"When the Europeans arrived I felt very happy because I didn't think we'd suffer anymore. But, in the long run, we lost our identity and culture. When I'm still alive I'd like to assist the next Inuit generation and their own identity."

- Inuit elder, Mariano Aupilardjuk

ntil recently, the Canadian Arctic consisted of two territories, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories.

n April 1, 1999, after 35 years of on-and-off discussions, Nunavut ("our land" in the Inuit language, Inuktitut) was split off from the Northwest Territories by an act of the Canadian Parliament. With an area of 770,000 square miles, Nunavut is 35% larger than the State of Alaska, yet has only 27,000 residents. (Alaska has over 625,000 residents.)

 

n the Arctic, the important boundary is the tree line, the point north of which a combination of wind, permafrost, and lack of sunlight prevents trees from growing. Historically the Dene and Metis native people lived below the tree line, and the Inuit lived above the tree line, on the tundra. The territory of Nunavut covers the same area as the land claim of Nunavut, which the Inuit negotiated with the federal government. (Ratified by the Canadian Parliament in 1993, it is the largest native land claim settlement in the country's history.) The border between Nunavut and the Northwest Territories roughly matches the tree line, except for the Inuvialuit region in the Western Arctic, whose Inuit inhabitants chose to negotiate their own land claim and remain in the Northwest Territories.

he Inuit people, known to many Southerners as Eskimos, have lived in the Arctic for thousands of years in an area stretching from the Arctic Slope in Alaska, through the Canadian Arctic and northern Quebec, to Greenland. The daily life of a nomadic Inuk hunter ("Inuk" refers to one person, "Inuuk" to two, and "Inuit" to three or more) was left undisturbed by early visitors to the Arctic: explorers searching for the Northwest Passage, trappers and traders who bartered with the Inuit, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), which established posts beginning in the early 1900s.

 

he 1950s permanently altered the Inuit lifestyle. The United States built the Distant Early Warning Line, designed to detect a cross-polar Soviet invasion. The DEW Line was a series of radar installations crossing the northern edge of the continent through Alaska and Canada. Around the same time, the government of Canada, in an attempt to exert sovereignty over the far North, moved Inuit families into permanent settlements. The government also began offering health care, education, and other services in the settlements. The need for money shifted many Inuit from hunting for food to trapping for fur, which required covering a greater area and drove further demand for Southern goods.

 

ven today, all communities in Nunavut are self-contained. The only road connecting two towns is a 13-mile gravel road between Arctic Bay and Nanisivik, a mining town that might essentially disappear since the closing of the mine in September. Many northern regions in Canada take advantage of the cold weather to clear and plow winter roads, which allow a few months of travel when lakes and rivers have frozen over. There has been talk of building a winter road up from Manitoba to serve some of the Nunavut communities around Rankin Inlet, but despite the cold, much of Nunavut receives so little precipitation that there is not enough snow to make winter roads feasible.

 

onstruction equipment, trucks, cars, non-perishable food, and other bulk supplies are brought in by barge during the brief summer season. There are no power or telephone lines between towns; each community generates its own power, and telephone connection to the rest of the world is via satellite. All the fuel needed for winter—gasoline, heating fuel, diesel, jet fuel—must be stored in tank farms. Last winter, rumors began that the fuel supply in some communities was gumming up snowmobile engines; after some finger pointing, it was determined that a key engine-cleaning compound was missing. Short of flying in new fuel at prohibitive expense, the government could do nothing except sell the fuel at a discount, and wait for a new shipment the following summer.

 

his remoteness leaves Nunavut at a disadvantage, even compared with Canada's other two territories, which have a large infrastructure of roads that are open all year. The Yukon, for example, has only one town, Old Crow, that is inaccessible by road. To bring in new infrastructure supplies a few years ago, the government decided it was easiest to build a temporary road to the town, then abandon it.

 

ll this makes Nunavut an expensive place to run. The government of Nunavut's budget is about $500 million ($750 million Canadian), which is over $18,000 per person. By contrast, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories spend about $11,000 per person. Alaska's per capita budget is similar; a typical continental US state has a budget of $3,000 per person.

