I’m flying home, in an economy row seat. Air Canada flight AC100 from Vancouver to Toronto. It’s a few hours into the flight, and we’re somewhere over Saskatchewan. I turned on the in-seat entertainment screen, and found a video stream that shows a live video of our airplane from a camera mounted on the aircraft’s tail. Several thousand feet below us were foggy clouds covering the ground. I turned off the screen and took a nap. A few hours later, now somewhere over North-Western Ontario, I turned on the screen again. From 30,000 feet, the clouds looked almost identical to the ones over Saskatchewan. I still can’t quite adjust to the reality that travel from Tsiigehtchic to Toronto is by taxi and then an economy passenger jet. True, I’m cramped in a middle-row economy seat, and my in-flight food choices are between apple juice and orange juice, but these seem like small compromises for the relative comfort of cruising at 30,000 feet.

The captain announces that we’re an hour from Toronto. This is it – coming full circle. Not yet the end of the school year, but a milestone nonetheless. Three times this semester I seriously considered resigning from my position. I struggled from a mix of inexperience, teaching challenges, remoteness, and disriptions in our administration. There will be things for me to work on and improve over the holidays. All the same, when I spoke to some other teachers in Inuvik (the northern airport hub for this part of the Arctic), and realized that our school is holding together about as well as every other school. One school in the district has four teachers on stress leave. Another teacher read my mind when they said “surviving, not thriving.” I’d said exactly the same thing to myself a few days earlier. This first semester was hard, but we made it across the line. In many ways the first few months was a personal journey for me – learning what school was about, what students expected from school, and what living in our community was like. If these first few months were a personal journey, the next six months after the holidays need to be a school-wide journey.

All the same, I can reflect on what we achieved this semester. Our students participated in a variety of events on the land and on the ice. In the younger grades, the classes are progressing impressively with their teachers. I smiled thinking of a student in my class who was reluctant to write much for weeks, and then wrote a full-page paragraph in a matter of minutes. I smiled remembering a student who showed me how to shoot a basketball, and another few students who – despite their toughness – played an amazing game of badminton against each other in phys-ed.

We live in worlds together, and worlds apart. The sky-scrapers in Toronto, or Vancouver, or Montreal, could hold twice or three-times the population of Tsiigehtchic. The entire Northwest Territories has only 44,000 people. That’s barley the population of a Toronto neighbourhood. Each condominium could be its own northern town – at least in numbers. We live on opposite corners of the country, we have different history, in some cases different language. Is the only thing we have in common the fact that the Northern Stores, Canadian Superstores, and Loblaws, are all owned by the Weston Family?

Southern encroachment was everywhere I travelled in the north. In Whitehorse you see Tim Hortons, Canadian Tire, Quiznos Sub, Walmart, and a dozen tourist shops all selling the same mugs and shot glasses labelled “Yukon – North of Ordinary.” Food brands in northern grocery stores are largely the same as southern stores. Perhaps less obvious, but more significant, everyone uses Tiktok and Snapchat and Instragram. Most houses have Starlink. Some kids at our school wanted a VR gaming headset for Christmas. Everyone (it seems) plays Fortnite (one day at school a student asked if I would play with them – it struck me how kind this offer felt, but at the same time I realized I didn’t want to jump into an environment where teachers and students are shooting at each other).

What strikes me about this is that life in the North feels not so different from life in the South. Northernners and Sourtherners are not so different from each other. At least, this is how it feels walking through the “tourist” parts of town in Whitehorse. This is how it feels being a teacher who works in the school, and lives in an apartment a few steps from school. If I lived in Whitehorse, I probably wouldn’t spend much time window shopping at Steele and 2nd Avenue. If I lived in Tsiigehtchic, and wasn’t working at school, my feeling about how things are would probably be very different.

While I was at Inuvik Airport, I was looking at a birds-eye view map of the town, and another teacher came up next to me.

“You see these nieghbourhoods?” he pointed to the small south-western part of town, between Inuvik’s hospital and the town administrative buildings.

“That’s where all the people with administrative jobs live.” The streets and hoses looked typical of a southern Ontario suburb.

Then he pointed to another part of the city, that looked much less residential.

“You see here?” he pointed to the northern part of town, set behind the downtown shops and stores. The area looked more like a trailer park than a neighborhood. “When they re-developed the city, they moved most of the indigenous settlements here temporarily, except the move didn’t stay temporary.” I realized that during my “touristy” wandering around the streets of Inuuvik, my wanderings never took me in that direction. It made me think that even in Tsiigehtchic, beyond my apartment, and the Northern Store, and the School, I possibly know nothing about what life is like in the North.

One thing I noticed during my walk in Inuvik was that almost every house had a Starlink. We’re more connected than ever, and yet, we have vastly disconnected lives. Starlink connects me to my family in Toronto – but it doesn’t help me walk and knock on the next-door neighbour’s door in Tsiigehtchic (or anywhere…).

What I felt, in Tsiigehtchic, in Inuvik, and in Whitehorse, was that when I left the tourist shops on 2nd Avenue in Whitehorse, and walked along a community path, or in Tsiigehtchic walked out of my apartment, and went out on the land, or at the end of a school day, called a family at home, to share some work that their child had done in school that day - those were when I felt I’d connected to something about life in the North. Those were the moments I was invited fishing, or heard country radio playing in someone’s kitchen, tasted smoked fish, or saw little moments of family life.

Going home to see family has a warm feeling. Warmer than my parka (which has become more uncomfortably warm the farther south I travel). We have talked on Whatsapp most days, but I miss being there with them. Our flight is coming in to land. I can imagine exiting the baggage area, seeing my Mom or Dad, and giving them a big hug. Someone will be waiting at the airport. It is a wonderful feeling. Home for the holidays.

Merry Christmas – and Happy New Year.