Martina Tyrrell

• PhD
• Writer and Editor at Freelance

In communities across the Arctic, the formation and evolution of sea ice each year is accompanied by the practice of season- and environment-specific forms of hunting, travel, and leisure. On the dynamic and ephemeral ice, these practices are shaped by the relationships, movements, and actions of human and nonhuman actors, and are entwined in expre...

In the past decade, polar bears have become the poster species of climate change. But in March 2013, a joint proposal by the governments of the United States and the Russian Federation to up-list polar bears to Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) diverted public attention from cl...

Inuit and scientists are increasingly aware of the presence of contaminants in the Arctic food web and of the threat these contaminants pose to human and environmental health and well-being. The varied ways that Inuit think about and react to contaminants in the foods they eat are explored in a case study of one Inuit community: Arviat, on the nort...

In the Arctic, there has long been a strong relationship between Inuit and beluga whales. As well as being considered sentient creatures, Inuit value these small white toothed whales for nutritional, economic, social, and cultural reasons. They are a staple food for many Inuit, and in the complex set of social activities that surround the hunting,...

Beluga whale hunting is one of the most social subsistence hunting activities to take place in the Canadian Arctic. Through the harvest, distribution and consumption of beluga whales, Inuit identity and social relationships are affirmed. The whale-hunting complex is influenced by beliefs that beluga whales are sentient beings who inhabit a shared s...

How do we come to know the places we inhabit? What do places mean to us? What associations do we make with them? As an ethnographer and outsider I have grown, in a small way, to know places at sea along the northwest coast of Hudson Bay. In this paper I explore my growth into that knowledge, and how the sea became transformed from a blank space to...

Inuit and scientific perceptions of polar bear populations are grounded in different epistemologies, relationships and interactions with polar bears. In many communities, the presence of polar bear hunting quotas has led to both external and internal conflicts. Inuit throughout Nunavut are seeing more polar bears in close proximity to their communi...