhere in the Arctic,” says Chris Debicki, of marine conservation charity Oceans North. Narwhals, in particular, are significantly affected by noise, which can disrupt their migration patterns and lead them to become trapped under sea ice. Plans also include a 110km railway line to transport ore northwards from the mine, which Ootoovak says will cut across caribou habitat, making their mass migrations much more dangerous.
Then there’s the dust produced by the mine. It’s already “creating an environmental disaster,” says James Eetoolook, vice-president of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc (NTI), which advocates for Inuit land rights in Nunavut territory, which encompasses Baffin Island. He talks of white Arctic hare turned pink and lakes near the mine that are now a deep red.
The Mary River mine conflict is just one front in a battle that is heating up across the Arctic as the climate crisis, a global thirst for the region’s mineral deposits and Indigenous rights collide. The Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as anywhere else on Earth and while for many the melting ice is a clear sign of the climate crisis, for industry it’s an opportunity to reach the enormous resources that lie beneath the surface.
“This is a story that's happening in Greenland, Canada, the Nordics, Alaska,” says Klaus Dodds, professor of geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London. “What's playing out here in the Arctic is Indigenous peoples, first and foremost, are not prepared to be told what's going to happen to them.”
In February, a small group of Baffin Island hunters known as the Nuluujaat Land Guardians staged a blockade at the mine, cutting off its airstrip and service road for nearly a week. “This is the first time hunters stood up for their rights,” says Marie Naqitarvik, a Land Guardians supporter who lives in Arctic Bay, in the northwest of Baffin Island. “We have never heard anyone in Nunavut do a protest before because Inuit don’t usually stand up for themselves.”
That’s changing. “We are not not prepared to lose our animals and our culture because someone is extracting money from our land,” says Ootoovak. Mittimatalik Hunters and Trappers Organization opposes the expansion, as does NTI and the Qikiqtani Inuit Association, which represents Inuit on Baffin Island.
Inuit are not unequivocally against development; many support mining but not at the cost of the environment and their way of life. “This situation with Baffinland is really forcing Inuit to decide where that line in the sand is,” says Warren Bernauer, a postdoctoral fellow in environmental geography at the University of Manitoba in Canada.
The line has certainly been crossed for Jerry Natanine, the mayor of Clyde River, a hamlet on the eastern shore of Baffin Island. He’s been fighting to protect this slice of the Arctic for more than a decade. In 2017, he played a key role in halting plans by a consortium of Norwegian companies to conduct seismic testing off Baffin Island, searching for oil and gas deposits, which could have seriously harmed narwhals by scaring them from their feeding grounds and potentially leading to deadly ice entrapments.
“We won that battle and now we're fighting the same thing,” says Natanine, who feels worn down by the cycle of having to stand up to big corporations with deep pockets. “We're not opposed to this [mine] to the point where we want to completely shut it down,” he says. “We want to do it right, we want our people to benefit.”
A Baffinland spokesperson says the mine has been designed “to minimise and mitigate potential impacts on the surrounding environment,” adding, “we do not expect that the proposed mine expansion would have significant impacts on wildlife or Inuit harvesting.”
The company’s case is that it needs to expand to remain financially viable and that’s in the community’s interest as the mine provides jobs and opportunity in the region. Baffinland also provides revenue to Inuit organisations as part of the Nunavut Agreement, reached in 1993, which gives Inuit rights over the land — although not a veto on development. Baffinland has promised Inuit organisations CA$2 billion (£1.17bn) over the lifetime of the mine if expansion goes ahead.
It’s easy, then, to frame opposition to the expansion as being against Inuit interests, says Natatine. “They label us as those guys, the reason why you don't have jobs, why you have no money.” But the job pledges haven’t been delivered, he says, Baffinland has never met its target of 25 per cent Inuit employment, and managerial jobs go to non-Inuit.
A Baffinland spokesperson says the company is committed to increasing the numbers of Inuit in managerial positions and that the 25 per cent target was from an outdated document. Pre-pandemic, about 15 per percent of the total workforce were Inuit.
But shifting pledges feed into a big trust problem, says Natanine. When the mine was first built, the plan was to transport ore from a port at Steensby Inlet to the south of the mine, which would have had a smaller impact on marine life. Instead Baffinland built a port to the mine’s north at Milne Inlet. The company originally applied to produce four million tonnes a year, this was then ramped up to six million tonnes and now potentially 12 million tonnes, and in the future up to 30 million tonnes.
It’s a pattern, says Bernauer. Baffinland and Inuit groups come to compromises over development, he says and then “those slowly get chipped away and the company can always say: ‘we're going broke and if you don't cut these environmental regulations, we're going to have to lay everyone off’.”
What’s happening at Mary River reflects a bigger question, says Bernauer: whether or not mining under our current economic system can ever be done sustainably. “If [companies] want to stay in business, eventually they're going to have to do what it takes to keep those profits flowing.”
It’s a question that ripples across the Arctic, where many Indigenous communities remain torn about resource development. This played out recently in Greenland, when a controversial plan to mine uranium and rare earth metals became a focus of its April elections. For supporters the mine, proposed by an Australian company, meant jobs and a chance for the country, which is an autonomous Danish territory, to gain independence. For critics, it risked environmental catastrophe. The ultimate victory of the Inuit Ataqatigiit party, which campaigned fiercely against the mine, suggests that the proposal will be quashed.
But this won’t be the last battle here or elsewhere in the Arctic. There’s “an ongoing, continual reckoning with settler colonialism,” says Dodds. “It's really a 500 year struggle, saying: ‘we don't want stuff being taken from us and not being asked about it, not being consulted and not benefiting’.”
On Baffin Island, the final decision on the mine expansion rests with the federal government, but no-one is sure when it will be made. In April, the company threatened to mothball the mine because of the “indeterminate delay” to expansion approval and falling iron ore prices.
For many Inuit, bound to these lands by generations of ancestors, the fight is one for survival. “[A] project like this is going to devastate the area and the communities around it,” says Nunavut MP Mumilaaq Qaqqaq. “That's exactly what Inuit have been trying to say for years now, and it's slowly coming to light.”
Ootoovak fears his generation will be the last to truly experience Inuit culture. “My children and grandchildren will probably never have the same experience as our ancestors and up to me because the animals won't be there,” he says.
“It's like they're saying, ‘Why don't you guys assimilate already? Leave your hunting way of life and move to the city’ [...] And we don't want to.” says Natanine. “This is our home.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
