E8 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST. SUNDAY, APRIL 10, 2022 EZ EE E9
ship, 91 miles by ATV (four-wheel and
tracked), 210 miles by snowmobile, 3,473
miles by road vehicles, and 41 miles on
foot, and the only threats I could see were
those caused by global warming. Some-
times the most valuable tool I had was
listening, which gave me a vast resource
of history, political understanding and
science.
I grew up in Canada and have photo-
graphed the Arctic since 1993, when
diamonds were first discovered in Cana-
da’s far north. When I first flew 29 years
ago into Yellowknife, a hub many use to fly
north of the Arctic Circle, I was confronted
by striking gold miners who had been
deadlocked in a long, bitter standoff that
resulted in a bombing that killed nine
miners. It would be decades until I
experienced the usual images of the Arctic
most think of, like polar bears, but I was
surprised that the animal I saw most was
the raven, the smartest bird on the planet.
In nearly three decades since first going
to the Arctic, I have come to learn a few key
things when it comes to the polar region
that came out of my fieldwork for my
visual reporting. The first thing I learned
was that the Arctic is not one place or
thing, but can be more than 100 issues and
narratives depending on who you are and
what your goal is. What I found was that I
had to become a student and that Indig-
enous people are the original scientists of
the Arctic. I have learned more about
ancient technologies for navigating and
understanding weather and animals from
Inuit elders than anyone else, which has
helped me see how the region is undergo-
ing a drastic change that will affect our
perceived safety to the south.
While traveling along the Northwest
Passage, I began creating n on-pictorial
conceptual documentary photographs vi-
sualizing the environmental trauma of the
region. I took 4-by-5-inch sheets of large-
format film and instead of conventionally
exposing them to light in a camera, I
pressed them against the ground, render-
ing physical marks on the film reflecting
the state of the planet in that spot.
At one point while on an icebreaker
with scientists, we passed Terror Bay,
named after the HMS Terror, the British
bomb ship that attacked Fort McHenry in
Baltimore in 1814. The Terror was even-
tually turned into an exploration vessel,
which took it to Antarctica and eventually
the Arctic. In 1845 it sailed from England
in search of a new shipping route from
Europe to Asia.
B ut the journey was ill-fated, and the
sunken wreckage wouldn’t be found until
2016 in Canada’s Arctic. It wasn’t clear
until then that the ship, which in its time
boasted the greatest naval knowledge and
technology, had become trapped in the ice
and crushed, all because the crew lacked
the thousands of years of Inuit knowledge
of nature and the environment.Louie Palu: Distant Early Warning Through
May 20 at the Albin O. Kuhn Library and
Gallery at the University of Maryland,
Baltimore, 1000 Hilltop Cir., Baltimore.
library.umbc.eduSTORY AND PHOTOS BY LOUIE PALUT
he militarization of the North
American Arctic began during
the Cold War in the 1950s and
now involves all Arctic nations
— Canada, Finland, Greenland
(Denmark), Iceland, Norway, Russia, Swe-
den and the United States. The people of
the region face many unknowns because of
perceived threats and the imagined geopo-
litical battlefields of the future.
“Distant Early Warning” is my long-
term project on the constantly evolving
state of a perceived militarization of the
North American Arctic from the legacy of
the Cold War to facing the unknown
threats from a shrinking ice cap and
changing climate. I use the word “per-
ceived” because since the Cold War, the
militarization of the Arctic has been based
on an imagined threat and attack that has
evolved into many things. The changes in
the region are exacerbated by the many
unknowns the Arctic faces, among them
the warming of the planet. In political
capitals like Washington, where I live,
regions such as the Arctic — which are
inaccessible to nearly all of us to experi-
ence in person — can exist only in our
imaginations via journalism or visual art
like photography.
Invented narratives, imagined possibili-
ties and ideas around claiming territory,
resource extraction and the new economic
opportunities resulting from the loss of
sea ice have elevated concepts about how
to secure the Arctic. One of my key
takeaways from years of on-the-ground
fieldwork is that if any army ever tried
invading North America over the North
Pole, it would result in the biggest search-
and-rescue operation in history, because
nature is the most powerful force in the
world, especially when the temperature is
below minus-50 degrees. I have been to
places in the Arctic where a medevac could
take a week or more because of the
weather, which is longer than in any war
zone I have covered.
After covering several wars — including
in Afghanistan for nearly five years,
Ukraine and the drug war in Mexico — I
turned my attention to examining the
growing geopolitical tensions and chang-
ing life around Canada’s Inuit communi-
ties, Greenland and Alaska, which is just
over 50 miles away from Russia. The
fieldwork took place over years in one of
the coldest and most geographically beau-
tiful — but logistically challenging —
places on the planet, excepting its South-
ern cousin Antarctica.
I wanted to know what had happened
to one of the oldest active imagined “front
lines” in the world, which was once
known as the DEW Line, a.k.a. the
Distant Early Warning Line, now called
the North Warning System. It was one of
the largest construction projects in the
North American Arctic. It is composed of
radar and military installations from
Alaska across Canada to Greenland and is
still in operation today. I traveled 104,431
miles by airplanes large and small, 506
miles by helicopter, 5,882 miles by boat orPhotography
Militarization of the
North American Arctic
A photographic study examines one of the planet’s harshest yet
most beautiful places — and the complexities it representsCLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Just south of
the Arctic Circle, U.S. soldiers parachute
from aircraft into the Donnelly Training
Area near Fort Greely, Alaska, an Army
launch site for anti-ballistic missiles. An
image from a 4-by-5-inch sheet of film
rubbed onto the ground at Terror Bay in
Canada’s Nunavut territory documents
environmental trauma. Canadian Rangers
from Resolute Bay and Arctic Bay train
soldiers in Arctic survival at temperatures
as low as minus-75 degrees at the Crystal
City training site at Resolute Bay in
Nunavut. Canadian Master Bombardier
Jonathan Caron Corriveau holds survival
candles, his only source of heat in an igloo
he built in the Arctic Operations advisers
course, where soldiers learn from Inuit
instructors how to build and sleep in
improvised shelters at the Crystal City
training area. Canadian military
personnel unload komatiks, Inuit-designed
sleds built by hand using wood and rope,
from a military cargo aircraft in Hall
Beach, Nunavut, in 2017. It was the first
time an aircraft that large had landed in
the community as the military plans for
future operations in the region.On reconnaissance on Cornwallis Island in Nunavut, Canada Arctic Operations
advisers walk on airplane wreckage in temperatures below minus-55 degrees.