An inuit elder gives prospective to AGW and its impact on polar bears.

Sarah Nangmalik

To Roland Doucet...I read your email up further about the CBC report of a polar bear that swam for 9 days and you also attached a website to it. Let me tell you from an Inuit point of knowledge here. I was born in a snow house on the land w...here polar bears roam in great population...To make it short I would like to tell you that there are two types of polar bears in the arctic. As you said earlier a polar bear swam for 9 days out in the ocean. These type of polar bears are called "Tulaajuittut" by Inuit. "Tulaajuittut" means polar bears that never ever set foot on land and has lived out in the sea all their lives and they are much larger than those polar bears that go on land. Tulaajuittut are born on sea ice and live all their lives in places called "ikiq" or "ikirasak" which means open sea water beween the sounds especially in the high arctic, to give you a better view of a map of an "ikiq - ikirasak" you would normally see on map is "Aqqusiriaq" Lancaster Sound, Davis Straight, Baffin Bay and all the large bodies of sea water in the north have "Tulaajuittut" polar bears. In the summer they will swim for many days out in the open sea and same for the polar bears that go on land as well. In Nunavut and Nunavik today, people are constantly in fear of polar bears that regularly arrive into the communities and into the camping grounds daily. I do believe our Inuit elders speaking one after the other throughout Nunavut and Nunavik on CBC North radio why polar bears are coming into towns is because the southern scientists with lack of knowledge of the land and animals in the north are harrassing them by helicopters, injecting them to put them to sleep to take samples and many times their needles will break and leave them in the polar bear because they think nobody sees them BUT when they roam into communities sometimes they have to be shot to protect the people and you know what? so many times we see and hear on the radio that the polar bear was infected with an injection broken needle in their legs or some areas in their body. When we have southern scientists that come up north for very short periods of time usually only during warm spring and summer months just to write a scientific article that is often not true or correct observation and often they do not consult with local elders and hunters but they sure move the people around the world as if they are the only ones with all the knowledge. We've been taught by our parents and elders all our lives how to observe polar bears as each and every one of them have their own personality and when we have southern scientists that come up to take pictures they have absolutely NO CLUE how to observe and respect animals of the arctic especially polar bears and because they label and express themselves with great southern knowledge they often leave without learning anything at all from the local people which is sad when they could have at least learn something that they never learned from Universities down south.