Honorable Mention TIFA 2023 Nature / Wildlife

The Last Caribou

  • Photographer
    Katie Orlinsky
  • Agency / Studio
    National Geographic
  • Technical Info
    Canon R5
  • Photo Date
    8/17/2021

A male Bathurst caribou as fall approaches near Lake Contwoyto in Northwest Territories, Canada. The Tłı̨chǫ people have depended on and co-existed with caribou for thousands of years. They have witnessed, and felt the greatest impact, of the Bathurst Caribou herd’s shocking decline from over 400,000 in 1986 to less than 9,000 today. In 2015, the Tłı̨chǫ government instituted a caribou hunting ban, and in 2016, they began the groundbreaking Ekwǫ̀ Nàxoèhdee K’è: Boots on the Ground caribou monitoring program.

Photographer Katie Orlinsky has spent the last fifteen years covering news stories and feature assignments around the world for publications like National Geographic, The New York Times and The New Yorker. For the last nine years the majority of her work has focused on documenting the how climate crisis is changing and challenging communities across the Arctic. Katie received a BA in Political Science from Colorado College and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University. She has taught photojournalism as a visiting professor at NYU and the University of Alaska Fairbanks.