 

he Canadian government financially supports the territories through the Territorial Formula Financing program, also known as transfer payments. (Canadian provinces, to a lesser extent, also receive transfer payments under a different program.) Unlike provinces, royalties on mining of public lands in the territories are paid to the federal government, although as part of the land claims agreement, Nunavut did retain the mining rights to a small part of its territory. This leaves Nunavut with few internal sources of income. Transfer payments account for 57% of the budget of the Northwest Territories and 70% of the budget of the Yukon, but 84% of the budget of Nunavut.

 

igh levels of unemployment, low average incomes, and high costs for goods and public services—it is easy to reel off a list of the troubles faced by the Nunavummiut, as residents of Nunavut are known. The rate of violent crime is almost four times higher than the rate of non-violent property crimes—a situation unique in Canada. Life expectancy is ten years lower than the Canadian average. The rate of suicide is incredibly high: every year nearly one person out of a thousand takes his or her own life. It is hard to find a family untouched by suicide: in an online poll conducted by the newspaper Nunatsiaq News, in answer to the question, "Has your life been affected by suicide?", more than 70% of the respondents answered "yes."

generation seems to have grown up unaware of the potential that life represents. Terence Tootoo, a hockey player from Rankin Inlet, played last season for the Roanoke Express of the East Coast Hockey League. A fan favorite, he was reported to be the first Inuk to live out the Canadian boy's dream of playing professional hockey. He spent the summer training for the upcoming season with the Express. On August 27, after being arrested in Brandon, Manitoba, for driving under the influence, Terence Tootoo committed suicide.

 

 

 

 

Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (IQ)

and the Quest for a Mixed Government

 

he goals of the Government of Nunavut have been quantified in the Bathurst Mandate, a document finalized in a retreat at Bathurst Inlet in August 1999.

 

The Mandate lists four priorities for Nunavut:

Healthy Communities,

Simplicity and Unity,

Self-reliance, and

Continuing Learning.

 

nderlying the Bathurst Mandate is a more basic goal: to reverse the damage done to the Inuit by a half century of exposure to Southern culture. Nunavut's fundamental principle is Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, or IQ, a hard-to-define summation of everything that is traditional Inuit values. A workshop on IQ in September 1999 resulted in a report the following year. Among other recommendations, it states that Inuktitut should be the working language of the government, that government departments should invite at least one Inuit elder to policy or planning sessions, and that employees should be allowed traditional leave at certain times of the year to go hunting.

o non-Inuit, Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit may conjure up visions of returning to a simpler way, a path to wisdom free of the conflicts of modern societies. Yet the quest for a mixed government is not straightforward. As Penny Rumbolt, a Communications Manager in the Nunavut Department of Culture, Language, Elders and Youth, explains, "There always will be a clash between trying to impose a government that works in the South and a traditional lifestyle in the North." In one incident reported this year, a man wanted to see his wife who was in a women's shelter. In the old days, he claimed, the two would have been allowed to visit an elder together for guidance. Yet this contradicts current Southern thinking on how abuse cases should be handled. The situation led to a heated debate in the Nunavut Legislative Assembly, with members accusing others of ignoring the principles of IQ.

ne of the ingredients of IQ is government by consensus. There are no political parties in Nunavut: all 19 members of the Legislative Assembly are elected as independents, and the elected members then vote for the Speaker, the Premier, and the Cabinet. With no party lines to follow, allegiances shift more rapidly, and in theory everyone must work harder to reach an agreement. (In the end, issues are still decided by a simple majority vote.) Government by consensus is often mentioned as one of the unique features of Nunavut. In fact, the Northwest Territories has the same model of government.

n many ways, wondering why the Inuit wanted their own territory is condescending. Prior to 1999, Nunavut was governed from the city of Yellowknife, in Dene country. It is a mistake to think that all native peoples will naturally get along because of a shared affinity for the land. Vicky Latour, a British woman who has lived in the Northwest Territories for 46 years, recalls a visit to Tuktoyaktuk, in the Western Arctic, by some Inuit from the Eastern Arctic. After they left, an Inuvialuit woman spoke. "We don't know those people," she said. "They're not like us." To this day, Latour can still remember the surprise and disappointment in her voice.

