The Missing Link

Here's one of those peculiar combinations of images from different worlds I often see combined by random chance up here: a soldier taking a snapshot of the missing link. The soldier is up here for an extensive military exercise that's taking place up here, the base that's normally used by scientists is now stuffed to bursting with people in camouflage gear, although I'm not exactly sure what good green camouflage is going to do in a place that is entirely brown, grey and white.

On the table in the office is a replica of a famous fossil that was discovered in 2006 by a scientist working from here. It's called Tiktaalik Roseae, and it's a creature that shows the intermediate stage of development between fins and legs, one of the first animals ever to have the bright idea of crawling out of the water onto land. Which probably seemed like a better idea back in the Devonian period, when the weather around here was apparently quite tropical.
The military exercises are part of an effort by the Canadian government to establish sovereignty up here. Apparently the Northwest Passage is being used by all sorts of riff-raff these days, every now and then the local people look out into the bay and see a submarine popping up, and nobody knows whose submarine it is or what it's doing there. Russians, collecting glacial ice for their vodka, perhaps. Apparently the Canadians are a bit behind technologically - the Russians have submarines and stuff, the Canadian Army on the other hand don't even have enough skidoos to go round, I hear. Which could slow them down a bit if the battle for the north takes place anywhere away from paved roads. However no armed force in the world can match them in a snowball fight.
So the Canadian armed forces are spread out across the Arctic practicing various tasks, in this particular neighborhood they have a doll hidden somewhere representing a lost little girl and they're trying to find it and rescue it. Which will teach those pesky Russkies a thing or two; they may have the submarines but in the end, it's the scrappy Canadian underdogs who get the girl.
This noble effort to convince the world that Canada really owns the Arctic has been going on at least since the fifties, when they took a bunch of Inuit from a nice place near Pond Inlet, full of caribou and seal, and relocated them up here to Resolute Bay, where there is little to hunt and the landscape is basically a gravel pit. Human flags, they called them, and planted them here to flap in the breeze. It's a shameful little incident in Canada's past, which a few years later they tried to fix up by taking children away from their parents and sending them off to residential schools. And we all know how that worked out.
Some of the people who got uprooted and parked in Resolute Bay in the fifties are still living here now. One of them is a wonderful lady named Zipporah, which is such a great name that I would be her biggest fan even if she weren't awesome, which she is. Coincidentally, there is a photo of her on the front cover of this week's Nunavut News, blessing the military's new Arctic Training Centre. Which is very nice of her, considering.

There is also a photo of a bunch of people wading into the Arctic waters to participate in the "polar dip." Which shows that the survival instincts that drove Tiktaalik up onto land have pretty much faded away, I think.