“When I was growing up my father used to tagjaq (go inland) and have to cross those rivers and creeks. Now these places have dried up. We went up there a few years ago to a place where my father used to frequent as a hunting area. We were once able to put our canoe with a maximum load with all our dogs and everything, but now it has dried up.”
“Years ago the ice used to get really thick and they had to have really long ice chisels. We would use up the whole length of the ice chisel. Now we have much shorter ice chisels and we still manage to reach the water. It seems that the overall ice thickness has lessened. Also the thickness of the ice is an indication of how cold the weather is. If it has been cold it will be thick. If it has good snow coverage it is likely to be thinner, but overall it follows the climate.”
“Another thing we miss now is the qapiq, it is not happening anymore. Is it because we just don’t notice it? It is a very thin ice layer on the surface of the snow. We used to use it for a trap. We would cut an oval of snow and scrape it. This cover was used to keep it together.”
“There are lots of things that we have noticed such as there are hardly any clear skies now. There are clouds, or haze. It is always white out (qaqurnaqtuq) when you can hardly see the ground. We don’t get those clear skies anymore with very good visibility. The traditional word for it is pujurattuq—there is a lot of this now. It is not ihiriaqtuq (smoke from a fire) and there is a lot of that today. Even during clear skies. There is a lot of this [pujurattuq] now even during clear skies.
“The areas around the channels were considered cool places. They were known as cool places. Now they are just as hot as inland areas.”
“[One] thing is the timing of the seasons. They don’t connect anymore. We used to know in what season something would occur. For example when your feet would sink through the snow, you knew when the aujaq (summer) or upinngaaq (spring) would happen. Using our traditional knowledge you would know what was going to happen when, but you just can’t predict anymore. People like me are confused. In the early fall sometimes there will be a freeze of the lake and the ponds, and then after that it would take several weeks to have the ice finally safe enough to travel on."
“Traditionally we have used snowdrifts as a guide, especially when we are travelling in the dark. We would check the drifts occasionally to make sure that we are heading in the right direction to return to our iglu. Now it is disorienting because they are not pointing in the direction that they were pointing in before.”
“The intensity of the wind has increased. Sometimes we worry about our cabins and belongings being blown away. These days things have to be secured. The wind is getting stronger than we used to experience before.”
“When you were camping out in an iglu, we would have the iglu by the lake. There was this constant cracking of the ice. It was non-stop and very loud like thundering. You don’t hear that anymore. It might do that once in a while but during those years you heard it all the time.”
"Today we don’t seem to be prepared for the changes that affect everyday life. People are dying of exposure and they are not prepared for the unpredictable weather."