 

 

 

The Education of the Nunavummiut

hen Nunavut was created, all the existing laws in the Northwest Territories were adopted wholesale, with the understanding that they would be gradually replaced by Nunavummiut-crafted laws.

One of the first major pieces of legislation to undergo this process is the Education Act, which is being debated by the Legislative Assembly this year, replacing the 1995 Northwest Territories Education Act (the "NWT Act").

n his book Arctic Crossing: A Journey Through the Northwest Passage and Inuit Culture (Knopf, 2001), adventurer Jonathan Waterman recounts his 2,200-mile trip across the Arctic by kayak, ski, dogsled, and sailboat. In August 1999, he was invited to speak to a high-school class in Gjoa Haven. His description of the scene is grim:

ontrast this with the story of Jessica Illaszewicz, a member of the Class of 2003 at Princeton University, who attended high school in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, a town of 1,500 people about 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Illaszewicz is not an Inuk; her parents were both teachers from the South of Canada. "I don't think my education lacked in any way," Illaszewicz says, reflecting on her years in Cambridge Bay. "There are so many opportunities, for Inuit and non-Inuit, if you are willing to grab them."

he education system is especially critical for Nunavut because the population is so young. Thanks to a high birthrate among Inuit, 41% of the population is below 15 years of age, and an astonishing 60% is below 25 years of age (the figures for all of Canada are 20% and 38%, respectively). If the Inuit youth of Nunavut can learn their culture and embody Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, then the Bathurst Mandate may one day be fulfilled.

arlier this year, the Nunatsiaq News examined the education system in a series of articles entitled "The crisis in Nunavut's schools." The first article states, "There's a crisis in Nunavut schools, and it's hurting Inuit children...The drop-out rate is soaring, attendance levels are suffering and growing numbers of children affected by fetal-alcohol syndrome are finding little help available." As with everything in Nunavut, the isolation hurts. Unlike an Indian reservation in the United States, residents of Nunavut cannot drive to better educational opportunities off the reservation—or to better jobs either, which might provide examples of the value of an education. Just for perspective, the nearest city is Edmonton, about 1,000 miles away.

he new Nunavut Education Act in large part has only minor changes from the old one. The NWT Act included rules allowing "local programs"—that is, education in native ways—which were preserved in the Nunavut Act. Nonetheless, a few specific changes may signal how IQ will be applied to the education of the Nunavummiut.

he most obvious is the language of instruction. The NWT Act allows instruction in any of eight official languages: Chipewyan, Cree, Dogrib, English, French, Gwich'in, Inuktitut, and Slavey. The native languages, except for Cree and Inuktitut, are all Dene (The Cree are another native people, who generally live south of the Arctic.) Furthermore, the NWT Official Languages Act defines Inuktitut as including Innuinuqtun, a dialect spoken in the Central Arctic that is different enough from Inuktitut that some consider it a separate language.

n the Nunavut Education Act, Inuktitut and Innuinuqtun are officially separate, and are the only languages allowed besides English and French.

ther changes are aimed at codifying traditional behavior. Inuit elders are specifically presumed to have the necessary qualifications to teach local programs in schools, although the exact meaning of the term "elder" remains elusive. Ian Rose, who works for the Ministry of Education and first taught in the Arctic in 1973, explains that elders are generally recognized as such within a community without a formal definition, although in the end the District Education Authority (a community's governing body for schools) has the final say on who qualifies as an elder for instructional purposes.

prinkled throughout the act are rules that school principals, District Education Authorities, and the Minister of Education must act in accordance with Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit—a reminder, says Rose, that this is a unique chance to invent a new school system for Nunavut, and care should be taken not to simply reproduce a Southern curriculum. The most significant change may be related to children who miss school during the hunting season. In the NWT Act such absences are allowed, but require approval of the principal. In Nunavut no such approval will be required: the parent need only request the absence, as long as it is for "traditional activities on the land or other learning experiences away from the community." Nunavut students would also be automatically excused from school for any time spent living at an outpost camp away from the community. "We wanted to have parents be responsible for making some decisions about their children," explains Rose.

