There are few places where the sheer scale of the Arctic becomes quite as obvious as it does on the east coast of Baffin Island. Mountains rise abruptly from the sea, glaciers fill the valleys between them and icebergs drift slowly through Baffin Bay. Sitting amongst all this is the small Inuit community of Qikiqtarjuaq, one of the gateways to one of Canada’s most spectacular wilderness areas.
I’d written about Qikiqtarjuaq before coming here, but actually arriving by expedition ship and going ashore changed my perspective completely. Places on maps can seem like dots surrounded by enormous areas of wilderness. Once you step ashore, meet the people and walk through the community, that dot becomes someone’s home. And Qikiqtarjuaq turned out to be one of those places where the people, culture and history were every bit as interesting as the extraordinary landscape surrounding it.
Qikiqtarjuaq – pronounced roughly kee-kik-tar-joo-ak – is an Inuktitut name meaning “big island”. The community was formerly known as Broughton Island and lies on an island just off the eastern coast of Baffin Island in Nunavut.
For most travellers this is a seriously remote destination. There are no roads connecting Qikiqtarjuaq with the rest of Canada. Scheduled flights link the community with Iqaluit, Nunavut’s territorial capital, and from there with southern Canada.
Arriving by expedition ship, however, gives a completely different perspective. We came ashore by Zodiac and walked up through the settlement towards the large community hall, where local people had gathered to welcome us. There were tables selling locally made souvenirs, including beautiful fur gloves, but what followed was much more than a chance to buy something to take home. It became an introduction to the living culture of Qikiqtarjuaq.
One of the highlights was throat singing. I’d heard Inuit throat singing before, but seeing it performed here, in an Inuit community on Baffin Island, gave it an entirely different context. Traditionally it was particularly associated with women and could accompany everyday activities and work. Today local women are keeping the tradition alive. Two women stood almost face-to-face, staring directly into one another’s eyes. It looked almost like a friendly face-off. Then the extraordinary sounds began – deep rhythmic breaths, hums and guttural noises passing backwards and forwards between the two performers. The sounds can evoke the world around them: wind, snow, dogs, sea and waves. Each singer responds to the other, maintaining the rhythm until eventually one loses the pattern or bursts into laughter. It was amazing to watch.
Then came demonstrations of traditional Inuit games – sometimes described as Inuit or Arctic sports. These developed in a world where strength, balance, agility and endurance weren’t simply sporting attributes; they were extremely useful qualities for survival. We watched demonstrations including the one-foot high kick, two-foot high kick and one-arm reach. Some of our expedition staff were persuaded to have a go.
Then came the food. Local people had prepared Arctic char in several different ways: raw, smoked and boiled. The smoked char was, for me, easily the winner. It was superb. Then someone offered me narwhal. You don’t get many opportunities in life to write that sentence. Narwhal remains an important traditional food for Inuit in parts of Nunavut. What I tried was essentially skin with roughly a centimetre of blubber underneath – often known as muktuk or maktaaq. I tried it both raw and boiled. The raw version was very, very chewy. The skin was hard and rubbery and certainly required some determination. The boiled version surprised me. It was actually quite nice.
For visitors it is important to understand the context. Narwhal isn’t being eaten here as some exotic Arctic novelty invented for tourists. It forms part of a much older Inuit food culture based upon the animals available in this environment. The sea around Qikiqtarjuaq has always been far more than scenery: it is a highway, a hunting ground and a source of food.
After our community welcome I wandered farther through the village. There were big working dogs around the settlement, many looking wonderfully scruffy as they shed their thick coats in the Arctic summer. There were also a couple of ridiculously cute puppies, which rather undermined the tough Arctic sled-dog image. Walking along the main road gives you some idea of the practical realities of living somewhere this remote. I passed the school, the Co-op store and the Parks Canada office. Currently the Co-op gets two resupplies per year by ship. Once it has run out of a stable like rice or pasta there is no more to buy till the next ship comes in. There are no roads leading onwards to another town. Eventually the community simply ends and the tundra takes over.
I walked up onto the rise at the end of the settlement where there was a large stone structure. At first glance you might simply describe it as a cairn, but it was an inuksuk – one of the deliberately constructed stone markers found throughout Inuit landscapes. The plural is inuksuit. Inuksuit have been constructed for generations and can have many purposes. Depending upon their shape and location, they can act as route markers, indicate hunting or fishing places, mark caches or hazards, or carry other cultural meanings. It is another reminder that what an outsider might initially see as an empty landscape is anything but empty. This land has been travelled, named, understood and interpreted by Inuit for generations.
