Igloo
| Igloo ᐃᒡᓗᓕᒃ |
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| Location in Nunavut | |||
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| State : |
 Canada
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| Territory : | Nunavut | ||
| Region: | Qikiqtaaluk | ||
| Coordinates : | 69 ° 23 ′ N , 81 ° 48 ′ W | ||
| Residents : | 1538 (as of 2006) | ||
| Time zone : | Atlantic Time ( UTC − 4 ) | ||
| Postal code : | X0A 0L0 | ||
The settlement Iglulik ("place of snow houses"; English Igloolik ) is a municipality (English "hamlet") in the northern Canadian territory of Nunavut . It is located on an island of the same name off the mainland south of the Fury and Hecla Straits in a traditional region of the Foxe Basin , known by the Inuit Amittuq (literally: "It's narrow") .
The island has been inhabited by Inuit or their ancestors for more than 2000 years , and the village is now quite large by arctic standards with around 1,600 inhabitants (94% of them Inuit). There are close family ties to the residents of Arctic Bay .
The first Europeans to land here are the crews of the two ships Fury and Hecla , which wintered on the small island in 1822 under the command of William Edward Parry in search of the Northwest Passage . A Roman Catholic mission was established around 1930 and a Hudson's Bay Company post towards the end of the 1930s . In 1950 an architecturally remarkable Catholic church was built out of stone; Services have long been taking place in a new wooden church, as the stone church could not be heated and was too small. An Anglican mission did not come into being until 1959. In the mid-1960s a school, health center and police station were established. As can be seen from these annual figures, the area around Iglulik came under the influence of Euro-Canadian culture late in comparison with other Inuit settlements. Iglulik has therefore retained essential elements of its tradition despite growth and the penetration of influences of modernity and is still rooted relatively deeply in the traditional Inuit culture .
Today the place serves as a starting point for sledge and boat tours; Scheduled flight connection ( First Air Ltd.) exists with Iqaluit , the capital of Nunavut. When the Fury and Hecla Straits, which runs between Baffin Island and the Melville Peninsula, are still frozen in early summer and bowhead whales wait to migrate through the Hudson and Foxe Straits and the Foxe Basin to come north to Lancastersund , there are ideal conditions in the northeast of Iglulik to observe these giant marine mammals from the edge of the ice. At the same time, about eighty kilometers to the southeast in the Manning Islands area, hundreds of Atlantic walruses lie in small groups on floating ice floes and encamp on the islands en masse after the ice has melted.
Iglulik found international interest as an Inuit film center through the ISUMA institute after the film Atanarjuat (German: The fast runner) shot here was awarded the Golden Camera at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival .
From the Amittuq region also has a number of known is Inuit artists emerged, so among other Luke Airut (1942-2018), Bart Hanna and in (1948 *) Yellowknife living Germaine Arnaktauyok (* 1946).
literature
- Miriam Dewar (Ed.): The Nunavut Handbook: Traveling in Canada's Arctic . Ayaya Marketing & Communications, Iqaluit / Ottawa 2004, ISBN 0-9736754-0-3 (English).
