Bicycle Power, Up North

There are no cars in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. Aside from a few trucks, snowmobiles are the preferred form of transportation for much of the year in the hamlet high in the Canadian Arctic.


And given that only 1,477 people live in Cambridge Bay, and that the population lives on about a quarter of a square mile, probably no part of it is unknown to its residents.

All that would suggest that Google Street View has limited value there. But a pitch to Google from an Inuit man brought a tricycle fitted with Google’s camera system to the streets of Cambridge Bay on Monday as part of what the company expects to become a long-term project in Canada’s Far North.

The Inuit man, Chris Kalluk, said he approached Google with the idea of bringing Street View to the Arctic last year as a way to educate the rest of the world about the region. “People that have never been in the north, past trees, in communities you can only get to by airplanes; they just don’t know,” Mr. Kalluk said by telephone from Cambridge Bay, where he has lived most of his life. “They wonder if we live in igloos and travel by dog team. I spoke with an elder the other day who said that the land belongs to all the people, so everyone should be able to see it.”

Fishing and hunting trips, often covering long distances, remain an important part of life for the Inuit in Cambridge Bay, or Ikaluktutiak as its known in the native Inuinnaqtun language. But because magnetic compasses do not work in the far north, paper maps were rarely used for navigation in the past.

“People got around by recognition,” said Mr. Kalluk, 28, who is a geographical information systems coordinator for Nunavut Tunngavik, an organization that manages land claim settlements between the Inuit and the federal government and runs wildlife management programs. 

Thank you NYT for this article