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There are plenty of ironies when you plan a 140-kilometre snowmobile trip in the spring, and the day you plan to leave becomes the coldest day of the winter, plummeting below -40 Celsius with strong winds. Despite the cold and winds, we had confidence that an experienced Inuk guide would make sure we got from North West River to the coastal community of Rigolet safely. There was also humour knowing that we were transporting buckets of Mary Brown’s chicken for a research open house that night, and the local radio station had already broadcast that the chicken was on the way in a komatik. Halfway into the trip, the chicken was frozen solid.

This trip of research colleagues to the coast was all about seeing friends, sharing research results, experiencing the winter trails, and hearing stories about the land. We were mostly going to chat about caribou and all they mean to people in Rigolet. From caribou stories come many more stories about culture, experiences on the land, early memories of family and kinship, and changes that have occurred. While the populations of caribou are now low, the social suffering is high associated with injustices that manifest themselves into the present with each new caribou season that could have been.

I understand the ways in which being on the land is connected to so many important things. I was born in a small coastal fishing village on the Labrador coast to an Inuit father and a settler mother. I went through a colonial educational system that did not share Inuit knowledge or teach Indigenous history in the curriculum, and certainly did not offer place-based education about the Inuit culture and lineage along Labrador’s coastline. I grew up struggling with my history and my identity, and with my connection to the land.

I did not grow up on the land like many Canadians would assume an Inuk should. My family moved away from my home community when I was young, as my father educated himself to become a laboratory and x-ray technician and got a job in a regional hospital. There are times when I am angry because I didn’t have opportunities to learn and appreciate how important land skills were at a young age. That caused me to shut down and be discouraged about learning traditional and life-giving activities over the course of my life.

This brings me back to Rigolet, where I was sitting by the fire doing a conversational interview with an Inuk Elder and hunter who generously spent a couple of hours with me providing his passionate thoughts about caribou, but also about passing on knowledge and maintaining his own land skills: “Well, let me give you one bit of advice when it comes to being out on the land.” I lean in and listen: “Don’t be chasing me around all the time, make your own tracks. Get that confidence. Don’t be scared if you go off the road a little way, make the wrong turn, or go around the wrong point. Just as long as you don’t go in the water. That’s how you learn, doing stuff on your own, you know, whether it’s putting up a tent or cutting down a stick of wood, or take a stick of wood home and the God damn thing don’t burn, you know you got the wrong kind of wood, so you know you shouldn’t do that twice.”

Days later, the trip back to Happy Valley-Goose Bay was not as cold, and I had more confidence making the trip. This trail and ice on Lake Melville were getting more familiar to me, the more time I spend developing skills and reclaiming knowledge from my ancestors. The different bays, points, and landscapes are starting to look more familiar, their nuances and attributes more apparent.

Within a few days of my return, the concern about COVID-19 was getting stronger, and people were getting more worried. Travel to the Labrador coast was quickly restricted to protect the communities, and people all over Labrador started to work from home. Life began to change quickly in Labrador, bringing with it a lot of humility, a sense of fragility, and genuine fear as Labrador had been indelibly marked by the Spanish Flu 100 years earlier.

Throughout the early days of the pandemic, I kept thinking about what I learned in Rigolet and my desire to reconnect to and learn from the land. If I had to work in isolation and practice social distancing, I decided it might as well be in a small cabin near a woodstove with my laptop. Each day, I’d snowmobile to our cabin, light the fire, and do my work. As each day passed and this new pattern provided a sense of wellness and gratitude, I started to explore more and more around Lake Melville after work. I was going where so many others were going on the land during this pandemic, but I was also making my own tracks, and that felt liberating.

I also began to look for different types of firewood, preferably dry black spruce or birch that could be burned that year. But then, with some advice from Elders, I started to look for juniper (or larch or tamarack, as called in other places), as I was told juniper burned “real hot” and that sounded appealing for the really cold January and February months.

As the spring days passed, I noticed my connection to the land, and my overall wellness, was increasing. The pandemic forced me to turn inward and toward the land, in ways that I had not previously done. It brought opportunities for me, as well as my family and friends, and many others throughout Labrador, the space for reflection, and for reclamation of time on the land, and the knowledge that emerges from that connection. We are now on the cusp of a second wave in Labrador, as well as nearing the winter months. I will take that opportunity to continue with my own reclamation and learn what I can from these opportunities to be on the land, sharing, learning, connecting, and healing.

This article is a component of a collection that will be published by the Royal Society of Canada. The collection is available here: https://rsc-src.ca/en/covid-19

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