My project to photograph the changing climate, history and culture in the haunting isolated beauty of Nunavut’s arctic landscape has gone through the Fulbright peer review process.

It is a pleasure to inform you that the peer review process organized by the Institute of International Education’s Council for
International Exchange of Scholars (IIE/CIES) has concluded and that you are among those recommended for a Fulbright
award in Canada.

[from the letter]

This is roughly one of the next steps before receiving the grant where I which would allow me to work in Nunavut for several months.

The application

will be forwarded to the Foundation for Educational Exchange between Canada and the USA, the U.S. Department of State, and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. Applications will be reviewed in light of program priorities and budget. Not all applications that were recommended in the peer review process will be selected for grants.

The focus is to capture both the rapidly receding glaciers as well as the cultural changes in the extremely remote Inuit settlements in Baffin Island.

Melting ice leads to massive changes forcing native peoples to change or move, and as a result of unprecedented cultural upheaval, suicide rates and alcoholism spiked. Baffin Island is the world’s fifth largest island, where only a handful of small settlements make up the population of 11,000 is one of the most isolated places in the world. There, Pre-Dorset and Dorset native peoples inhabited the Island for thousands of years, but in the Eleventh Century Norse explorers from Greenland (perhaps mentioned in the Grœnlendinga saga and the Saga of Erik the Red) landed there. 

Winning the Fulbright will allow me to photograph traces changes happening to land, ice and communities. The the three main locations planned to travel to are the fast-retreating Barnes Ice Cap, one of the last remnants of the North American ice sheet; Glacial formations in the massive Sirmilik National Park; and “Suicide Prevention Walk”, a 37 mile trek across the tundra to highlight modern changes happening in the communities.

Beyond documentation, however, these photographs crystallize a feeling of inertia taking place in the primordial landscape of the arctic.