♪ bouncy mandolin strumming ♪ add bass I'm a journalist and I am travelling across my home country Canada.

On this journey I'll be visiting some iconic Canadian experiences.

My next stop is in the home of Canada's first people, the Inuit, in the Territory of Nunavut.

♪ ♪ tranquil I've come to Iqaluit, the capital of the Territory of Nunavut.

It sits on Baffin Island in Frobisher Bay.

I've come here because I want to learn more about the Inuit and explore the Arctic Tundra.

♪ Tourism is a growing industry in Nunavut.

Traveling to Canada's most northern territory can be expensive but visitors are making their way up here.

They are coming by plane, cruise ships or expedition vessels.

One of the unique ways to learn more about the Inuit culture is by visiting families who are opening up their homes to tourists.

I traveled with other visitors to the Angnakak's family home where they greeted us with traditional throat singing.

(singers perform) Three generations are in this home today.

And we are so lucky to spend time with elder Meeka Arnakaq, who teaches us about the traditional inuit oil lamp known as the 'Quilliq'.

She speaks Inuktituk.

We use two kinds of plants - the Arctic cotton and that's one of them and the moss from the land.

So she has to combine the two plants to be used for the wick.

These two kinds of plants are used from the land.

So the Arctic cotton, Arctic willow.

They have this cotton on them through the summer and fall and this certain plant is moss, you have to find it in certain areas of the land so you have to look for it and find the right kind.

What is this?

This is vegetable oil.

In the summertime they used it in the tents but in the wintertime they had it in their Umukk.

The men who were who went out hunting out on the land to look for food they used it in their igloo.

It is for warmth and shelter.

And it is the source of heat for cooking meals.

This stick is called 'Taqqut' in Inuktitut.

Wow, and the power of the lamp, I mean it's quite small but it must have done a lot of work.

Yes.

Now she's starting to tend the Quilliq.

And whose job is it to tend the Quilliq?

It was the mother's role but it was also passed on to their daughters.

Even though they had not grown fully as adults or teens.

But it was the way to give them the practice to light the Quilliq and be able to light it on their own.

And how does it make you feel when you see it?

It is so soothing and relaxing because I got to witness it from my grandmother as well.

It's like you don't want to go anywhere else again.

I'm warm already.

(laughter) ♪ acoustic guitar I really wanted to get out on the land and see some of the plants first hand that Meeka was telling us about.

I hired a guide to take me out.

♪ This vast arctic tundra has a lot of bumps in it so we've chosen to take some ATVs to explore the region and I'm with Scott Thornhill, he's a guide here who has spent many years enjoying the arctic landscape.

Can you tell me a little bit about your background?

Yeah sure.

I came to the Arctic twenty-three years ago as a carpenter.

I fell in love with the Inuit people, the landscape, the culture and I just never left.

Wonderful.

And what sort of things do you do, where do you take people out in the Arctic?

I take people to see icebergs.

I take people to see polar bears, walrus, anywhere people want to go and take a beautiful photograph.

I will take them there.

Now let me ask you about your gun.

We have a gun with us.

What is that for?

Yeah.

So we are in polar bear country so we never leave anywhere on the land without a firearms for protection.

I carry mostly non-lethal rounds with me so bear bangers and rubber bullets.

That way we can stay safe without having to do any harm to the animal.

All right, you ready?

I'm ready!

Let's do it.

(engine starts) (engine revs up) [Scott] So this is Arctic cotton.

Beautiful.

Yes.

So it was used in the Qulliq as part of the wick to heat the fur tents and the igloos.

[Brandy] It's wonderful.

Hey this is a lot of work though if you had to go around and pick these I guess is the day that you would spend harvesting this and then collecting it for a long time for the winter?

It would be kept for the whole winter.

And the tundra has these beautiful different colors.

Right now autumn is beginning.

So we have yellow, we've got purple.

Do you know the names of any of these?

[Scott] This is actually blueberry.

This is a blueberry bush and as we can see right here.

That's an Arctic blueberry.

[Brandy] Wow!

Look how tiny the blueberry plant is.

[Scott] Our Arctic plants grow very slowly and very low to the ground which keeps them surviving.

But here in Iqaluit we are actually below the Arctic Circle right?

That's right.

Even though we're below the Arctic Circle we still are well above the tree line which makes us still all Arctic tundra.

OK... Let's hit that ATV, I want to explore more.

Let's get out of here.