he Nunavut economy is referred to as a "mixed" economy, because it combines a traditional wage-based component with a land-based one. The land-based economy refers to all economic activity that is non-wage based, including hunting, fishing, and trapping for personal use or barter, making crafts, and informal childcare. It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of the land-based economy to the traditional Inuit way of life. It is not just a means to acquire food that replaces expensive food brought in from the South: it is the basis for the whole culture, because in a nomadic culture so much time was spent hunting. The traditional Inuit skills, such as sewing and making tools, are those needed to support hunting. Inuktitut is also closely tied to the traditional lifestyle.

he richness of Inuktitut is communicated through the hunt, and it is dying off as people stop living off the land and settle into communities. Young Inuit often speak a simplified, anglicized version of the language, with unclear pronunciation and incorrect accenting of syllables. Verbally classifying snow by type, location, and condition, as Inuktitut famously does (although not to the extent that is often reported) becomes unnecessary if little time is spent out on the land. Preserving Inuktitut requires preserving Inuit culture, and preserving Inuit culture requires preserving Inuktitut.

 

he ideal education system for Nunavut is also a "mixed" one, in which students learn both traditional land skills and Inuktitut, and a formal school curriculum and English. In his 1988 report, Lords of the Arctic: Wards of the State, anthropologist Colin Irwin wrote, "People do not want thousands of years of Inuit tradition to be totally lost, and though they would prefer to see their children have a good job, as a life spent out on the land is so hard, elder Inuit feel jobs cannot always be relied on. For this reason, they want their children to learn both the old and new ways."

 

Preserving Inuktitut, Preserving a Culture

n exercise in linguistic, if not cultural, preservation has already been performed in Canada. In the late 1970s, the government of the Province of Quebec, alarmed by a declining birthrate among French-speaking Quebecois and

an influx of English-language culture from the United States and the rest of Canada, passed a series of laws aimed at fortifying the French language. The best known was Bill 101, which stated that all exterior business signs must be in French, and that all public school children must be educated in French, unless at least one of their parents had been educated in English.

he law outraged many English residents of Quebec, who felt unwelcome even if they retained the right to send their children to English schools. A small exodus of businesses and families ensued, accompanied by dire predictions for the Quebec economy. Yet a generation later, the laws unquestionably have worked. (The sign law has since been relaxed somewhat.) The children of immigrants from Eastern Europe and South America happily chatter in fluent French, the economy in Quebec is doing no worse than the rest of Canada, and the future of the French language in North America seems assured. Many parents see learning French as a child as desirable, and choose to send their children to French schools even if they have the option of English public schools.

Quebec was trying to solve a simpler problem: preserving a language, not an entire culture, and it was a language that was spoken in many countries around the world. If someone spoke French because his or her parents had moved from Boston ten years earlier, or because they had arrived from Morocco the week before, the result was still one more French speaker in Quebec. The Inuit, short of encouraging immigration from Greenland or Alaska (or northern Quebec), do not have a ready source of Inuit speakers to draw on.

here have been calls to allow only Inuktitut or Innuinuqtun as the language of instruction in Nunavut schools, although it is doubtful this would be accepted even if the necessary curriculum and teachers were in place: it is generally agreed that English proficiency is a valuable skill, and parents who speak Inuktitut at home might actively desire to send their children to school in English. Nobody in Nunavut knew of any Southerners who had moved up because they wanted their children to become fluent in Inuktitut and proficient in hunting. Yet the large number of young Inuit in the population, and the small number of Southerners who want to live in Nunavut for more than a few years, means that the survival of Inuktitut will be guaranteed if Nunavut can simply teach fluency to the generation of Inuit students currently in school.

