I think that heartbreak happens on a cellular level. 

I think heartbreak happens on a cellular level.

On Devon Island, I felt cold in a way I had never known, all the way into my bones. 

But that physical cold was inseparable from another kind of cold: the history of this land. In the 1930s and ’40s, Inuit families were forcibly relocated here by the Government of Canada to work at a trading post, promised only a temporary move, and instead endured years of displacement before finally being moved again. Their stories, and the impacts that rippled through generations, are part of the landscape itself, the silence, the abandoned harbour, the wind on the ice.

This connection between human history and the land reminded me that grief, like glaciers, is not separate from place,  it is part of it, shaping how we feel, how we remember, and how deeply we carry what came before.

Read more about the history of Devon Island and the forced relocations here:

The tragic history of the largest uninhabited island on Earth | National Geographic