Film depicts temperature change
Michele LeTourneau
Northern News Services
Sachs Harbour (Nov 27/00) - If someone told you that he was out catching salmon, you probably wouldn't think twice.
But if he told you salmon have never come as far north as his home in Sachs Harbour you'd wonder, just like the salmon-catcher, what the heck was going on.
It's called global warming, and for the residents of Sachs Harbour it's a reality that's changing their way of life.
Sila Alangotok (The Weather is Changing), a Northern-made video, documents the arrival of salmon, the disappearance of seal, the melting of permafrost, and the arrival of thunder and lightening.
"These are changes that result in uncertainty," says narrator Rosemarie Kuptana.
"When I first used to work at the airport up here, when I first reported a thunderstorm for the first time, they said You guys can't get thunderstorms. It's too cold,'" says one resident.
The video records the chilling changes that Sachs Harbour residents have been noticing these last few years.
"This is one of my favourite projects," says Yellowknife-based videographer Terry Woolf.
"The people in Sachs Harbour were so incredibly co-operative, helpful and kind."
As an example, Woolf recounts the story of asking Andy Carpenter if he had any old pictures that could be used in the historical portion of the documentary.
"We get to the old warehouse and he pulls out 12 rolls of 16 mm footage his father had shot in 1948 to 1953 that nobody's ever seen before," Woolf says.
The videographer has a laugh when talks about wanting to film the salmon.
"I asked, 'Where's the salmon?' They just said, 'Oh we ate them.'"
So much for the salmon. But Woolf got tons of great material of the changed landscape, while residents described what it was like before.
For a people who depend on the land and on the predictable climate, the most extreme obstacle now is the unpredictability of the weather.
"You want to affect people, and it really has," says Woolf.
"(Viewers) can see directly the effects of global warming on these people that are on, from, and of the land."
Woolf shot the documentary for the International Institute for Sustainable Development, based in Winnipeg.
Sila Alangotok made its debut in the Hague, Netherlands at United Nations convention on climate change. Over 6,000 participants from 160 governments attended the conference, which ended last Friday. The video had a huge impact at the conference, and showed the true effects of greenhouse gases. on the environment.
Image: a muddy, mucky expanse of land -- there once was a fresh-water lake here, says a voice-over. But the permafrost has melted and collapsed, and the lake water drained into the ocean.
In the winter, says another resident, kerosene would turn milky and fuel would be thick like jelly. We don't get that anymore.
Baby seals die because melting sea ice separates them from their mothers. Hunters fall through the ice because the ice has thinned dramatically.
Buildings are shifting and cracking and windows are breaking because the permafrost is melting.
These are only a few examples of the frightening effects of climate change.
"Virtually the whole town makes a living from the land in some way," says Kuptana near the end of the video.
Woolf is proud of the production, not only for helping to document such an important subject, but also because it is Northern-made.
"Even though the money was raised outside the North, and the producers were from outside the North, all the creative elements come from the territories," he says.
Sila Alangotok will air on APTN Dec. 14.
