‘Most at risk on the planet’: Polar heritage sites are slipping into the sea but can one island live forever online? | Indigenous peoples

IT was in early July when the BeauFort sea infiltrated, then rushed, on the sound of gravel from the remote control North Pole island. For hours, the narrow strip disappeared from the ground, and it extends like the tail of the comma to the water, gradually in the ocean.

When the Canadian scientists in Qikiqtaruk (also known as Hershel Island), off Yukon’s coast in Canada, wiping the flood, they saw a dark comic scene revealing.

The employees of the Yukon government, who wandered in the water, were rushing to transport historical buildings before they were able to slip to the ocean. This was not the first time that the water drew the old whales hunting buildings, and despite the team’s efforts to prevent a segment of history from restoring nature, it will not be the last.

However, with the building that floats on the wood gospel and with the help of a strong cable, they managed, for a while, to transfer it 8 meters (26 feet).

“We bought ourselves some time,” says Stefan Pederman, a carpenter to save with the government that is scrambling with his team to reduce the effects of flooding on the buildings. “But these are just short -term solutions. We have an idea of ​​what may seem to be a permanent thing, we will continue to race to respond to these floods.”

Stormy weather has always been an essential element in life for Rangers and researchers working on the remote Arctic Island. But the indisputable internal ocean march raised thorny questions about how to keep the weak elements of the Qikiqtaruk heritage in the Arctic.

“There are pressure you feel at work, knowing that there is an increasing sense of urgency. But you know that urgency comes from the fact that these places are meaningful to many people, so the work has value,” says Pederman.

When Richard Gordon was a young man, his family made a multiple days of days to Qikiqtaruk from Aklavik in a small boat. He spent the summer in hunting, camping and running in the remains of buildings that start from the weather.

Gordon has spent the past two decades as a headquarters in the regional Hersheltaru Island Park, a witness to Earth’s collapses, soil soil and floods – Climate emergency ravages land from the weak island.

“With the increasing poor floods, all the conversation revolves around the plans of historical buildings. Where will they go? What should we do?” He says.

“But there is a lesser talk about heritage sites on the island, Important places in inuvialuit. There was no decision on that. Instead, the focus is what we do with these buildings brought by newcomers. “

Qikiqtaruk island, a short distance off the coast of Yukon in northern Canada, does not contain trees on the smooth flowing hills that, in a number of places, quickly turn into coarse slopes and sharp valleys.

For more than 1000 years, Qikiqtaruk was a valuable land for hunting, fishing and camping at inuvialuit. It occupies an important space in its oral history-its protected state like the Horschel Island-Sikiqtaruk regional park that reflects a striving battle to preserve it from external influence and destruction.

In the late nineteenth century, the waters of the protected island pushed an abundance of whales in the region and an indisputable appetite for oils and insanity of whales in the north. American and European crews built nearly ten wooden buildings along a low part of Pauline Cove to support nearly 1500 whales hunting on their ships.

The remains of both history are still spread on parts of the island. The wooden floor of one building, The Blubber House, is dug, with deep pieces of strong fat cutting crews. It is believed that the community home is the oldest building of the wooden frame standing in Yukon. The signs of the grave from whale hunting who died a long way from the house stands out in a random row in Willow fields.

With no historical written language and a pragmatic method that is used to use the Earth, the legacy of material existence in Inuvialuit can easily be missed. they HomesOr IGLURYUAQand Once Cooking stove and sleeping seats and is caught from the ground. The remainder of these structures, some of which date back to 1,200and They are now appearing as the arc -shaped impressions on the ground that crowned tundra flowers and herbs.

But within the oral history of inuvialuit, there is a deep catalog of human experience on how to prosper in the region – including Qikiqtaruk. For people who fill their language and lives in land and water, one is born from the other.

“If anything happens to one building, he can easily replace it,” Gordon says. “But you cannot replace culture and history. If you leave these people die, they are next to it is impossible to return.”

In an attempt to confirm the scale of the crisis, researchers have found new ways to bring people – actually – to the front lines.

Early in the afternoon of August, Miche Eckert is flowing through the melted soil clay. He wipes the area to get a higher ground, jumped with a Gloopy to prepare a virtual realistic camera.

Record an article of life 360 ​​degrees of life on the island, team bush-researchers at the University of Columbia, British University- They work to maintain what they can One of the landscapes in the borrowed time. The Qikiqtaruk: Arctic project aims at risk to show an island that swings about the deep environmental turmoil, which is dominated by a changing climate.

“The Arctic is four times faster than the rest of the world, and it increases the floods worse, lengthening the ice -free ice season,” says Ecker, a highly studied student who studies flood mechanics. “Every time we get a flood, which is what happens more because the coastal line is exposed, it washed sandy parts of the island, which makes those areas itself more vulnerable to the next flood.”

The areas of the island’s only air landing and a group of whale hunting buildings used to host research teams from Canada and Europe. Last summer, there were 19 floods during the summer research season, including 11 consecutive days in August, which were captured in the team’s bush using virtual reality. Half of the buildings sit on the wood’s viscera, with others sometimes immersed in sea water.

“The polar heritage sites are among the most vulnerable sites on this planet,” says Peter Dawson, head of anthropology and archaeology departments at Calgary University. “It seems like a crime to let these places disappear without making an effort to save them. We cannot stop climate change, but we can maintain the best of our power in the history of the region.”

With the uncertainty that looms on the horizon in the future of the settlement, Dawson, who works alongside computer scientists and computer scientists, has spent the past few years to create a An accurate digital archive of the island’s human structures. Each building is rebuilt using millions of laser databases-known as the point cloud-to ensure the occurrence of structures forever on the Internet, which surpasses their counterparts in the real world.

For the team, this work is especially important because it gives Aklavik residents in Inuvialuit – the closest community to the island – an opportunity to reconsider the place. Many have strong relationships with Qikiqtaruk, either from their youth or through stories from the elders. Using data points, the team printed 3D models from the island and their structures.

“You can bring it to a semester. Dawson says:” You can show these models to a 85 -year -old who lived there, and returns them to the place. “They can keep them in their hands. It does what cannot be drawings or photographs. “

The team described as “artistic from the anniversary”, sits carefully, recognizes the past injustice committed against inuvialuit, and all Native peoples In Canada, in the name of “memorization”.

For decades, strangers looted and looted the homes of the first nations and villages through what Canada now knows. Their art, their lives and culture were cleared by strangers and stolen under the curtain of preservation.

In 1957, a federal “Indian Agent” was appointed required 12 Totem Cedar columns, including two poles, are removed from a site on Haida Gwaii to be preserved for the sake of future generations. In museums Instead of the land you mean.

“Societies deal with the loss for more than a century. First, the ethnographic surveys, which behave from” fear “, were that people’s cultures will die,” says Dawson. “Now, we have climate change.

“The land and history disappear at the sea and therefore we are trying to act before it disappears. But we need to make sure that society is concentrated in this, this knowledge is returned to them.”

Those involved in efforts also know, despite the archive, on the limits of such work on a place determined by the waters of the ocean, lush plants and the countless species that make the island the home.

“We are fighting against time and we need to act urgently,” says Dawson. “But if we are able to keep these spaces digitally, do we need to maintain the real version? Does this make our commitment to maintain and protect the original if we still can?”