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Editorial

July 25, 2003 - A star will always shine
July 18, 2003 - Shooting off their mouths again
July 11, 2003 - The key to Nunavut's success
July 4, 2003 - Excellence rewarded again

A star will always shine

Isabelle Takolik is just a regular girl growing up in Taloyoak. She likes to read magazines, hang out with her friends and listen to music.

But last month, the 17-year-old became one of the pioneers of Nunavut's education system.

In becoming the first student to graduate at the advanced level from Taloyoak's Netsilik School, Takolik has proven for future generations of Taloyoak teens that it can be done — and that with dedication and support, anyone can do it.

That's an important lesson for the hundreds of high school students who struggle through final exams every year, not knowing why they're doing it or what they're going to get out of it.

It's also an important lesson for parents, who may think that once their kids have reached high school, they ought to know everything.

Takolik credits her family and friends, as well as her teachers, for encouraging her and helping her get through the rough spots.

"They told me to study, to go to school every day, to wake up," she told Nunatsiaq News this week. Most high school students in Nunavut who drop out before graduation are probably not doing at least one of those three things.

Even parents who haven't been through the Nunavut education system themselves know that those three elements are key to their children's success.

What they may not realize is that not all high school diplomas are the same.

"A lot of parents think, oh my child has graduated Grade 12. They can go to university now, they can be a doctor now," Manitok Thompson said during an interview with Nunatsiaq News shortly after being appointed minister of education.

"That's what a lot of parents think. A lot of them," she continued, her voice rising. "That's a real problem."

What sets Isabelle Takolik apart is that she graduated at the advanced, or academic level. That means she can go to university if she chooses. She can become a nurse, something she says she would like to do, or even a doctor.

No one else from Taloyoak's Netsilik School has ever been able to do that.

What's more, she was the only student to graduate from high school in Taloyoak at all.

And so, we extend our congratulations to Isabelle Takolik and her family for proving that even within the darkness of Nunavut's troubled education system, stars will always shine. PD

July 18, 2003

Shooting off their mouths again

Nunavummiut saw just how distanced the federal government really is from real life in Nunavut last week, when Justice Robert Kilpatrick issued an interim stay in the application of the federal Firearms Act against Aboriginal people.

Crown lawyers representing the Solicitor General of Canada, which represents the federal government in the case, used a ridiculous and offensive argument to defend their position that imposing the law would not cause "irreparable harm" to Inuit.

"The Crown points to a number of anthropological and sociological case studies ... to suggest that actual participation rates of Inuit in harvesting activities, and Inuit dependence upon harvesting as a food source has declined over time," Kilpatrick wrote when describing the federal government's position.

"The Crown also argues that those Inuit unable to access firearms can always use commercially available foods as an alternative to that ordinarily obtained through harvesting practices."

In other words, if Inuit with unregistered guns don't want to face criminal charges for using them to hunt, they can just go to the grocery store and buy some beef flown in from the South, as any Inuk who doesn't own a gun would do.

But for many Inuit, retail food sales in Nunavut only supplement food procured through hunting. Even Inuit who don't hunt rely on country food provided by friends and relatives.

George Wenzel writes in his 1991 book, Animal Rights, Human Rights: Ecology, Economy and Ideology in the Canadian Arctic, that this has been the case since retail food operations were introduced in the North more than 50 years ago.

"Government policy of the 1950s was built on the assumption that the basic economy of hunting and trapping would no longer be able to provide a suitable livelihood. Planners relocated Inuit without providing support for harvesting, but Inuit did what they had always done; they adapted available resources and opportunities into the scheme of subsistence," Wenzel writes.

"Although the growth of southern influence in Inuit communities during these decades included an explosion in the variety and amount of important foods, Inuit recognized very quickly that the monetary cost of these goods was prohibitive."

What the Crown lawyers do not take into account is that protecting the Inuit right to hunt is only partly about preserving the culture. More importantly, it is about one of the basic elements of survival.

So why should putting food on the table get in the way of gun control?

"I can't see a family of five going down to the Northern and buying a $25 steak," Cathy Towtongie, president of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., said in an interview with Nunatsiaq News.

