A few years back, a particularly imaginative young boy came into Georgina Berg’s kindergarten class in Churchill, Canada, full of excitement. Launching into his story, he said that moments earlier, on his way to school, he and his siblings had turned a corner and come face-to-face with a polar bear. Before the boy had time to react, his mother took hold of his backpack and swung it square into the bear’s nose. The bear took off running, and the family, a little shaken up, continued to school.

“This was one of my little guys that could tell a few stories,” Berg said. “I said, ‘Oh yeah…’ thinking he was embellishing it.”

But later that day, when the boy’s mother came to pick him up, she confirmed the story — right down to her backpack attack.

It’s a memory that Berg has become fond of recounting to outsiders to convey the defining aspect of life in Churchill, Manitoba — coexistence with polar bears (Ursus maritimus). As the Arctic warms, roughly four times faster than the global average, loss of sea ice means the bears can spend more time on land, near humans, each summer. Community members, most of them Indigenous, are largely in support of minimal bear management, say elders — a stance that follows traditional values of coexistence and respect for animals. This sometimes puts them at odds with officers from the government’s Polar Bear Alert Program, who are tasked with keeping Churchill’s residents safe from the large mammals.

Churchill sits at the western edge of Hudson Bay, an inland offshoot of the Arctic Ocean. Each summer, sea ice slowly melts away from the bay, forcing the ice-faring bears onto land. When cold temperatures return in fall, the waters near Churchill are the first to freeze up, and the bears pass back through on their way out to sea.

“During polar bear season, you watch the Hudson Bay freeze,” long-time Churchill visitor Kt Miller told Mongabay. “The land transforms into this whitish, bluish, almost pastel, color palette.”

Miller, a doctoral candidate studying collaborative research in the social sciences at Carleton University in Ottawa, has spent more than a decade making trips to Churchill through work with the nonprofit Polar Bears International. A few years ago, she teamed up with Berg to collect stories from Indigenous people on the subject of polar bears. This year, they published the stories, alongside a detailed analysis, in Nature Communications.

Miller and Berg’s study paints the picture of a town that has evolved alongside polar bears from the beginning.

“The bears were here before all of us. We built in their way,” Churchill native and Parks Canada Indigenous knowledge weaver Heather Spence-Bothello told them. “There’s no reason we can’t coexist, and I believe that it can be done respectfully. The bear gets the right of way from one end of town to the other.”

A complex history

Churchill has always been a melting pot. Long before European settlers arrived, the delta of the Churchill River at Hudson Bay was a meeting place. The Dene people came from the west, the Inuit from the north, and the Cree from the south, to trade and congregate.

In the late 17th century, Indigenous peoples surrendered Churchill, along with much of Manitoba, to Queen Victoria via Treaty 5. Soon, European fur trappers arrived, and the Hudson’s Bay Company built a trading post nearby. For the next two-and-a-half centuries, the fur trade shaped commerce and development in the region. The Indigenous peoples of the region continued to subsist off the land, while also selling animal hides and adopting some Western tools and conveniences.

In the 1950s, shifting economic and political tides changed Churchill forever. As the fur trade slowed, other small towns and trading posts on the frontier were abandoned, and the Manitoba government decided to relocate Indigenous families from the area to Churchill.

Berg, who is Cree, wasn’t born yet, but her parents told her the story of the 240-kilometer (150-mile) trek from York Factory, a trading post to the south. Along with their belongings, they carried her 8-month-year-old sister.

In 1954, Manitoba banned polar bear hunting, and, in 1969, the province established a “Polar Bear Control” program meant to protect the community from stubborn, hungry or overly curious bears. With these protections in place, and the fur trade in decline, Churchill’s economy began to shift toward polar bear tourism.

Today, Churchill is a different kind of melting pot. A majority of the town’s roughly 900 permanent residents still come from Indigenous families, like Berg’s, with ancestral roots in the area. The Polar Bear Control program, now renamed Polar Bear Alert, is a formidable province-led presence, run mostly by outsiders. And, of course, researchers, educators, photographers and sightseers flock to the “Polar Bear Capital of the World” every summer.

High alert

If there’s one thing the permanent residents of Churchill interviewed by Miller and Berg agreed on, it’s that tourists can be a pain. A necessary pain, and a boon to the local economy, but a pain nonetheless.

Morris Spence, a lifelong Churchill resident, put it concisely: “Every Tom, Dick and Harry is out looking for a bear,” he told Miller and Berg.

The crowds are one thing, but worse is when tourists put themselves in danger. It happens often enough that most Churchill residents have a few chilling stories of close encounters.

Churchill Bear Smart, a working group of local stakeholders, has taken some measures to avoid these situations. At the train station and airport, where most tourists start their trips, signs display the do’s and don’ts of vacationing in “polar bear country.” Polar Bear Alert also posts signs warning people away from areas with high polar bear traffic and little opportunity for refuge.

Locals say the signs keep some tourists in check, but not everyone.

“You can have signs all over the place, and people don’t really pay attention to them. They just want to see that bear they came to Churchill to see,” Berg told Mongabay.

Despite the close calls, polar bear attacks are rare in Churchill, and fatalities are rarer still. Records go back as far as 1968; since then, only two people have been killed by bears, one in 1968 and one in 1983.

