By Michael Kwan
January 15, 2025, was my last day at work at the Nunavik Research Centre (NRC) and then I began my retirement. No fuss, no fanfare at the office; I just finished my last day of work and walked away quietly and uneventfully. Just the way I like it. After 29 years of service at the Research Centre I began a new chapter of my life here in Kuujjuaq, my only home. I arrived in Montreal in 1995 from the U.K. where I spent 16 years studying and working. At that time the then Makivik Research Centre in Kuujjuaq sent fish samples to the Centre of Indigenous People’s Nutrition and Environment (CINE) at McGill University for mercury analysis. Being a research fellow working at CINE, I was responsible for carrying out the analysis. That’s when my connection with Kuujjuaq and Makivvik started. The next year, the Research Centre managed to secure fundings from the federal, provincial and regional governments to set up the very first toxicological and contaminant analytical facilities in the Eastern Canadian Arctic. The then Director of the Makivik Research Centre, the late Dr. Bill Doidge asked me to come up to Kuujjuaq in the summer of 1996 for a six-month contract to set up the brand-new analytical lab and purchased all the necessary equipment. It was fun setting up all these new instruments. I am a tinkerer, and I just love analytical instrumentation. Kind of like a car enthusiast but it is for lab instruments instead of cars. I can still vividly remember when I first arrived at Kuujjuaq, the very first northern community I ever visited. Kuujjuamiut are super friendly and warm; many were curious about this new arrival and came to shake my hand. Many started talking Inuktitut to me without realizing I am not Inuk. Even now I still suspected that back then I might well be the first Chinese person who took up residence in Kuujjuaq. Toward the end of my six-month contract, I was offered the full-time position of toxicologist at the Research Centre and have been responsible for all the files relating to contaminants and toxicology ever since. And Kuujjuaq has become my home.
My first big project was the federal Government’s Northern Contaminants Program (NCP) funded study of spatial and temporal trends of heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in ringed seals and Arctic charr in the Canadian Arctic. The project spanned between 1998 and mid-2000. I still remember I was so eager to announce to the research community down south of our unique trace metal analytical facilities in Kuujjuaq which still is the only such facilities in the Eastern Canadian Arctic to date. Southern researchers were astonished and excited that such intricate analyses were being done in the North at a quality control and quality assurance level on a par with any southern lab. At this early stage I was trying to put our analytical capability on the map – just to say, ‘Hey we are here! And we can do such analyses just as good as any southern lab.’ In the NCP project our lab analyzed close to 2,000 samples collected by 24 communities throughout the Canadian Arctic including all 14 communities of Nunavik for trace metal contaminants. It was the most extensive survey of contaminants in ringed seals and Arctic charr ever undertaken for the Canadian Arctic.
Over the years I have identified two overall objectives for our analytical lab: (1) to analyze all wildlife species harvested for food by Nunavimmiut for metals that have important human health implications: mercury, lead, cadmium, arsenic, and selenium in order to build a database to ascertain the long-term time trends of contaminants in country foods over decades and (2) to pro-vide contaminant data to the Nunavik Regional Board of Health and Social Services (NRBHSS) for formulating public health mes-sages regarding food safety for communication to communities. Unlike many southern universities and research groups that carry out research purely for the sake of scientific interest and with the ultimate aim of publishing findings for peer scientists; the research carried out by the Nunavik Research Centre is first and foremost to address concerns voiced by Nunavik communities and to gen-erate results which are beneficial to Nunavik which I would say is the mandate of the Research Centre. In such respects we are very different from most southern researchers. Contaminant research at the NRC has evolved over the last three decades with new tech-nologies and methodologies but our mandate remains the same.
Apart from analyzing samples in our lab, my work had taken me to different parts of Nunavik to carry out fieldwork to collect samples for contaminant analysis and doing on-site water quality assessment upon requests from communities expressing concerns about mining and other infrastructure developments nearby that might affect their lands, watersheds, and wildlife.
Our contaminant research is heavily reliant on the active participation of local hunters, fishers, wildlife wardens, and students from communities in sample collecting and in their expert knowledge of the lands. Many of our research projects would not have been possible without the help of Nunavimmiut and we make it our utmost priority to communicate our findings back to communities.
We have always been a small, tight-knit team at the Research Centre, with expertise and skillsets that complement one another in many projects. Looking back, I am proud to have been part of this team—it has been the most rewarding period of my career as a toxicologist. Over the years, I have seen many colleagues move on to new opportunities, but the Research Centre has remained a place where people dedicate many years of service before taking the next step in their careers. As I said at my retirement party, which my Makivvik colleagues so kindly arranged: ‘It’s been a great run.’