o preserve and expand the French language, the government of Quebec created the Office de la langue francaise. In addition to investigating complaints about English signs, the Office hurried to define French words for new technology terms, such as byte and database, to prevent the English terms from gaining common usage. The government of Nunavut has created a similar program for Inuktitut under the Department of Culture, Language, Elders and Youth. The Living Dictionary (www.livingdictionary.com) provides translations of terms; users can also request translation of new terminology, which is referred to a council of elders ("byte" becomes "titiqqat," which means "letter").

onetheless, there have been complaints that Nunavut is not doing enough to enforce the use of Inuktitut. Currently government signs are in English and Inuktitut, and possibly French (a requirement for federal government offices). The Official Languages Act remains the one inherited from the Northwest Territories in 1999, which applies only to the government and the courts, and requires less official use of the six native languages than of English and French. Earlier this year, during hearings over revising the Act, Nunavut Language Commissioner Eva Aariak proposed a new law designed to specifically protect Inuktitut. Among other rules, it would require that all signs, posters, and commercial advertising be in Inuktitut, with other languages allowed as long as Inuktitut was as prominent. Bills and notices sent by businesses and public utilities would have to include Inuktitut. Inuktitut speakers could not be fired from a job for being unable to speak English. (Quebec has a law, somewhat laxly enforced, that all businesses with 50 employees must conduct their business in French.)

n Quebec, someone who speaks only French can go to university, get a well-paying job, and live a successful life in French. Is this true for Inuktitut right now? It may depend on how success is defined. Certainly in the old days Inuit lived like that, and the success of Nunavut may partially be judged on whether it remains possible to live a life only in Inuktitut. Yet French has centuries of books, art, and music, while Inuktitut has a total of 220 books and exactly one completely Inuit-produced movie, "Atanarjuat" ("The Fast Runner"), which won the Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001.

 

The "Threat" of Southern Influence

 

rticle 23 of the Nunavut Land Claims agreement has as its objective "to increase Inuit participation in government employment in the Nunavut Settlement Area to a representative level"—meaning that the level of Inuit employment within the Government of Nunavut matches the level in the general population, currently 85%. (The Northwest Territories also has an affirmative action program to encourage native employment, but with no set target.) The problem is the lack of qualified Inuit to fill positions in the new government.

urrently, 40% of all teachers in Nunavut are Inuit, but no high school teachers are. Judges, RCMP, and other authority figures are overwhelmingly non-Inuit. In traditional Inuit cultures, elders would have fulfilled these functions. The mentors that children see are for the most part no longer Inuit, and this is hurting the ability to transfer the culture between generations.

he government has been pursuing a decentralization strategy, moving jobs out from the capital in Iqaluit to ten communities around Nunavut. Over 300 jobs have already been moved and the plan is to have moved 429 by March 2003 (out of a total of about 2,500 jobs). The plan has generated some controversy: a report on decentralization issued this May stated the vacancy rate for decentralized jobs was 37%, compared to the overall Government of Nunavut vacancy rate of 22%. However, 59% of the decentralized jobs were held by Inuit, compared to 42% of all government jobs (and 28% of the government jobs in Iqaluit).

o fill the gap, many of the jobs are currently filled by Southerners. The first non-Inuit who worked in the North, in the early 1900s, were sent there: trappers, missionaries, policemen, prospectors. The Cold War brought more people north, to build and staff the DEW Line and other military installations. Around that time people started to move up voluntarily from the South, seeking a simpler or safer life. Today there are many Southerners, undeterred by the cold weather and short or nonexistent winter days, who apply for jobs in Nunavut. (In the middle of winter, the sun almost makes it to the horizon around noon, and the sky sometimes lights up to an amazing orange pink. But it's dark again by 1 o'clock.)

he Southerners who are staffing positions in the new government are in an odd position. Some are there because they love the North; others view it as a short-term assignment, to exchange knowledge and gain some new life experiences. Some find the opportunity to create a new government compelling. However, many realize that the plan is for them to work until they can train an Inuk replacement.

