Wearing two layers of gloves makes it difficult to hold a pen, let alone take the quick, legible notes required of a boots-on-the-ground reporter.
Dressing in more layers than she was ever accustomed to wearing—even back home in Toronto, Canada—was one of several challenges Caroline Dignard (SPH’24) faced when she traveled to Iqaluit, Nunavut during April 2025 to learn from local residents about their efforts to secure food sovereignty for their community.
Dignard, a former Public Health Post fellow, received a 2024 Pulitzer Center Reporting Fellowship for her proposal to cover Inuit-led solutions to the prohibitively high cost of importing food to the region and the resulting decades of rampant food insecurity among residents. Through the funding and mentorship provided by the fellowship, Dignard organized a three-week visit to Iqaluit to hear firsthand how Inuit leaders have initiated a resurgence in traditional hunting, gathering, and cooking methods to combat the food crisis.
During her stay, Dignard rented a little two-room house in the center of town. There, after a brisk walk back from any conversations she struck up during the day, she would write down any highlights she had committed to memory. From these many threads of conversations, she weaved a story about the reclamation of “country foods”—from the butchering of bearded seal to the fermenting of fish heads in beluga blubber—and the restoration of access to affordable and nutritious diets in the Arctic. The piece was recently published by the Pulitzer Center.
“At first, it was trial and error,” says Dignard of approaching sources for the story. “It makes sense that people from the North are pretty wary of outsiders coming in and asking questions. They have been burned so many times, and I was acutely aware of that sort of power dynamic.”
Before arriving as a guest in Iqaluit, Dignard was careful to conduct thorough research so she would arrive informed and prepared from day one.
“So many times, the way that people write about Indigenous people, Inuit people, is from a place of suffering, and that is not what I saw when I was in Iqaluit,” she says. “I saw a bunch of really engaged, smart people doing what they could to help their communities. I think especially in the Inuit culture, which is so based in community and sharing, food sovereignty just makes sense.”
To learn more about Inuit food sovereignty, read Dignard’s story at the Pulitzer Center website link below:
