“Maybe just to act tough?” she said.

With about 3,000 people, Rankin Inlet is the second most populated town in Nunavut, a Canadian territory nearly three times the size of Texas with a population of only 40,000 people, most of them Inuit.

For centuries, European colonial powers led expeditions in search of a Northwest Passage — a shorter and faster sea route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the labyrinth of islands and waterways in Canada’s Arctic.

In 1905, a Norwegian man, Roald Amundsen — who went to live among the Inuit to learn how to survive in the Arctic — became the first European explorer to cross the Northwest Passage. But some of the doomed efforts, most famously the Franklin Expedition, have become parables of colonial cluelessness: European explorers who died of scurvy by rejecting the Inuit’s vitamin-rich diet of raw meat or after ignoring the Inuit and getting lost.

Harry Ittinuar, 59, a former Inuit ranger who used to run boat tours to Marble Island, grew up listening to stories of outsiders stranded on the island, including James Knight, an 18th-century English explorer who was shipwrecked with his crew after failing to find the Northwest Passage.

“One of the stories I heard, they knew one crew was struggling, so they went over in winter by dog team,” said Mr. Ittinuar of the Inuit.