 

From Nunavut to Nassau Hall

 

ccording to a Conference Board of Canada report on the Nunavut economy, high-school graduates in Nunavut (or the area that later became Nunavut) increased from 25 in 1987 to 65 in 1997 and 135 in 2000. One of the 65 students in 1997 was Jessica Illaszewicz, who graduated from Kiilinik High School in Cambridge Bay, one of seven students in her class. Cambridge Bay is the administrative capital of the Kitikmeot region of Nunavut, where Innuinuqtun is spoken. To reach the town, you fly north from Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, cross the tree line and the border into Nunavut, and fly over a vast tundra untouched by roads and possibly, at any given point, never visited by humans. Eventually you cross the Arctic Circle, then the northern edge of the North American continent, and arrive at Cambridge Bay on Victoria Island.

llaszewicz describes herself as having "severe issues with cold weather," but says her parents love the North. They first moved up in 1975, and were teaching in Arviat when Illaszewicz was born. The family moved to Saskatchewan while her father earned his masters degree, and arrived in Cambridge Bay when she was 13. After high school, Illaszewicz attended Lester B. Pearson College in Victoria, British Columbia, for two years, obtaining an International Baccalaureate degree. From there she was accepted at Princeton. When asked where she is from, she often says the North Pole, since it is the closest point to her hometown that the average person has heard of. (Cambridge Bay is almost exactly halfway between the North Pole and the United States-Canada border.)

he fact that Illaszewicz's family was from the South (and that her parents were teachers) is significant. In Lords of the Arctic: Wards of the State, Colin Irwin wrote, "The individuals who benefit most from the education system are those best able to take advantage of it. In the Northwest Territories [which at the time included the area now in Nunavut], these people are the sons and daughters of the non-native Canadians who went north to help the native people of the region."

sked whether Inuit feel that formal education is somehow less important for them, Illaszewicz begins, "A lot of Inuit families have less..." but then stops, searching for an indefinable attribute that might be lacking. Finally she continues, "Everyone knows how important it is to get an education, but the curriculum is not culturally relevant to them."

n 1972, Vicky Latour moved to Hay River in the Northwest Territories. Hay River is on a spur from the main road from Yellowknife south to Alberta and is home to, among other companies, the Northern Transportation Company Limited, which is responsible for barge deliveries to all of the communities in Nunavut. It's the second largest town in the Northwest Territories, although it trails Yellowknife by a large margin. Vicky Latour also feels that a student could go directly from high school in the North to a university like Princeton, but as she says, "The circumstances would have to fall in place. They would have to be lucky in their teachers." She feels this is not unique to the Canadian North, and would be the same for any student from a small town. However, in Nunavut every community is a small town, and there are no larger towns to which ambitious students could commute for a better education.

n the fall of 1982, Vicky's son Ken began attending St. John's-Ravenscourt, a boarding school in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on a scholarship. From there he attended Princeton, graduating in 1992. Ken Latour is skeptical of the possibility of a student from a small Arctic community reaching a school like Princeton. "It's not part of the mainstream culture for people to go off to university. You also have so few graduates. A class that starts grade 1 with 15 students might end up with only one or two grade 12 graduates."

sked whether he personally could have gone to Princeton if he had attended high school in a remote community in the Northwest Territories or Nunavut, he is unsure. "For many people in small communities, I don't think the rewards that an education brings are apparent—they don't see the connection yet. They might come from non-supportive families that are dysfunctional, with alcohol and substance abuse, and a culture that has been turned on its head in the last 50 to 80 years." One of the goals of the government decentralization program, beyond spreading government salaries around Nunavut, is to provide local examples of the benefits of a university education.

en Latour just finished five years of teaching at an adult learning center in Fort Resolution, a small town in the Northwest Territories. For half the time he was the only teacher there. "It's so hard to see that you are making a positive impact. You don't feel like you have a lot of support a lot of the time. When you are just one teacher, that can really wear you down." When critical employees such as teachers leave in the middle of the year, it can be difficult or impossible to replace them. Still, reflecting on his time there, he realizes that he did change people's lives. The goal for many of his students was to learn what they failed to learn in high school. He estimates that a third of his students stuck with the program and prepared themselves to continue their education and receive a professional or technical degree.

 

The Internet: Link or Leveler?

