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Indigenous peoples in Canada’s North, especially youth, are increasingly using creative visual arts, such as film, video, and new media technologies to portray their own realities and their personal view of the surrounding environment, thereby contesting colonial, stereotyped media representations of First Peoples. To analyze the youth geography—a sub-discipline of human geography—of nuna (“land” in Inuktitut) and istchee (“land” in Cree) and to understand the distinctive and contemporary meanings that Inuit and Cree young people give to the land, we carried out participatory video (PV) workshops in three Inuit and one Cree communities in Nunavik in 2016, 2017, and 2019. In this paper, we give an account of the nuna/istchee PV project as a method for engaging with young Indigenous people, as a means to develop an Indigenous youth cultural geography in the Arctic. We discuss the effects of PV on the different actors involved in the research process: young Inuit and Cree participants and their communities, the participating schools, and researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a mathematical model and statistical methods to quantify trends in presence/absence observations of snow cover (not depths) and applies these in an analysis of Northern Hemispheric observations extracted from satellite flyovers during 1967–2021. A two-state Markov chain model with periodic dynamics is introduced to analyze changes in the data in a cell by cell fashion. Trends, converted to the number of weeks of snow cover lost/gained per century, are estimated for each study cell. Uncertainty margins for these trends are developed from the model and used to assess the significance of the trend estimates. Cells with questionable data quality are explicitly identified. Among trustworthy cells, snow presence is seen to be declining in almost twice as many cells as it is advancing. While Arctic and southern latitude snow presence is found to be rapidly receding, other locations, such as eastern Canada, are experiencing advancing snow cover. Significance Statement: This project quantifies how the Northern Hemisphere's snow cover has recently changed. Snow cover plays a critical role in the global energy balance due to its high albedo and insulating characteristics and is therefore a prominent indicator of climate change. On a regional scale, the spatial consistency of snow cover influences surface temperatures via variations in absorbed solar radiation, while continental-scale snow cover acts to maintain thermal stability in the Arctic and subarctic regions, leading to spatial and temporal impacts on global circulation patterns. Changing snow presence in Arctic regions could influence large-scale releases of carbon and methane gas. Given the importance of snow cover, understanding its trends enhances our understanding of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The understanding of traditional security is undergoing a more multi-faceted transformation. Security itself is no more regarded as being limited to a physical presence, it requires a stable self as well. Claiming this, ontological security theory enables scholars to examine state behavior which strengthens identity values via self-narratives. This study aims to reveal that the traditional security perception of Canadian governments is limited in evaluating their relations with the Arctic states and indigenous people, therefore, in recent years, the relevant governments have provided Canadian ontological security in the Arctic region by constructing indigenous people as self-narratives. Therefore, in this paper, instead of traditional national security, it is mentioned that ontological security theory better articulates the state behavior of Canada both domestically and internationally. In the study, the qualified document analysis method is used by examining the reports that include the indigenous peoples as a significant part of Canada's national identity and the declarations announced at the ministerial meetings of the Arctic Council after the chairmanship of Canada. In this way, the study concludes by mentioning that Canada has built its ontological security by constructing self-narratives from indigenous peoples to have a robust position in the Arctic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]