Despatches from Iglooliki

A winter's day as Igloolik knows it. The cold is crisp, the sky dark and clear. Outside, it is ­40°, a temperature at which it does not matter if the scale reads Celsius or Fahrenheit. It is December in the southern calendar, but the beginning of Tauvikjuaq in the Inuit one. This small Nunavut community in northern Canada, established in the 1950s - when the Inuit were encouraged, and sometimes coerced, into moving off the land and into permanent settlements - sits at the north-eastern side of the Melville Peninsula and across the water from Baffin Island, just inside 69° latitude. The snow-encrusted land around it, bluish and untrammelled, stretches out flatly in all directions like an upside-down plate. The horizon, its distant rim, is an incandescent, silvery white.

Before the arrival of Qallunaat - the white man - Tauvikjuaq was the time when the Inuit were likely to be assembled in camps, the weather inclement and their supplies often running out. The sun, which fell below the horizon at the end of November, would not be seen again for several weeks. In the old days it was a time of storytelling, when Elders would amuse the children with games, and long hours passed in the handing down from one generation to the next of Inuit lore, history and folk knowledge. After Tauvikjuaq, the Inuit nervously awaited the return of the sun, which meant a return of the light and that the year was starting afresh.

Today, science trumps Inuit lore and the old ways are rendered increasingly useless, not just by the trappings of modern living, but by climate change and the soaring value of the territory's resources. Now the narrow strait that separates Igloolik from Baffin Island freezes later, so that the caribou herds roaming there cannot reliably be hunted until January, and GPS systems have replaced stories that were used to navigate the land and speak of its properties, guiding not just hunters, but ships and prospectors through.

When the Inuit do hunt, this is what they find: the work of diamond-mining, uranium, hydroelectric, oil and gas pipeline companies altering the migration of the caribou herds from Mackenzie to Labrador, affecting the organisation of the land as dramatically as whalers did a century ago. Now, as then, there is a competition of governments eager for resources: the Russians claim the seabed, the Danes plant flags, and Chinese vessels visit. Canada's north is no longer open. Now it is "territory", and the country's prime minister, Stephen Harper, has set about defending it - planning a deepwater port where frigates can stop at Iqaluit and sending in military patrols.

From the settlements, the Inuit watch. Zacha rias Kunuk is the director of the remarkable film Atanarjuat: the Fast Runner. When I met him in his Igloolik office, he spent most of the time staring out the window across the frozen water, to Baffin, where his father was hunting. "Is our story lost?" he asked. "I look around and it's still the same world, still the same animals, still winter every year, but now there's all this talk of global warming and PCBs [persistent industrial pollutants], there's mercury in our fish - why, why?"

Igloolik is a "dry" community: its temperance has contributed to its healthy social ties and cultural flourishing. But still it must contend with change - and the forgetting. "Today, in Igloolik, there's TV and radio, there's hockey and there's light," said John MacDonald, a resident of the Arctic since 1959. "There are more distractions - a different tempo and different obligations. The very nature of the community is changing."

"All the hunters take radios with them when they go," said another neighbour, Louis Tapardjuk, "so everybody is constantly informed. There's no good stories coming back from the land any more." Tapardjuk sighed. "Memory is so different now."

When I visited Igloolik, a nurse's van parked outside one Elder's house indicated another death and more of the old knowledge irretrievably lost. A plume of smoke rose from the chimney of the late woman's home, and wended its way through wires tying her house to a world thousands of miles away - but disconnecting her from her community.

Noah Richler's "This Is My Country, What's Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada" (McClelland & Stewart) won the 2007 British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and is available through Amazon.ca

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