 

he Internet has increased educational opportunities for Inuit, but once again nothing is as simple as it is in the South. With no fixed communications infrastructure connecting Nunavut to the South, all Internet traffic is by satellite. Satellite bandwidth is expensive, and the costs are ongoing rather than occurring primarily during installation. This makes it difficult to run a profitable Internet Service Provider (ISP) in small communities; the cost of the satellite connection from the ISP to the Internet is so expensive that it is hard to amortize the cost over the small numbers of people in a town. The Government of Nunavut has been attempting to set up at least one public Internet connection in every community, but the total bandwidth available to some communities is only 64 kilobytes per second, barely more than a single modem connection. One audio stream can consume the entire bandwidth.

he Inuit are not opposed to the Internet; they are a pragmatic people who accepted snowmobiles and rifles for hunting when shown their usefulness. As stated in the 2001 report of the Nunavut Broadband Task Force (possibly the only such document to explain bandwidth using the example of caribou crossing a river), "Inuit have always lived in a knowledge-based economy. The correct interpretation and communication of information about the land, weather patterns, and the activities of wildlife has been crucial to the production, distribution, and consumption of food, shelter, and clothing, and therefore essential to survival. Nunavut will not be 'moving into' a knowledge-based economy; because of the strength of our economic traditions, we are already there!"

et the Internet, like other Southern imports, will not be absorbed without affecting Inuit culture. Although Innuinuqtun is the only officially recognized dialect of Inuktitut, in practice the 28 communities in Nunavut, due to their remoteness, have evolved 28 different dialects. If communication increases with Internet usage, it is inevitable that the dialects will standardize, presumably towards the one spoken in Iqaluit, since that is where most government documents originate.

 

First Steps

 

using on the influx of Southerners and Southern culture in the North, Vicky Latour says, "Every person, both native and non-native, might have a moment where they think, 'Should we have come?' But there is no possibility of turning back. It's not something that can be changed, we can only modify it." Certainly few Inuit want to go back to the old way of life: comforts such as fuel delivery and health care are too important.

n ways the Inuit are fortunate. They live in a country with an established system of social welfare, whose inhabitants do not seem opposed to supporting Nunavut for as long as necessary (although Ken Latour speculates that most Canadians are unaware that the government spends almost a billion dollars a year in transfer payments for the 100,000 residents of the three territories). More importantly, no Southerners are clamoring to live on their land; there are no fertile grasslands and virgin forests to exploit. As a result, the arc that is often traversed in encounters between natives and Europeans—initial meeting, attempted overlay of foreign culture, steps towards self-governance —has happened within a few generations.

onsider the story of Duncan Pryde, a Scottish orphan who worked for the Hudson's Bay Company. Pryde, who chronicled his life in the book Nunaga: Ten Years of Eskimo Life (Walker, 1971), arrived in the Arctic at age 21, and proceeded to trade, drink, and fight his way across the North, leaving behind a legacy of hair-raising stories and numerous children born to Inuit women. He was elected to two terms on the Northwest Territorial Council, but finally overstayed his welcome and may or may not have nearly died after setting off on a dogsled trip with an Inuit shaman's curse on his head. He surfaced briefly in Alaska, fled to England with Canadian tax authorities and US immigration authorities in pursuit, and eventually died of cancer at age sixty. The astonishing thing about his story is not so much that it happened at all—such stories probably exist wherever colonialism exists—but when it happened: Pryde was born in 1937, did not reach the Arctic until 1958, and died only five years ago. He writes at the end of Nunaga, "There will never be another fur trader in the old tradition, just as there will never again be an Eskimo in the old image." Perhaps. But Inuit tradition is not something preserved only in songs and stories: it is a living thing embodied in elders who remember the old ways first-hand.

n Inuit elder, Mariano Aupilardjuk, was quoted in the Nunatsiaq News discussing the arrival of the Southerners: "When the Europeans arrived I felt very happy because I didn't think we'd suffer anymore. But, in the long run, we lost our identity and culture." He continued, "When I'm still alive I'd like to assist the next Inuit generation and their own identity."