♪ This plant right here is the lichen that the caribou eat.

Gorgeous, look at the colour.

Yes it's absolutely beautiful.

It grows in abundance all over the tundra.

This is what the caribou with their very well- developed hooves are digging through the snow for.

All winter long.

Neat.

There's one more right here that I'd like to show you too.

This is Labrador Tea.

So this would just be steeped in water.

So we would just peel all these right off here.

Put it in the water, steep it for about ten minutes and you have a beautiful cup of tea and it has a very nice pine-needles smell to it and has a very minty aroma and flavor to it.

It actually will act as a stomach medication.

So if you're feeling ill in the stomach we would use Labrador tea to make you feel better.

Wow.

Well listen thank you for showing me all these things on the tundra.

It's so interesting.

No problem - I'm glad to share.

♪ The next day my friends and I travel to the art studio of Jeweler Mathew Nuquingaq.

Mathew was appointed to the Order of Canada for his jewelry design.

He designs pieces that bridge contemporary style with classic Inuit imagery and is known for making jewelry from local materials.

And these, are from... Wow, from the muskox?

Wow these are so cool!

Look at these.

What do you think, ladies?

Amazing.

Do you want to try them on?

Sure!

And then the black part is baleen, like this one here.

Wow.

So where does the baleen come from?

It came from a bowhead whale.

A bowhead whale?

...are these glasses from the bowhead whale?

These are opera glasses.

Yes, very cool.

Wow.

We're lookin' good here.

Aren't we?

You gotta try those ones on.

Oh yeah.

All right.

Now is it difficult to make these glasses?

Actually the baleen is like, it's like plastic.

Really!?

You can bend it with heat and you can also bend it when wet, also, but... it polishes very nicely.

It's like a plastic - couldn't really tell a difference if it was really polished.

Well I know that they just harvested a bowhead whale recently.

Yes.

Are you going to be getting some of the baleen?

I have enough baleen from the last one.

[Brandy Yanchyk] Really!

Ha!

Okay... Well it's wonderful to see that every aspect of the animals are being used, right?

Yes, yes.

Even sunglasses are being made from the baleen.

Yes, they are.

Okay.

And then what do we have here?

This is incredible.

It's a walrus.

Whoa, so the face... it's like this right?

These are the tusks.

And what do you do with this?

This one...

I make them into beautiful door handles.

Door handles?...

OK. Let's have a look here.

Wow.... And look there inside here you have these beautiful sketches of - a whale.

This is a bowhead whale.

Is it?

I did four seasons there.

This one, a little guy is drying caribou with these stones.

Cache it for later use.

And this guy is a musher, a dog team.

[Brandy] I'd love to have a demonstration of some of the work that you do.

How can we help you?

You can hammer that.

I'm going to hold it.

I'm scared to hammer any of your jewelry.

What am I doing?

Just tap it there.

I'm hitting this?

Yup, right there.

Are you trusting me?

Oh yeah.

You're very brave, Matthew.

Are you sure?

Oh yeah, go ahead.

(tap) Ow!

Oh come on!

(laughter) What a rascal...

Okay.

Ready?

Yup.

Go ahead.

I'm not even going to ask how much this is worth.

(tap, tap, tap) A little bit harder.

I'm just looking for an apprentice, you have a chance.

I'd love to move to Iqaluit.

(tapping gets louder) How did I do?

Looks pretty good, a little bit more... here.

Okay.

(loud tapping) Maybe I just found my calling?

(laughter) Mathew, when people come here to Iqaluit what do you want them to learn about the people that are Inuit?

I guess.

You know, it's to respect of the land, you know it's one of the most powerful things there is.

You know.

And I get all of my ideas from the land because it's so beautiful.

You go out there you, you breathe beautiful air.

And then you see these lines, I try to copy the land, the simplicity of it, the beauty of it.

And trying to go back to simple, simple can be difficult.

Trying to get back to... you know, something simple ...design as possible is quite challenging.

Oh beautiful.

Thank you for sharing all of these treasures with us.

Thank you.

And your inspiration and your, your world.

Oh!

Thank you.

Wonderful.

Thank you for coming here!

♪ Here on the land in Iqaluit you really seen signs of how the Inuit culture is alive.

Right in front of me you see the spine or the vertebrae of a bowhead whale that was harvested starting in August.

You see different parts of blubber, and the insides and then behind me is the front of the bowhead whale.

And this is a real example of how the Inuit are passing along their traditional knowledge to the new generations today.