Standing there, looking back across Qikiqtarjuaq towards the sea, also put the community’s extraordinary location into perspective. Beyond lies the mountainous interior of Baffin Island and Auyuittuq National Park, one of Canada’s great wilderness areas. Qikiqtarjuaq is one of the two principal gateways to Auyuittuq, the other being Pangnirtung farther south. The name Auyuittuq is usually translated as “the land that never melts”, which gives a reasonable indication of the landscape beyond the coast. The park is dominated by the enormous Penny Ice Cap, glaciers, deep fiords and some of the most dramatic mountains in the Canadian Arctic. Among the best known are Mount Asgard, with its extraordinary twin flat-topped towers, and Mount Thor, whose western face contains one of the world’s greatest sheer vertical drops. Running through the mountains is Akshayuk Pass, a natural corridor roughly 100 kilometres long which today provides one of the great wilderness trekking routes of the Arctic. There are no roads into Auyuittuq. Visitors using Qikiqtarjuaq as their gateway travel towards the park by boat during the open-water season or by snowmobile when conditions allow. The community is about 34 kilometres from the park boundary along North Pangnirtung Fiord.
People have lived and travelled throughout this part of the Arctic for thousands of years. Successive Arctic cultures developed extraordinary knowledge and technologies that enabled people to survive in conditions which would challenge almost anyone arriving from farther south. The ancestors of today’s Inuit developed sophisticated understanding of sea ice, weather, wildlife, currents and seasonal movements.
Much of that knowledge remains fundamental today. Depending upon the season, local people travel across the surrounding land, sea and ice to hunt and fish. Seals, narwhal, Arctic char and other wildlife remain culturally important, while berries and other plants are gathered from the land.
What visitors may see as untouched wilderness can actually be a landscape filled with place names, family histories, hunting grounds, travel routes, archaeological sites and generations of accumulated knowledge. Some areas around Auyuittuq remain particularly important for Inuit harvesting. Maktak and Coronation Fiords, for example, are important areas for narwhal hunting, and visitor access can consequently be restricted seasonally. Other areas of tundra are important for berry picking.
It is a useful reminder that responsible travel in the Arctic isn’t simply about respecting wildlife. It is also about respecting the people whose home you are visiting. The waters surrounding eastern Baffin Island are tremendously exciting for wildlife enthusiasts. Baffin Bay supports an impressive collection of Arctic marine mammals, including one of the animals most visitors desperately hope to see – narwhal. Sometimes rather unimaginatively described as the “unicorn of the sea”, the narwhal is actually a medium-sized Arctic whale. The famous spiral tusk, predominantly seen in males, is an elongated tooth that can grow several metres long. Narwhal migrate through the Canadian Arctic, and the fiords and channels of eastern Baffin Island form part of their summer range. Having just eaten a small piece of narwhal in the community hall, seeing these animals at sea takes on another dimension. Here they are simultaneously wildlife, part of an ecosystem and part of Inuit food and hunting culture.
Baffin Bay is also iceberg country. Many of the icebergs travelling along this coast originate from glaciers draining Greenland’s enormous ice sheet on the opposite side of Baffin Bay, although glaciers within the Canadian Arctic also produce icebergs. Every iceberg is effectively on a journey. Wind acts upon the relatively small section visible above the surface while ocean currents push against the much larger mass beneath. Consequently, an iceberg can sometimes appear to be moving in a completely different direction from the wind.
Qikiqtarjuaq has another story, and it is a much darker one.
It is easy when walking through the community to imagine that it has stood here for centuries. In fact, the present permanent settlement is comparatively recent. The development of modern Qikiqtarjuaq is closely connected to the Cold War and the construction of the DEW Line – the Distant Early Warning Line – during the 1950s. The DEW Line was an enormous chain of radar stations constructed across the Arctic from Alaska, through northern Canada and towards Greenland. During the Cold War, Canada and the United States feared that Soviet bombers attacking North America would approach across the Arctic and North Pole. Radar stations in the far north were intended to detect those aircraft early enough for a military response. A DEW Line station was established on Broughton Island in the mid-1950s. Its construction brought employment and infrastructure, and Inuit increasingly came to the area for work and later to be closer to the store, school, church, healthcare and other government services.
But this was part of a much larger transformation taking place across the Canadian Arctic. During the 1950s, 60s and 70s, Canadian government policies encouraged – and in many cases coerced – Inuit families away from dispersed camps and into permanent settlements. The Qikiqtani Truth Commission, established by the Qikiqtani Inuit Association to record Inuit experiences of this period, describes a history of rapid social change involving relocations, inadequate housing, residential schooling, disease, government pressure and the killing of sled dogs. Qikiqtarjuaq has its own particularly painful chapter in that history.
About 50 kilometres away was Kivitoo, where Inuit families had lived on the land. In 1963 three men from Kivitoo died in a tragic accident. The Canadian government subsequently decided that the remaining community should be relocated to Qikiqtarjuaq. People were reassured by the RCMP that they would be able to return. That mattered, because families consequently left possessions behind. But they didn’t return to the community they had left. Homes at Kivitoo were bulldozed, with belongings buried with them. Testimony subsequently collected by the Qikiqtani Truth Commission records the shock of people returning to collect possessions and discovering there was effectively nothing to return to. It is difficult to read those accounts today without feeling sad.
