Nunavut’s Quttinirpaaq park still on Canada’s World Heritage Site submission list

A muskox blind is one of the many sites left by early Inuit within the boundaries of Quttinirpaaq National Park. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

A view into the Tanquary Fiord and the headquarters of Quttirnipaaq National Park, which has earned a place on Canada’s tentative list for the World Heritage Site inclusion. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

You can help weigh in on Canada’s nominations for future World Heritage sites, which include the tentative nomination of Quttinirpaaq National Park in Nunavut, Parks Canada says.

Parks Canada put out a call last month for nominees to a special ministerial advisory committee who will assist as Canada updates its nominations for World Heritage Sites.

These are natural and cultural heritage properties “with strong potential” to be inscribed on the World Heritage List for their “outstanding universal value,” such as the pyramids of Egypt, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the Taj Mahal in India and Yellowstone National Park in the United States.

Properties can only be nominated for inscription on the World Heritage list if they are first included on a country’s tentative list.

As of July 20, 2016, five of the 11 sites that were on Canada’s 2004 tentative list have been inscribed as World Heritage Sites.

The remaining six sites include Quttinirpaaq, nominated for its “outstanding universal value” due to its:

• “exceptional testimony to the earliest and successive human occupations of the Canadian Eastern High Arctic by the early Paleo-Eskimo and subsequent cultural traditions;”

• “exceptional natural scenic beauty;”

• “outstanding examples of major stages of the earth’s history;” and,

• “diversity of species, with a wide range of Arctic species, including endangered Peary caribou.”

Quttinirpaaq, which includes mountains, ice caps, glaciers, ice shelves and fiords, borders on the Arctic Ocean and rises to Mt. Barbeau at 2,616 metres, the highest mountain in eastern North America. Mt. Barbeau is a nunatak, described as an exposed, often rocky part of a ridge, mountain, or peak not covered with ice or snow within an ice field or glacier.

Early Inuit peoples used the area’s valleys as they moved from the Canadian Arctic to Greenland, 4,500 to 3,000 years ago, and the park has one of the highest concentrations of pre-contact sites surveyed in the High Arctic.

The advisory committee will be composed of six Canadians who represent a broad base of knowledge in heritage conservation and must include Indigenous peoples, Parks Canada said.

They’re scheduled to meet in early December 2016 and by November 2017 to decide on a final list of sites to recommend to the minister for Environment and Climate Change and Parks Canada.

But nominations must be submitted by Sept. 23.

For any questions regarding the process to select candidates for the committee, you can contact Parks Canada at tentativelist@pc.gc.ca or 1-866-862-3378.