She's right, of course. Even if country food was not more nutritious than store-bought food, and even if it was not the primary method of Inuit survival for thousands of years, it would still be the most abundant and economically viable food supply in the North today.

Now, perhaps it is not the responsibility of the Solicitor General of Canada to weigh in on issues of health and personal finance. The Solicitor General's primary job, after all, is to oversee major programs for the department of justice - including the RCMP or corrections.

It would make sense then that public safety is the Solicitor General's primary objective in applying the Firearms Act. And there is certainly a safety concern regarding firearms in Nunavut. The number of firearms accidents in Nunavut is high, for example.

But Crown lawyers might have missed their chance to make that argument. After shooting off their mouths about going to the grocery store, who's going to listen to them now? PD

July 11, 2003

The key to Nunavut's success

Many Nunavut residents will remember the vote in November 1992, the one that ratified the Nunavut land claims agreement and made the creation of Nunavut possible - especially the result.

About 69 per cent of eligible Inuit beneficiaries voted Yes, allowing the Nunavut land claims agreement to go forward. That, in turn, meant that the Nunavut Political Accord, which set the ground-rules for division of the Northwest Territories and the subsequent creation of a Nunavut territory, could also go forward.

Nearly one of every three eligible beneficiaries voted No, or didn't vote. Because of how the vote was calculated, the 1,843 people who didn't vote had the same effect on the result as those who voted No.

The pressure to vote Yes was enormous. Every Nunavut MLA sitting in the Legislative Assembly of the Northwest Territories signed a declaration urging their Inuit constituents to accept the deal, and had it published in newspapers. Almost every other elected leader in Nunavut threw their support behind the deal too.

At the same time, a two separate groups of officials from the Tungavik Federation of Nunavut - Nunavut Tunngavik's predecessor - toured Nunavut, holding public meetings, radio call-in shows, and meetings with local hamlet councils, elders, and other groups in every community.

Members of an ad hoc committee set up to conduct the vote and explain the voting procedure travelled with the TFN officials, and even sat at the head table with them at community meetings.

In contrast, the "No" side, which consisted of a few scattered individuals and informal groups of people, had no money to campaign with and no organization to back them. They used phone-in shows, public meetings, and letters to the editor to express their views, but were overwhelmed by the powerful resources available to the political establishment.

So more than 10 years later, it's impossible to say if the Inuit of Nunavut ever really gave their informed consent, in the true sense of that term, to the Nunavut project, and to the surrender of their land for all time to the Canadian state.

In any event, that's now an irrelevant question. The Nunavut territory and Nunavut the land claims agreement are now living legal entities, and at least one of them, the land claims agreement, is protected by the constitution.

But the issues raised by those who opposed the agreement are still with us. One of those issues was raised by Jack Anawak, who at that time was the MP for the federal riding of Nunatsiaq.

Anawak opposed the Nunavut land claims agreement for two reasons. One was that the surrender of Inuit land was too high a price to pay for what the federal government offered through the agreement. The second was that not enough people in Nunavut had the education needed to benefit from the creation of Nunavut. He and his friend Peter Irniq both campaigned against the agreement for those reasons.

As we all know, each of them accepted the deal as soon as it was ratified, and each, in their way, has worked to the best of his ability to make Nunavut work.

But on the second point, time has proven them right.

In its own analysis of why Inuit employment within the government of Nunavut stands at only 41 per cent, and stands at even lower levels within federal government workplaces in Nunavut, NTI has concluded that Nunavut's stock of qualified Inuit workers has been exhausted.

NTI came to that conclusion in a study it conducted in partnership with the GN, a study that shows that the Inuit employment provisions in Article 23 of the Nunavut land claims agreement aren't working.

To remedy that appalling situation, which amounts to a major breach of the agreement, NTI and the GN are proposing that the federal government spend between $10 million and $20 million a year, over the next 10 years, on the training and education of Nunavut Inuit.

Federal officials have dug in their heels on this issue - which is why there was no new land claims implementation contract to celebrate on July 9 this year, the date when a new contract was supposed to take effect. NTI and GN officials want Ottawa to spend the money under the terms of a new implementation contract - and Ottawa, so far, is balking.