And perhaps the most disturbing aspect is how recent this history is. This isn’t something that happened hundreds of years ago during the earliest period of European contact. It happened in 1963. People living today remember these events. The story of Kivitoo also sits within the wider experience of Inuit families around Qikiqtarjuaq. Government policy increasingly concentrated people in the settlement, and Inuit later testified about feeling coerced by the threat that those remaining on the land would lose access to education, medical care or food supplies. The loss and killing of qimmiit – sled dogs – also dramatically affected people’s ability to travel independently between traditional camps. The school, roads, Co-op, harbour and houses represent a modern Arctic community that has adapted and survived, but the existence of Qikiqtarjuaq in its present form is also intertwined with government policies that profoundly disrupted Inuit lives.
And now another huge change may be coming.
Qikiqtarjuaq is planning a major new deep-sea port. This isn’t simply a bigger harbour for cruise ships. The project has been developing in various forms for years and is now being advanced as an Inuit-led project. Its location is strategically important, close to the eastern approaches to the Northwest Passage and the shipping routes of Baffin Bay and Davis Strait. The port is intended to provide proper deep-water facilities for fishing vessels, community resupply and other commercial ships. At present the lack of substantial marine infrastructure across much of Nunavut makes almost everything more difficult and expensive. A deep-water wharf would allow vessels to unload far more efficiently and could provide storage and infrastructure for Nunavut’s growing commercial fishing industry.
It could also create local jobs in construction, fisheries, port operations and tourism. There is another increasingly important reason for the development: Arctic sovereignty and security. As sea ice changes and marine traffic through the Arctic increases, Canada is placing much greater emphasis on infrastructure in its northern territories. Qikiqtarjuaq’s proposed port is now being presented not merely as a local harbour but as part of Canada’s wider Arctic infrastructure. The project has been discussed for decades. Construction had been expected to begin in 2026, but the latest plans have pushed the start back to 2027. Whatever the final timetable, if the port goes ahead on the scale proposed it could significantly change Qikiqtarjuaq. More fishing vessels, supply ships and potentially expedition and cruise vessels could use the community. That could mean jobs, investment and opportunities – particularly important if the development remains genuinely Inuit-led – but inevitably it will bring change as well. That thought stayed with me after our visit.
Before leaving, some of the community leaders were invited aboard our expedition ship to have a look around. It was lovely to see them on board. There were lots of smiles, laughter and good-natured exchanges – the sort of interaction that makes an expedition visit feel much more worthwhile than simply landing somewhere, taking photographs and leaving again.
Qikiqtarjuaq isn’t a conventional tourist destination, and that is part of what makes visiting it special. You aren’t arriving somewhere created for visitors. You are a guest in a living Inuit community in one of the most remote regions of Canada. That makes how we behave important. Houses, boats, sled dogs and working areas aren’t tourist attractions. Visitors should ask before photographing people, particularly children, and follow the guidance of local hosts about where they should and shouldn’t go.
Independent travellers can reach Qikiqtarjuaq by scheduled flights via Iqaluit. The community is also an access point for Auyuittuq National Park, although reaching the park requires local boat or snowmobile transport depending upon the season. Anyone planning an independent wilderness journey here needs to take the Arctic environment seriously. Weather changes quickly, travel delays are common and itineraries need spare days built into them.
Auyuittuq itself is genuine wilderness. Facilities are extremely limited and visitors entering the park must register and receive an orientation. Travel across Inuit-owned land may also require permission from the Qikiqtani Inuit Association. But perhaps the most important thing I took from Qikiqtarjuaq wasn’t about mountains, wildlife or wilderness. It was how quickly visiting somewhere like this challenges our southern idea of the Arctic as an enormous, empty frozen landscape. It is a cultural landscape, a wildlife habitat and, above all, someone’s home.
The mountains, fiords, islands and stretches of sea around Qikiqtarjuaq have been travelled and understood by Inuit for generations. They contain hunting grounds, routes, stories and memories. Some of those memories are difficult ones, including the forced changes and relocations experienced within living memory.
At the same time, this is very clearly not a community frozen in its own history. Qikiqtarjuaq is changing again. A new generation is keeping traditions such as throat singing and Inuit games alive while the community considers a future that could include a major deep-sea port, more employment and a very different role in an increasingly busy Arctic. For narwhal, seals, whales, birds and polar bears, the surrounding waters and mountains remain migration routes, feeding grounds and breeding habitat. For visitors like me, fortunate enough to come ashore here, it provides something increasingly difficult to find elsewhere: genuine scale, wildness and perspective.
Why not take the opportunity to read our other blogs about Nunavut and the Canadian arctic;
- Beechey Island: Polar Bears, Franklin and Three Graves Beside the Sea
- Kayaking with Arctic Wildlife: Staying Safe Around Polar Bears, Walrus and Whales
- Croker Bay: Paddling Beneath the Glaciers of Devon Island
- Dundas Harbour: Ghosts in the Fog on Devon Island
- Duart Bay: Sea Kayaking into a Scottish Corner of Baffin Island
- Isabella Bay: In the Realm of the Bowhead Whale
- Port Leopold: Paddling Through the Search for Franklin
- Prince Leopold Island: Paddling Beneath a City of Seabirds
- Radstock Bay: Paddling Through a Thousand Years of Arctic History