here are a few towns in Nunavut where life resembles the old days. On Bathurst Inlet, on the north coast of the mainland, there are two towns: one also called Bathurst Inlet (where the Bathurst Mandate was finalized) and Umingmaktuq. At this point the DEW Line left the mainland, jumping northwards onto Victoria Island and passing through Cambridge Bay, leaving Bathurst Inlet untouched. Between them, the two towns have fewer than one hundred residents, one school (with one teacher), one store, one airplane landing strip (not certified by Transport Canada) with no scheduled flights, three mail deliveries a week, and no RCMP officers, telephones, or cable television service.

uncan Pryde lived for years in Bathurst Inlet. Even when Nunaga appeared in 1971, he described Bathurst Inlet as a lone holdout against the changes sweeping over the North. Yet progress may be inevitable even for Bathurst Inlet. The Arctic is not unaffected by global warming; it is estimated that within a decade the Northwest Passage will be navigable to regular ships in the summer, cutting almost 5,000 miles from the trip between Europe and Asia. The Government of Nunavut is discussing building a deep water port in Bathurst Inlet and an all-season road leading to the Izok Lake mineral deposits 185 miles away.

icky Latour calls the Canadian Arctic "a huge hunk of land just making its modern history." It is easy to imagine a bright future for Nunavut, with the Bathurst Mandate fulfilled. An all-weather road up from Manitoba, deep sea ports at Bathurst Inlet and Kimmirut, broadband Internet access in every town. More importantly, an educated, bilingual society that balances the past and the future, keeping Inuit culture alive but ready to take on the world. Thirty years ago, Duncan Pryde wrote, "Now that the young people have lost many of these ancient techniques and have learned instead the ways of the whiteman, they exist in a vacuum between the two ways of life...Therein lies the tragedy and failure of the school system and the major problem facing the government of the Arctic today."

unavut's education system may finally offer the chance to repair that failure. It won't come easy. The problems caused by the arrival of Southern culture may take as long to undo as they took to create. As Ken Latour says, "With the creation of Nunavut, people will think the problem is solved, whereas in reality it is nowhere near solved. They have only taken the first steps."

 

 

Adam Barr '88 grew up in Montreal. At Princeton he studied electrical engineering and computer science. He worked at Microsoft for ten years, and his book about his time there, Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters, was published in December 2000. He lives in Redmond, Washington.

 

 

 

Nunavut Timeline 1949: The province of Newfoundland joins Canada, the last change to the map before Nunavut. 1963: At the urging of residents of the western Northwest Territories, legislation is introduced in the Canadian Parliament to divide into east and west portions (Nunassiaq and Mackenzie), but the legislation dies. 1966: The federally-appointed Carrothers Commission recognizes that division will eventually occur, but recommends against it. 1976: The Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, the main Inuit political organization at the time, proposes a division based on the tree line. 1979: The first federal election in which the Northwest Territories is split into two electoral districts, Nunatsiaq and Western Arctic. 1982: A vote in the Northwest Territories on the question "Do you think the Northwest Territories should be divided?" results in a 56% "yes" vote. 1987: The Iqaluit Agreement is negotiated, proposing that Nunavut be based on the Inuit land claim settlement area, not including the Inuvialuit claim. However the Dene, Metis, and Inuit cannot agree on a boundary, and the Iqaluit Agreement is not ratified. 1990: John Parker, former Commissioner of the Northwest Territories, is appointed by the federal government to recommend a boundary between the Dene/Metis land claims and the Inuit land claims. 1991: Negotiations are completed on the Inuit land claim and the creation of Nunavut. 1992: In a May vote among all Northwest Territories residents, 54% approve of the boundary proposed by John Parker. A political accord between Canada, the Government of the Northwest Territories, and Tunngavik Federation of Nunavut (the organization negotiating the land claim on behalf of the Inuit) is signed in October. In November, Inuit vote 85% in favor of approving the land claim settlement. 1993: Federal government and Inuit representatives formally sign the Nunavut land claim. The Nunavut Act, establishing the legal framework for the new territory, is passed by the federal government. 1995: Voters choose Iqaluit over Rankin Inlet as the capital of Nunavut. 1999: On April 1, Nunavut is established.