This, however, is a clever move by NTI and GN officials, because it could force the federal government to restore the money that Ottawa effectively withdrew from territorial government budgets in Paul Martin's funding cuts of 1995 and 1996. Those cuts are one of the reasons that Nunavut entered Confederation as a crippled, hollow entity on April 1, 1999 - and is still hobbling along with unnecessarily diminished capacities.

We urge all other Nunavut leaders, and all Nunavut residents to support NTI and the GN in their efforts to pry this training money out of the federal government. The key to success for Nunavut always was, and always will be, the development of Nunavut's people through training and education, coupled with better health care and housing. JB

July 4 , 2003

Excellence rewarded again

The little group of video geniuses at Igloolik Isuma Productions have demonstrated once again that with a lot of persistence and patience, excellence will be rewarded in the end.

In the mid-1990s, long before they achieved international praise for Atanarjuat, Igloolik Isuma produced a 13-part television drama called, in English, Nunavut Our Land.

Like Atanarjuat, the Nunavut series was produced entirely in Inuktitut with Inuit actors, and it displays many of the same qualities: stunning videography, a loving attention to historic detail, and an all-consuming reverence for Inuit cultural values.

It follows the lives of five fictional families from the spring of 1945 to Christmas Day, 1946, the period at the end of the Second World War when the lives of most Inuit living within Canada were about to change forever. Soon after that time, the old independent, nomadic life, based on subsistence hunting and the fur trade, would pass away, as Inuit were persuaded, cajoled, and often forced into permanent communities.

Based on the real-life recollections of today's elders, Igloolik Isuma's Nunavut series gives us a recreated vision of a way of life that was gone before most of us were born. Many Nunavut residents watched the series when it was broadcast over Television Northern Canada, and loved it.

Now, thanks to the Bravo arts channel, cable and satellite television viewers across Canada will be able to watch it too. It's the first time that Nunavut Our Land has been shown in its entirety, across Canada, on a national channel.

Appropriately, Bravo will broadcast the first episode of the series at 7:30 p.m. eastern time on July 9, a day when many Nunavut residents will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the proclamation of the Nunavut land claims agreement.

July 9 is an important day, to be sure. It's important also, to recognize the ideals of individual excellence that Igloolik Isuma personifies, and the idea the greatest rewards ought to go to those who refuse to do anything less than the best that they're capable of. That's a message we need to hear much more often in Nunavut. JB

July 4 , 2003

Iqaluit council should get on board

It's been evident for quite some time now that the potential for more economic ties between Baffin and Labrador has been growing rapidly.

Early this year, the Woodward family of Happy Valley-Goose Bay won a major Nunavut government contract to ship petroleum products to communities in the Baffin and Kivalliq regions. It's no secret that some day soon, the Woodward group would like to ship more than just fuel to the Baffin region. At the signing ceremony held in Iqaluit to formalize that contract, some company executives were talking informally about supplying dry goods to Iqaluit through Labrador and Newfoundland.

Not long after that, Air Labrador launched a weekly scheduled service to St. John's that includes stops in Happy Valley-Goose Bay. They're now talking about adding to that service.

At the same time, the Labrador Inuit Association's final land claim agreement with the government of Newfoundland is expected to be concluded soon, an event that's expected to provide the Inuit of Labrador with new economic tools.

Last week, a 19-person delegation from Nunavut, representing the Nunavut government and the Iqaluit and Baffin chambers of commerce, attended a trade show in Happy Valley-Goose Bay put on by the Labrador North Chamber of Commerce.

Will real economic ties follow the new transportation links?

That remains to be seen. Ultimately, that's up to business people from each region. It depends on people in one region finding ways of selling things that people in the other region will want to buy. It may also depend on people in each region being able to form partnerships in common ventures, such as fisheries projects.

It appears, however, that much goodwill developed between the two regions last week.

So why is Iqaluit city council dragging its feet on the issue?

There's nothing wrong with being prudent. But the city council also needs to realize that they have some responsibility for facilitating economic development in the community. The next time there's a flight bound for Labrador, somebody from Iqaluit city council should get on board. JB

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