In 2013, a resident, newly arrived from Montreal, was mauled by a polar bear on her way home from a Halloween party. Luckily, nearby Churchillians came to her aid just in time. One of her rescuers hit the bear on the nose with a shovel, which later earned him a Star of Courage from the Canadian government.

For more than a decade now, Churchill hasn’t seen a serious polar bear attack. This lull is probably due, at least in part, to Polar Bear Alert. The program, a branch of the Manitoba Conservation Officer Service, responds to calls 24 hours a day. And, since the 2013 attack, the service has been especially proactive in chasing bears away from town.

Polar Bear Alert officers “haze” bears using loud sirens, trucks, helicopters or noise-making “cracker” shotgun shells. If a bear becomes a problem, perhaps by breaking into a home or trash bin, they tranquilize it and transport it to a polar bear holding facility, colloquially known as “polar bear jail,” before releasing it north of Churchill a month later.

Most Churchillians have relied on the service at some point or another. Spence-Bothello remembers her first encounter with Polar Bear Alert. In the early 1980s, when she was 7 or 8 years old, a bear came sniffing at her front door, literally.

“My mom was hysterical,” she told Miller and Berg. “The neighborhood was aware and there was a bunch of commotion outside.”

Eventually, Polar Bear Alert arrived and tranquilized the bear right there on the front steps.

“Being able to see that bear in the back of the truck and touch it and seeing its size, that is my most favorite memory,” she said.

Philosophical differences

Pretty much all Churchillians agree that Polar Bear Alert makes the community safer. But there’s less agreement on the service’s tactics.

“[Polar Bear Alert], they just seem to be overly aggressive sometimes, in terms of how they’re handling the bears or steering bears out,” Churchill Mayor Michael Spence said. He added that bears can get dangerously exhausted trying to outrun helicopters, which the officers sometimes employ to capture bears or run them out of town.

Miller and Berg summarized the community’s complaints in their article: “manage the people more and the bears less,” they wrote.

When asked about the request, Ian Van Nest of Polar Bear Alert acknowledged it, but pointed to other factors.

“That’s fair in a sense, but the only reason we have a problem bear is that there was an attractant left out,” he told Mongabay. “The town is now doing a good job of managing waste, but you’re never going to 100% solve the problem. That’s why we do handle bears throughout the year.”

The source of friction between locals and Polar Bear Alert may stem from a difference in perspective, say the authors. The former is deeply concerned with the bears’ safety and well-being, the latter mostly focused on keeping humans safe.

“We just have this ultimate respect for them,” Berg added. “That’s how we live safely with polar bears in our community.”

One suggestion for reform came from one of Miller and Berg’s younger interviewees. University of Manitoba medical student Antonina Kandiurin explained that some Polar Bear Alert officers have become immensely trusted and admired in the community after years of service. These officers will retire soon, and Kandiurin suggested they might be replaced by locals.

“They should have some sort of apprenticeship program for the next Jack and Donald,” she said. “It should be local, young people following in their footsteps.”

Van Nest said Polar Bear alert prioritizes Indigenous locals for seasonal positions, but struggles to draw qualified applicants from the community.

“They have to have a firearms license, they have to have a driver’s license and they have to be at least 18-plus to get these jobs,” he said.

The program also has a summer internship that pairs high-school-age teenagers with conservation officers. Van Nest said he would like to hire a local for the internship, as long as they submit a strong application.

Whether these intentions come to fruition remains to be seen. Mayor Spence has also been working with the Polar Bear Smart working group to compile a series of recommendations for reforming Polar Bear Alert. This, too, might help bridge the disconnect that has arisen between conservation officers and the community.

It’s apparent, however, that these two groups’ values have converged over time. Local Indigenous tour operator Dave Daley remembers, back in the 1970s, the predecessor agency to Polar Bear Alert keeping a tally of the number of bears killed every year.

“I remember listening to the radio back in the day and they’d say, ‘that was the 21st polar bear shot in Churchill. If you want to see it, go run down to the RCMP garage,’ and the bear would be splayed out on the floor there.”

Today, Polar Bear Alert relocates bears instead of killing them. And, though Van Nest doesn’t fully share the Indigenous perspective, he has a reverence for it.

“They’ve lived with them for a long time, and they don’t view polar bears as a threat or a danger,” he said. “Their relationship with polar bears is really impressive and should be highly respected.”

Now, in the 21st century, Churchill faces yet another upheaval. As the Arctic warms, the sea ice in Hudson Bay melts out sooner each summer and arrives later each fall. The lack of ice means the bears are spending more time on land. In the short term, that may mean more human-polar bear interactions. In the long term, it could lead to a decline in polar bear populations.

“What are polar bears in this community going to look like 20 or 30 years from now?” Mayor Spence asked rhetorically. “That’s something we really need to look at.”

Banner image: Polar bears near Churchill. Image by Kt Miller / polarbearsinternational.org.

Citations:

Rantanen, M., Karpechko, A. Y., Lipponen, A., Nordling, K., Hyvärinen, O., Ruosteenoja, K., … Laaksonen, A. (2022). The Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe since 1979. Communications Earth & Environment, 3(1). doi:10.1038/s43247-022-00498-3

Miller, K. M., Berg, G., Berg, G., Hamilton, F., Sinclair Kandiurin, P., & Henri, D. A. (2025). Coexistence between people and polar bears supports Indigenous knowledge mobilization in wildlife management and research. Communications Earth & Environment, 6(1). doi:10.1038/s43247-025-02017-6