♪ My friends and I travel next to a local soap-maker's house.

Bernice Clarke is an Inuk lady, born and raised in Nunavut.

Bernice and her husband Justin make soap using whale blubber.

We have cultural hunts that are awarded to Inuit in three different regions.

We were very lucky to have one in our community because, I have to make the phone calls, pay for shipping but luckily it was here so my husband helped butcher and collected some blubber.

Wow, and this is the blubber right here right?

Yes.

And also this big chunk.

Yes, so that's the other part that's what you call the Muktuk.

The Muktuk and people eat Muktuk don't they?

Yeah definitely it's a delicacy.

Okay well tell me a little bit about how the process works with making the blubber into soap which you know we can take home with us and wash with later on.

Well the first thing you start with is your base, so you take your base and you melt it down.

As you can see we've got an olive oil base right here.

Okay.

And this one here is a goat's milk.

So we take those... if you wanted to, do you want to make a bar?

Yes please.

Perfect.

The lichen is caribou food.

[Bernice] I came across the idea of a spongy soap but also having Nunavut in our soap.

Each soap will look different.

So this one has peppermint mixed with it.

[Justin] Lichen is so nice, it's kind of like a loofah when the bar is cut and done you can use it as a natural exfoliant.

So it's, it's really, really nice.

It's beautiful but I worry that the caribou will try to eat my soap!

(laughter) And what do we do here, we just keep adding until a certain point?

That is good and now you pour this down the center.

And what is this?

So this one's goat's milk.

Not one bar is the same because it's... it's an artisan soap.

So you just make it.

Every person is different so the soap is going to end up being different too.

So we keep getting these tips from people that are coming to us and saying you need to try this.

So we tried the bowhead this way and another elder came to me and asked me to add Ujjuk.

Ujjuk is bearded seal oil and it was also used for healing.

Wow.

So it's turning into something else.

People, Inuit are coming to me and asking to incorporate it in our culture, into our business.

Which is wonderful because it's almost like the traditional information that they have from all those years that's been passed down to them.

Yes.

Is now being incorporated in your soap here.

Yes.

[Justin] This is our essential oil.

And what is an essential oil?

An essential oil is just basically all the goodness of a plant.

[Bernice] We did the peppermint oil now, and now we'll do the bowhead.

[Justin] Look at that goodness.

[Bernice] Our liquid gold.

Look at that.

Fantastic.

Let it go.

Yeah... Let it go.

Look at me just letting it go.

What an incredible experience.

It is really fun.

For sure.

I think that's perfect.

Now Brandy, did you want to try this one?

Look at the colors - it's huge, too.

So basically you have to fit all of that inside here and then you just cut like this.

Perfect.

And you know how big the pieces are because it's measured.

Yeah.

This is brilliant.

It fits our boxes, our soapboxes that we make.

Oh...

I see.

A method to everything.

Yeah.

All right.

Look at the colors - I see pink.

I see green.

It is a triple butter bar, so mango, cocoa and shea.

And some hand-picked tundra for natural exfoliant.

Good enough to eat and used to wash - so thank you so much for teaching us how to make soap and also teaching us about your culture.

It's fascinating.

Thank you.

I ended my trip staying up late, Aurora viewing.

The Northern Lights, also known as the Aurora Borealis, are spectacular natural phenomena, which are the result of solar particles entering the earth's atmosphere.

Nunavut is a great place to see the Northern Lights because of its lack of light pollution and location in the higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.

My next journey takes me southwest over two thousand miles across the country to the Province of British Columbia.

This place is known for its old-growth forests, ancient trees and wildlife.

I'm in Bella Coola in the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia.

I've come here to find a grizzly bear.

The Great Bear Rainforest is a magical place famous for its bears and wilderness.

It's part of the largest coastal temperate rainforest on earth.

Many visitors come here for grizzly bear viewing.

It's a growing industry.

One of the ways that you can see a grizzly bear is on a drift boat here in Bella Coola and I'm on the Atnarco River.

It's the salmon run, so our chances are high.

(ouboard marine motor) It's a big family of mergansers.

Look how cute they are.

Oh my God, there's a bear right there on the right!

So how close are we going to get to him?

Well he might walk right by us so we'll see where the bear wants to go but sometimes we get to be within ten to twenty meters depending on the bear.

♪ Brandy Yanchyk: So now I know why they call this place the Great Bear Rainforest.

