Food insecurity among northern Inuit communities represents a significant public health challenge that requires immediate and integrated responses. In the Inuvialuit Settlement Region (ISR), in the Northwest Territories (NWT), almost half of households experience some degree of food insecurity (33% moderate, 13% severe), and rates are even higher in Nunavut (35% moderate, 34% severe). Currently, food security issues in the Arctic are being addressed by multiple initiatives at different scales; however, the role that governance and policy plays in fostering or hampering Inuit food security remains under-evaluated. We took a participatory-qualitative approach to investigate how food security governance structures and processes are functioning in Inuit settlement areas, using case studies of the Inuvialuit Settlement Region (ISR) and Nunavut, the latter of which has already developed a food security strategy through significant community consultation. Using 18 semi-structured interviews, we examined the development and implementation of the Nunavut Food Security Strategy (NFSS) and Action Plan to identify challenges and lessons learned, identified governance challenges and opportunities in the current way food policy decisions are made in the ISR, and determined ways to improve governance arrangements to address Inuit food security more effectively at a regional scale. Participants implicated in the NFSS process identified a number of challenges, including high rates of employee turnover, coordinating work with member organizations, and lack of a proper evaluation framework to measure the Strategy’s outcomes. In terms of lessons learned, participants expressed the need to establish clear lines of accountability to achieve desired outcomes, and the importance of sufficient and sustained financial resources and organizational capacity to address food security in a meaningful way. Similar themes were identified in the ISR; however, top-down government decision-making at the territorial level and an absence of meaningful community engagement from program administrators during the conceptualization of food security interventions were specific issues identified in this context. In terms of opportunities for regional-scale food security governance, the Government of Northwest Territories (GNWT) is in the process of developing a Country Food Strategy that will engage with a range of stakeholders to develop a broader selection of country food programing. These findings suggest that food security governance remains a key challenge for Inuit. First, sufficient resources are needed to address food security in a sustained manner. Second, existing and planned food security policies and programs should include an evaluation component to demonstrate greater accountability towards desired outcomes. Finally, findings point to the need to develop new collaborative, integrated, and inclusive food security governance arrangements that take into account local context, needs, and priorities. The NFSS is a useful model for collaborative food security governance from which other Inuit regions can learn and adapt.

Arctic ecosystems are undergoing rapid environmental transformations. Climate change is affecting permafrost temperature, vegetation structure, and wildlife populations, and increasing human development is impacting a range of ecological processes. Arctic indigenous communities are particularly vulnerable to environmental change, as subsistence harvesting plays a major role in local lifestyles. In the Inuvialuit Settlement Region (ISR), in the western Canadian Arctic, indigenous land-users are witnessing a broad spectrum of environmental changes, which threaten subsistence practices. Local cumulative effects monitoring programs acknowledge the importance of subsistence land use; however there are few cumulative effects assessments that measure the impact of environmental change on land-based activities. My MSc addresses this gap with a broad-scale spatial inventory that measures the distribution of multiple disturbances in the mainland ISR, and assesses their overlap with community planning areas, land management zones, and caribou harvesting areas. I also generated nine future disturbance scenarios that simulate increases in both human development and wildfire occurrence, in order to understand how additional environmental change may affect the availability of un-impacted harvesting lands. I used the conservation planning software, Marxan, to assess the impact of increasing environmental perturbations on the availability and contiguity of 40 subsistence harvesting areas. Results show that the study region is already impacted by multiple environmental disturbances, and that these disturbances overlap considerably with wildlife harvesting areas. This limits the success of Marxan runs that attempt to conserve high percentages of subsistence use areas. It becomes increasingly difficult to conserve large, contiguous assortments of wildlife harvesting areas when using Marxan to assess conservation potential in future disturbance scenarios. In a separate study, I conducted 20 semi-structured interviews in the communities of Inuvik, Aklavik, and Tuktoyaktuk that explored the impact of environmental change on Inuvialuit land-users. Participants in my study indicated that wildlife harvesting in the region is being affected by a range of environmental disturbances and that this change is typically considered to be negative. Climate change-related disturbances were noted to affect travel routes, access to harvesting areas, wildlife dynamics, and the quality of meat and pelts. Human activity, such as oil exploration, was noted to impact both wildlife populations and harvesters’ ability to use the land. These observations are an important contribution to local cumulative effects monitoring because they highlight local accounts of environmental change, which are often missed in broad-scale assessments, and they emphasize the concerns of local land-users. This underscores the importance of including indigenous insights in cumulative effects monitoring and suggests that combining quantitative assessments of environmental change with the knowledge of local land-users can improve regional cumulative effects monitoring. / Graduate

This Inuvialuit ‘story’ revolves around the Inuvialuit uprising and resurgence against government and industrial encroachment, and the self determination efforts to regain sovereignty of traditional territories. This ‘story’ also discusses how meaningful consultation made the Inuvialuit Final Agreement a reality, through which Inuvialuit land rights and freedoms were formally acknowledged and entrenched in the Canadian Constitution. Through meaningful consultation, Inuvialuit have become ‘meaningful participants’ in sustainable and future-making decisions of Inuvialuit nunangat (Inuvialuit lands) and waters, with respect to the Inuvialuit People and natural beings that Inuvialuit depend upon and maintain relationship with. As ‘meaningful participants’, Inuvialuit have the sovereign rights to “make meaning” and carve out a future as a sovereign nation within the country of Canada. This Inuvialuit ‘story’ is told with an informal framework through which it decolonizes academia, while also highlighting Indigenous voice through an Indigenous lens and worldview. The government and industry are called upon to meaningfully consult with Indigenous Peoples who have not only inhabited Turtle Island for millennia, but who have inherent Indigenous rights and freedoms, as Indigenous embodiment and well-being, and temporality and future-making are entangled with homelands. / Graduate