ABSTRACT
This collection of essays emerged from a conference held at Memorial University in St John’s, Newfoundland, in 2007 in recognition of the Fourth International Polar Year (IPY). One theme of the IPY was the investigation of the ‘cultural, historical and social processes that shape the resilience and sustainability of circumpolar human societies, and to identify their unique contributions to global cultural diversity and citizenship’. 1 The maintenance of health and treatment of illness and accidents in locations such as northern Scotland, Scandinavia, Finland, Russia and northern Canada, and coastal regions such as Newfoundland and Labrador can certainly be easily linked to notions of human ‘resilience and sustainability’ (even if some of these northern locales are not circumpolar).
