Sea ice, the frozen ocean, is home to many Arctic Indigenous peoples. With climate change, the sea ice has been profoundly changing, resulting in a range of interconnected and often compounding impacts on the environment, wildlife, and livelihoods of many communities. If you were born by the sea ice, played as a child on the sea ice, raised a family on the sea ice, depend on it, work with it, think and dream about it, day in and day out—how do you describe such an integral part of your life, something exotic to most people, but so familiar to you? How to you express the impacts of the changes you are experiencing?

This talk will look at the relationships between Arctic sea ice and the people who call it home. It will look at the great depth of knowledge that Arctic Indigenous peoples have about sea ice and how visiting scientists and Indigenous peoples are working together to study sea ice and its changes. Most importantly, we will go beyond what sea ice is to what sea ice means to those who live with and from it.

Dr. Shari Fox is a research scientist and geographer with the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), University of Colorado Boulder and a long-time Arctic resident. Originally from Ontario, and spending most of her adult life working and living in Nunavut, Shari has been collaborating with Inuit hunters and Elders on research since 1995. She lived full time in the Inuit community of Kangiqtugaapik (Clyde River), Nunavut, for the last 15 years before moving to the Bow Valley, where she continues to work remotely to her university position and travel back to Baffin Island. Shari’s research centres on building multi-disciplinary, multi-cultural research teams and bridging ways of knowing to study shared environmental research questions, especially around sea ice, climate, and weather.