The Arctic Circle is non-profit, volunteer organization made up of people who enjoy learning, talking and sharing information about the North.

The annual cost of membership is….

• Regular:
  (residents of the National Capital Region): $30.00
• Out of town:
  (living outside the National Capital Region): $20.00
• Students:
  $15.00

The Executive

Chris Burn (President) holds an NSERC Northern Research Chair at the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Carleton University. He came to Canada in 1981 as a Commonwealth Scholar, and completed both the M.A. and Ph.D. at Carleton, studying permafrost. He then moved to U.B.C. as a Killam Fellow, to study with J.Ross Mackay, the world authority in his field. Chris is a Vice-President of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, and has been Chair of the Canadian Northern Studies Trust (CNST), and of the Advisory Board to the Polar Continental Shelf Project. He has just finished his term as inaugural Chair of the CNST Natural Science Committee which assists in adjudication of the Garfield Weston Awards. He published Heart of the Yukon: a natural and cultural history of the Mayo area in 2006, jointly with Mark O'Donoghue and Lynette Bleiler. Chris is the key contact for the Circle, and can be reached at christopher_burn@carleton.ca.

Pat Sutherland (Vice President) is a Curator at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, and a Research Associate at the Carleton University School for Studies in Art and Culture. Since 1975 she has undertaken research in Arctic Canada and Greenland. Her studies have included the Inuit and pre-Inuit occupations of the High Arctic and the Mackenzie River Delta, the mediaeval Norse colonies of Greenland, and the lost Franklin expedition. She co-curated the award-winning exhibition Lost Visions, Forgotten Dreams: Life and Art of an Ancient Arctic People, which was produced at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. She has published and lectured widely on her research, which most recently has focused on the question of Native/Norse contact in the Canadian Arctic.

John Bennett (Past President) studied geography (BA Hons, University of Western Ontario 1980) and Canadian Studies (MA, Carleton University 1986). At Carleton he studied Northern and Native Studies with Graham Rowley, one of the founders of the Arctic Circle. John worked for nine years at the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada (now Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami) first in the youth council program and later as editor of Inuktitut Magazine. He then spent seven years as an independent researcher and consultant specializing in Inuit culture and history. Since 2001 he has worked at the Canadian Polar Commission , where he edits the northern science publication Meridian.

Thomas Frisch (Secretary) is a geologist (BSc Hons, Queen’s University, 1962, PhD, University of California Santa Barbara, 1967) who spent his entire professional career with the Geological Survey of Canada. His first experience of the Arctic was as a student assistant on a GSC field party in central Ellesmere Island in 1962. Tom subsequently spent some 23 summers in the North, working in the Precambrian Shield of the Eastern Arctic, northern mainland and Greenland. Although retired since 1996, Tom continues his association with the GSC on a volunteer basis. Besides geology, Tom’s interests extend to book collecting (geology and Arctica) and Arctic history.

David Terroux (Treasurer) (Biography to follow)

The Committee

Weston Blake, Jr. (Arctic Circle member since 1951; VP 1969-1970 & 1985-1986; President 1987-1988) is an Emeritus Research Scientist, since 1995, at the Geological Survey of Canada, where he started in 1962. Arctic field work in glacial geology, glaciology, geomorphology and marine geology has been carried out between 1952 and 2007. In addition to the Arctic Archipelago, plus Labrador and the mainland around Bathurst Inlet, Wes has worked extensively in Svalbard and North-West Greenland. Shorter excursions and collecting trips have been made to Arctic Fennoscandia, Iceland and Russia. His degrees are in geology (Dartmouth AB 1951, Ohio State Univ. PhD 1962) and in physical geography (McGill MSc 1953; Univ. of Stockholm Fil. Lic. 1964, Fil. Dr. 1975). In 2001 he was awarded the Canadian Quaternary Association's W. A. Johnston Medal.

Laurie Buckland was a wildlife biologist based in Yellowknife for 10 years, where she conducted wildlife field studies throughout much of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. She later worked as a consultant for Golder Associates in Calgary, where she specialized in environmental assessments for development projects north of 60. In 2006-2007 she completed a Graduate Diploma in Science Communication at Laurentian University in Sudbury. Laurie has been a member of the Arctic Circle since 2007.

Laurie L. Consaul (biography to follow)

Luke Copland (biography to follow)

Lynn Gillespie, a botanist with the Canadian Museum of Nature, specializes in arctic flora and the systematics and evolution of flowering plants. She studied biology at Carleton University and obtained her PhD in botany from the University of California, Davis. She is one of the authors of the 2007 Canadian Museum of Nature CD-ROM publication Flora of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, a comprehensive guide to the 349 ferns and flowering plants of the Canadian Arctic Islands.

David Gray is an Arctic biologist and historian. David Gray has studied birds and mammals in Canada's High Arctic since 1968. As a research scientist with the Canadian Museum of Nature, he researched the behaviour of muskoxen, Arctic hare, Arctic wolves, and red-throated loons. As an independent researcher since 1994, he has prepared reports on Peary caribou, wolves, three northern national parks, and the history of Arctic exploration. David is a Research Associate at both the Canadian Museum of Nature and the Canadian Museum of Civilization a Fellow of the Arctic Institute of North America.

Jack D. Ives attended the University of Nottingham, obtaining a first class honours B.A in Geography in 1953, and completed his doctorate at McGill University. Jack has published extensively on the Canadian Arctic, Iceland, the Himalayas, South-Western China, and Central Asia and has supervised more than fifty Masters and Doctoral candidates. The recipient of numerous international awards, he is an Honourary Research Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton University.

Helen M. Kerfoot, a former President of the Arctic Circle, is an Emeritus Scientist with Natural Resources Canada. As a geographer, with experience in teaching, government research and administration, her interest in the Arctic stems from working with UBC, the Geological Survey of Canada, and Indian and Northern Affairs on geomorphological and land-use projects in the Canadian Arctic. Fieldwork areas included the Mackenzie Delta, Beaufort Sea coast, Banks Island, and Sverdrup and Ellesmere islands. More recently she has been involved with geographical naming and the United Nations, which includes investigating aspects of indigenous names, collecting local names, database development, and advancing international cooperation in training and distribution of data.

Tom Lukowski has enjoyed a career in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) which began with the RADARSAT Project in 1983. He has held positions at the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing and, most recently, at Defence Research and Development Canada. His interest in the North was kindled during experimental work with the CCRS airborne SAR in Prudhoe Bay in 1990.

Roger McNeely (biography to follow)

Donat Savoie has been involved with Northern issues since student days in the late 1960s at the University of Montreal, where he wrote a Master’s thesis on Inuit of northern Quebec. Shortly thereafter, he joined the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs where he served in a number of senior capacities, including Chief Federal Negotiator for the Nunavik Self-Government Project. He has held, among other professional appointments, the Vice-Presidency of the Canadian Man and Biosphere Program of UNESCO.