Latest Inuit Stories

By Jennifer KwanTORONTO -- Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk bought a video camera in 1981 with the proceeds from the sale of three soapstone sculptures and the purchase kick-started his movie-making career.On Thursday, his career goes into high gear. His second feature film, "The Journals of Knud Rasmussen," gets its world premiere as the opening film of the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival.A story of cultural identity and loss, the C$6.3 million ($5.7 million) movie...

By Jennifer Kwan TORONTO (Reuters) - Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk bought a video camera in 1981 with the proceeds from the sale of three soapstone sculptures and the purchase kick-started his movie-making career. On Thursday, his career goes into high gear. His second feature film, "The Journals of Knud Rasmussen," gets its world premiere as the opening film of the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival. A story of cultural identity and loss, the C$6.3 million ($5.7...

By Alister Doyle, Environment CorrespondentOSLO -- With signs that the world is warming, even Inuit peoples of the far north are ordering air conditioning.Better known for building igloos during hunts on the polar ice, Inuit in the village of Kuujjuaq in Quebec, Canada, are installing 10 air conditioners for about 25 office workers."These are the times when the far north has to have air conditioners now to function," said Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a leading campaigner for the rights of...

NEW YORK -- For a given level of obesity, Inuit men and women living in Greenland are healthier than those who have migrated to Denmark, Danish researchers have found.The stay-at-home Greenlanders are still living a relatively traditional lifestyle, and they had lower blood pressure, lower levels of the blood fat triacylglycerol, and less insulin resistance -- an indicator of diabetes risk -- according to a report in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition."These findings indicate...

By David LjunggrenCORNWALLIS ISLAND, Nunavut -- After decades of virtually ignoring its remote, frozen Arctic lands, Canada is belatedly trying to assert its sovereignty over a gigantic region rich in mineral resources.Ottawa's problem is that it has little idea of what is going on in the North and far too few resources to patrol the area properly.And that could be bad news when climate change and the appetite for energy and commodities mean the world is suddenly paying more attention to an...

By David LjunggrenRESOLUTE BAY, Nunavut -- Simeonie Amagoalik's anger still burns more than 50 years after he and his family were taken from their homes and dumped on a frozen beach in the wastes of Canada's High Arctic.The federal government, which relocated dozens of aboriginal Inuit to a strange, barren and uninhabited land, agreed to a compensation package in 1995 and admitted the operation had been flawed. But Ottawa did not say sorry."I think they wanted to give us money to shut us...

By David LjunggrenRESOLUTE BAY, Nunavut -- Even in one of the remotest, coldest and most inhospitable parts of Canada's High Arctic, you cannot escape the signs of global warming.Polar bears hang around on land longer than they used to, waiting for ice to freeze. The eternal night which blankets the region for three months is less dark, thanks to warmer air reflecting more sunlight from the south. Animal species that the local Inuit aboriginal population had never heard of are now...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- America's most popular dog is a big hit with scientists who are using Labrador retrievers to hunt up seals for study in the Arctic. The dogs are proving nifty at finding the breathing holes and snow lairs of ringed seals, which after centuries of being hunted by human and beast alike, are strictly covert. "Ringed seals are pretty well adapted to not being found because they live in a world with polar bears and human seal hunters," said Peter Boveng, program...

COPENHAGEN, Denmark -- Greenland's government on Wednesday introduced the ice-capped island's first hunting quota for polar bears, which scientists believe are threatened by the effects of global warming. The figure for 2006 was set at 150 animals, Greenland's fishing and hunting directory said. Only Greenlanders with valid hunting permits can obtain permission to shoot a bear. Previously, local Inuit hunters have killed about 250 bears annually in the semiautonomous Danish territory. The...

By Alister Doyle, Environment CorrespondentMONTREAL (Reuters) - Inuit indigenous peoples formally accused Washington on Wednesday of violating their human rights by failing to do enough to fight a thaw of Arctic ice undermining their hunting cultures."Climate change is destroying our environment and eroding our culture," Sheila Watt-Cloutier, head of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, said in a statement at a 189-nation meeting in Montreal, Canada, on ways to fight global warming.In...