Who’s got pins? Who wants pins? Plenty of haggling at Arctic Winter Games

The most important thing in pin trading is to not get duped, says 15-year-old Arctic Winter Games volunteer and pin enthusiast Elliot Gishler from Whitehorse.

Official Team Nunavut pins are displayed in the CBC News collection at Canada Games Centre i Whitehorse. (Photo by Arty Sarkisian)

“Are you kidding me? I will not be trading for that,” he said when someone tried to get him to exchange a CBC News pin for one from Team Nunavut’s set.

“I can get that myself for free,” he said. The CBC booth offering a big supply of those pins was just a few feet away at the Canada Games Centre.

Pin trading is an unofficial sport of the 2026 Arctic Winter Games.

Just about every organization arrived with their own pin sets – from RCMP with their polar bears dressed in red serge; to Air North, the Yukon airline that gave away pins with its logo on them.

Every self-respecting athlete or visitor has an album, a scarf or at least a lanyard filled with different pins.

All eight teams participating in these Games have their own collection of pins. Each athlete receives a few sets and is encouraged to exchange them with their rivals as a way to meet new friends. Team Nunavut’s pins depict a Dene game called pole push.

“You have to be strategic,” said Nunavut basketball player Nic Alainga, who by the end of day 2 already had the full Alberta, Yukon and Alaska sets.

“I just make them give me more than one pin for just one of mine.”

The pin exchanging is an “ice breaker,” said Nunavut curler Arianna Atienza.

“You start talking about pins and get to know them a bit better,” she said.

With the Arctic Winter Games in Whitehorse bringing together approximately 2,000 athletes from eight different circumpolar regions, there are a lot of international friends to be made.

The Games also brought some lifelong pin-trading experts to Whitehorse, such as Krassi Stamenov.

“These are my treasures,” he said at his table covered with hundreds of pins at Canada Games Centre on Monday.

Dozens of people approached him offering their pins.

“You see how they smile?” Stamenov said, after a young girl traded her Air North pin for an Arctic Winter Games pin from 2023, when they were held in Wood Buffalo, Alta.

But sometimes, people will try to make different kinds of trades.

“I will give a full Alaska set for that coat,” volunteer Mickey Yu told Kyle St. Laurent, a Nunavut speedskating coach who was wearing the team Nunavut blue-and-yellow jacket.

St. Laurent declined.

“Oh, come on, you have a few from previous years, don’t you? How about an Alaska and Yukon set?”

“I am keeping the coat,” St. Laurent said, and walked away.

The Arctic Winter Games opened last Sunday and run until Saturday.

Teams from Nunavut, Nunavik, Alaska, Yukon, the Northwest Territories, northern Alberta, Greenland and the Sápmi region of Scandinavia are competing.