Polar Bears!!
July 14, 2025 By: Robert Pritchard
Conservation
I’ve chosen a media article which pertains directly to conservation; however, it is related to a class reading that is partially about conservation but more generally about parks. The article is from WWF Canada and is about the conservation of polar bears in northern Canada through investing in the mapping of denning habitats and population estimates by way of a new smart phone app: “SIKU”. How this ties to the course reading by Theodore Binnema and Melanie Niemi is the consideration (or lack thereof, in the case of the course reading) of Indigenous Peoples right to hunt. It was surprising for me to learn that measures even exist(!) to be taken to ensure sustainable Inuit harvesting of polar bears, a stark contrast to the 1870 Canadian Dominion government’s restriction of resident Indigenous Peoples from hunting within the newly created Banff National Park.
References
Binnema, Theodore and Melanie Niemi, “‘Let the line be drawn now’: Wilderness, Conservation, and the Exclusion of Aboriginal People from Banff National Park in Canada.” Environmental History 11, no. 4 (2006): 724–750. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3985800.
Ostroff, Joshua, “How We’re Helping Conserve Polar Bears, the Arctic’s Apex Predator”, World Wildlife Fund, (June 26, 2025). https://wwf.ca/stories/how-were-helping-conserve-polar-bears-the-arctics-apex-predator/.
Hey Robert,
I really appreciated your take on the article and how you connected it to Binnema and Niemi’s discussion of exclusion in Banff. I also focused on Indigenous leadership in conservation in my own post, so your point about Inuit hunting rights really resonated. It’s interesting how you highlighted your surprise that such measures (like the SIKU app) even exist. It made me wonder if other technologies, like citizen science apps, offer better support for Indigenous-led stewardship, rather than working against it.