We're on the water for like three minutes and a grizzly bear just walks in front of us and as he got closer to us...

I have to say that my fear started to rise.

I started to get a little scared but it just passed us by.

It didn't even care that we were here.

It was wonderful to be able to see the grizzly bear in its natural environment.

And that we were safe, the bear was safe.

It's just wonderful here.

How come we can get this close to the bears?

They don't seem to be nervous or scared or angry at us at all?

Well, Grizzly bears aren't inherently out to get us.

They're not really a predator of humans.

They're, they're looking out for their own.

So when we hear about bear attacks and all that we're really just hearing about the bears being defensive in most cases and predatory attacks are super super rare.

So here in this environment the bears are very well fed.

They're very happy and we kind of tread the fine line between being in the bear's territory but also being out of its safety zone and comfort zone.

So by being here in the boat the bear doesn't see us as a threat.

And we can actually sit here and watch them quietly while they go on their feeding in the salmon season.

[Brandy] What other certain techniques that you tell people when you come out here so that you have a chance to see bears?

So - bear safety versus bear viewing is a little bit different when I tell people to be safe in bear country.

I want to be loud, to be obvious whereas when we're viewing bears you don't really want to disturb them.

So we're trying to be respectful and gentle in the areas, not too loud, just talking at calm tones not yelling, not really pointing.

So really want to be watching those... kind of surprise signals.

Camera flashes can really set a bear off sometimes, too so just avoiding anything that would surprise the bear or make it feel uncomfortable.

[Brandy] We're here now in early September.

How many do you think you might see?

[Sam] Yeah, so right now September... the bears are kind of going after the salmon - they've finished with the berries for the season.

The Atnarco river corridor can have anywhere from ten to twenty bears depending on the year.

The Bears have a large range, so some years we don't see the same bears year after year and some years salmon support more bears than other years.

I know we're here and this is the Great Bear Rainforest, which has been in the headlines because grizzly bear trophy hunting has been banned here and in British Columbia.

What does that feel like to be in this environment knowing that the bears are safe now?

Yeah it's pretty special to hear about the news of the closure of the hunt.

Grizzly bears is one of the slowest reproducing animals in BC.

And they've been losing habitat left, right and center.

So here in the park, it's kind of a great place for the bears to be but outside the park they're unprotected for years and so it's great to see that, that protection is now extending in areas that aren't just part for the bears.

These are all primarily pink salmon here that we can see.

Pink salmon are our smallest salmon but they're also the most numerous.

They have the fastest lifecycle - about two years and they come back to spawn again.

So these salmon here are going to lay their eggs and pretty much die of exhaustion soon after.

The river is getting shallower and shallower each day, but the salmon kind of hold their position because they have this, this 'redd' that they're preparing for spawning.

They pick their spot and they'll stick to it.

And so even as the water gets shallower you can see that the fins and, and humps on the salmon sticking out.

♪ So on the one side of the river here, we have the lodge property and we have some trails that kind of go along the river to see the bears.

But it's important the bears have a kind of a space they can, they can avoid humans if they so choose.

So on the other side here is kind of a refuge.

We don't really go there at all and there are no trails and they don't plan on building any trails there.

And the other thing too, is we try and be on the river on very consistent times so that if the bears really don't interact with people they have a place and time they can feel they can feed without having disturbance from humans.

So some of the bears we see on the river here are quite complacent and very used to people and other bears only show up late at night.

And we see it from the viewing platform only.

The British Columbia government estimates that there are about fifteen thousand grizzly bears in the province.

Grizzly bears play a key role in keeping ecosystems healthy.

They distribute salmon nutrients into forests and help to transport seeds through their feces.

Because grizzly bears are so elusive and you never know when they're going to show up.

The lodges built these platforms so you can come here during the day any time when there's daylight except one hour before dusk and you can look out and see the grizzly bears in their natural environment doing their thing and they don't mind because we're on these elevated platforms, away from them.

And right now we see four grizzly bears right here!

Grizzly bears weigh about 220 to 880 pounds.

They can also run at speeds of around 28 miles an hour.

Typically they have one to four cubs.

I've had such a wonderful time here in Bella Coola.

The Great Bear Rainforest is gorgeous.

You have all these salmon spawning and these magnificent old growth forests.

It's wonderful to be here and of course the grizzly bears.

Sometimes they are right in front of you, other times you have to be patient and wait a little bit but it's definitely worth the wait.

♪