Preserving Heritage Sites on Quikiqtaruk — Herschel Island Territorial Park
“I remember getting off the Twin Otter and just being shocked by what I saw. Everything seemed so familiar, but so different”
As a young archaeologist in the 1990s, Peter Dawson spent three seasons working on Qikiqtaruk—Herschel Island.
“After that I went on and did my own archaeology in various areas of the Arctic, but I always had a soft spot for Herschel [Island],” he says. “It was just a fascinating place with this interesting intersection of Inuvialuit history and settler history.”
Over the years Dawson worked on many sites throughout the north, seeing up close the impacts of a changing climate on the western coast of Hudson Bay and in the high Arctic on Ellesmere Island. It made him think about what was happening on Qikiqtaruk — Herschel Island.
Nearly 30 years later in 2018, Dawson returned to the island as a professor and researcher with the University of Calgary. He was surprised to see how much the landscape had changed.
“I remember getting off the Twin Otter [airplane], and just being shocked by what I saw. Everything seemed so familiar, but so different,” says Dawson. “There were standing pools of water, some of the buildings had moved, and a lot of the coastline had changed.
“It was a real awakening, and it spurred my interest in digitally capturing and preserving the heritage resources on Herschel Island, so that they would remain accessible for future generations.”
The University of Calgary project, called Digitally Preserving Herschel Island — Qikiqtaruk Territorial Park, is done in partnership with the Yukon government.
Over the past five years, Dawson and his team have been collecting drone images and terrestrial LiDAR — also called 3D laser scans — of landforms, such as Pauline Cove and Avadlek Spit, and buildings, such as Inuvialuit sod houses, remaining whaling buildings, and the Anglican Mission.
“It’s kind of like a 3D camera,” says Dawson. “It emits millions of points of laser light as it rotates 360 degrees and calculates the amount of time it takes for each one to leave the instrument, strike the surface of a building, like a wall or what have you, and then return.”
Once an object, like a building, is scanned from many different angles those scans are stitched together to create a three-dimensional cloud made up of millions of points. The spacing between the points is less than a millimetre, so the measurements are incredibly accurate.
“That’s what makes these images so valuable,” says Dawson. “They’re not just a three-dimensional image. They actually have metric data attached to them, and that makes them invaluable because you can use them to create as-built architectural plans.
So, should anything happen to the actual buildings, the data could be used to either repair or restore them. The restoration and building maintenance work on the island is done by specialists with the Yukon government’s Historic Sites Unit. They use the data to find accurate measurements of building features and monitor changes.
In fact, this digital record serves many purposes. The images and data collected by Dawson’s team is available publicly through a well-visited website at herschel.preserve.ucalgary.ca. The website includes open-source data files on key landforms and buildings created through laser scanning and drone photogrammetry, stitching together overlapping photographs to create 3D models.
The website brings the experience right into homes and classrooms for people who may not be able to get to the island to experience it in person.
“A lot of polar heritage sites are very difficult for the public to get to because they’re in remote areas,” says Dawson. “With this archive the public can view and interact with 3D digital models of the various historic buildings and Inuvialuit sod houses, and also learn about the history and significance of Qikiqtaruk, what it means to Inuvialuit in the region today, and its history of Euro-North American whalers at the turn of the century.”
The research team has also used their data and worked with Inuvialuit communities to create educational tools for youth in schools. For example, they created a two-metre-long 3D model of Pauline Cove and turned it into a jigsaw puzzle for a school in Aklavik, NWT.
“In the process of building Pauline Cove as a jigsaw puzzle, they actually got a sense of what the cove looked like and the proximity of the buildings to the coastline,” says Dawson. “So, it was an amazing way for the kids to experience Pauline Cove and develop an understanding for some of the impacts that are affecting it in terms of coastal erosion.”
According to the Inuvialuit Final Agreement, it is the Yukon government’s responsibility to maintain the historic park to the standard of a national historic site. Climate change is making that increasingly more challenging.
The data collected through this project helps the Yukon government and other park caretakers make informed decisions about how best to protect the heritage resources on the island. Because the data points are so accurate it’s easier to see how buildings are moving and land is eroding.
“One of the things we found is that climate change is like watching the second hand of a clock move,” says Dawson. “It’s very difficult to detect when you’re on the ground, but these tools allow us to see everything everywhere all at once. It is such a powerful way of understanding the transformation that’s happening to that landscape.”
Dawson says the project will continue for the next decade at least to continue monitoring changes and digitally preserve heritage sites.
“I think we sort of take heritage for granted, you know? We just assume it’s always going to be there because it’s always been there, and I think sometimes it’s a bit of a shock when we learn that a site is lost,” says Dawson.
“So, it really is important that we do whatever we can, leverage some of these new technologies to make sure that people 50, 60, 70, 100 years from now, know what these sites looked like and how significant they are.”
