From April 1st, half of the Northwest Territories in Canada will become Nunavut, a new territory owned and controlled by its native people, the Inuit. Nunavut, meaning "Our Land" is an expanse of tundra, glaciers and landlocked icebergs about the size of western Europe, with a population of less than 30,000, only 15 miles of paved roads and no light for two months of the year.
When I visited, the weather was clear and crisp and incredibly bright at minus 20 degrees Celsius; to locals, balmy weather. Getting off the plane - a nine-hour journey from Calgary via Edmonton, Yellowknife and Rankin Inlet - my hand stuck to the metal handrail. I was afraid to tell my friends who were waiting for me inside the Lego-like modular yellow plastic building which is Iqaluit airport, for I knew that for them, surviving the elements is second nature and they take for granted the stupidity of "city people in their city clothes".
When we went "out on the land" they berated me for wearing gloves, as one must wear mittens so that each finger keeps the others warm. While I was there, Fiona O'Donoghue (then working in the Nunavut Teacher Education programme), her Canadian husband Sandy McAuley and their small daughter Kathleen introduced me to their home and to their friends. It may be an isolated place, 2,000 km from Montreal, but my first conversation with an Inuk elder was about Danny Osborne, the west Cork sculptor, who had spent time in the Arctic with his family. O'Donoghue was one of maybe half a dozen Irish people in Baffin Island (the largest island of the Canadian Arctic), at the time.
After dinner, as the Northern Lights lit up the sky and through the large windows overlooking the graveyard and the bay the lights of snowmobiles could be seen bumping home over the ice from hunting at the floe edge, Eamonn O'Regan from Bandon sat back, closed his eyes and sang every word of Danny Boy in Irish. The bottle of whiskey I had brought up from the south had helped to oil the vocal chords at the party.
A number of Nunavut communities ban alcohol, others have strict controls. It is most readily available in Iqaluit (the capital of Nunavut), in restaurants and in the Royal Canadian Legion, but it is expensive and if a qallunaaq (white) family runs out, they run out. I thought Noel and Kate McDermott were joking when, visiting them next day, they apologised for being a dry household. It was three months until the next sea lift, when the sea ice opened, allowing the container ship in with the annual provisions from Montreal.
The traditional Inuit diet is seaweed, seal, caribou, polar bear, arctic char, muskox, frogs and roots mixed with whale blubber. Char and caribou are excellent, musk-ox is too tough and stringy. In the midst of all this snow and ice, it was strange to see two big freezers in the McAuleys' house. They must order and store non-perishables on a yearly basis as the Northern supermarket (the new name for the old Hudson Bay Company) is well stocked, but everything is wildly expensive.
The primary language of radio and television and important in the school curriculum, Inuktitut is still spoken in all the Northern communities and along with French and English will be one of the three official languages of Nunavut. Originally developed by Protestant missionaries in the 19th century with a 45-grapheme syllabary alphabet in which each symbol represents a syllable, a single Inuktitut word or syntagm can express a complex idea. A new orthography was created in l960, but the Inuit preferred to retain the syllabic system and the 1974 Inuit Language Commission worked out the dual system which is used today.
Despite the geographical isolation, the climate, cultural differences and all the other difficulties, qallunaaq remain in the Arctic not for the adventurous "last frontier" element, but mainly for the beauty of the place and the warmth, fun and closeness of the people, engendering great loyalty in anyone who has been there. The traditional attitudes towards time (clocks are new to the Inuit), co-operation and family which extend in many ways into daily life in the Inuit community differ greatly from Southern thinking.
Traditionally, when an old person became a burden on the group they voluntarily committed suicide for the greater good; this was considered an honourable option and the belief was that they would come back to life. Suicide among the severely depressed was also accepted, as personal despair placed an undue burden on the group and to take one's own life was proof of concern for its welfare.
Social gatherings are common and Inuit never seem to tire of games in the ice and snow. The rules of the Pond Inlet Golf Club include stipulations that balls landing in an aglu (seal breathing hole) are lost, but balls (or golfers) "taken by polar bears or narwhals or who are carried off by giant ravens or other northern wildlife may be replaced without penalty". However, "a two stroke penalty will be assigned to any player who so delays the game that they cause those playing behind them to freeze to the fairway".
Old customs such as drum dancing and set dancing (learned from the whalers) throat singing and story-telling are still practised and encouraged. Carving is a traditional occupation, out of necessity for spear and axe heads, for artistic expression, and latterly for money. Local artists prefer to work out of doors, using soap-stones, antler and bone and occasionally the spiral tusk of the narwal. Inuit carvings, prints and textiles are highly prized.
Everything, traditionally, is shared, including children. To qallunaaq, and especially those married to Inuit, one of the hardest traditional practices to accept is the maintenance of ties with other families through adoption customs. Inuit love children but in almost every family there are adopted children and those who have been given away.
Qallunaaq women cannot understand how a mother-in-law or sister-in-law can ask for, and expect to be given, their new born baby. If the request is refused, it can cause a permanent rift in both the marriage and the wider family. The Canadian courts have yet to uphold a single challenge to this Inuit tradition.
Sociologists recognise 15 steps from hunter-gatherer to the post-technological society of today. Many Inuit have taken that journey in a few years, embracing new technology with ease. Over the past five years, major projects have been undertaken to build computer programmes in Inuktitut and computer-based distance learning is being established, even in the remotest communities. Graduation levels for young Inuit have increased six-fold over the last 15 years.
Today Iqaluit has satellite communication (in Inuktitut computers translates to "like a brain"; faxes to "fast letters") and is the northernmost community in Canada with a cellular telephone service. It now has three banks, hotels and restaurants, a teacher training college, a museum, library and video store. There is a local radio station which sounds like Raidio na Gaelteachta on acid, and there is a pizza delivery service. For the implementation of Nunavut, an igloo-shaped Legislative building, administrative offices and dozens of new apartments and houses have been built. Because of permafrost and a complete lack of local materials, construction is hugely expensive and it costs the Canadian government around £8,000 per person each year to provide services in the region. All utilities must be above ground; sewage disposal and water delivery are more likely to occur by truck than by pipe, and graves can only be dug at certain times in the year.
In Nunavut, life is still a battle for survival. Every day for a thousand years the Inuit have waged that ceaseless battle just to preserve life, and only a people of resolute optimism and valour could have survived as they did. With an average temperature of minus 20 degrees to minus 40 degrees Celsius, motor vehicles must be kept plugged in to the electricity mains at all times. In the northernmost communities, a good fine day in mid summer could reach 10 degrees Celsius. For me, even taking a photograph was a major operation, involving discomfort.
If the electricity goes out for more than a certain number of hours, people speculate about the possibility of a contingency plan to airlift the entire population of Iqaluit. Otherwise, despite triple-glazing and solid fuel stoves, fur and thermal clothing, rugs and feather duvets, they could die of cold inside their houses. The elders in the community however, scoff at such an idea, for they were taught how to survive (they would not however, be so stupid as to wear gloves rather than mittens outside).
In l982 the Tungavik Federation of Nunavut (TFN) was incorporated to pursue land claims negotiations on behalf of the Inuit. Two decades of intense, difficult and sometimes acrimonious negotiations on the boundary followed, culminating in l993 with the most comprehensive land settlement ever reached between a state and an aboriginal group anywhere in the world and the promise of self-determination for an ancient people. Although land ownership is a foreign notion in the traditionally nomadic/hunting Inuit way of life, the birth of Nunavut involved a $1.6 billion settlement, the biggest land claim in Canadian history. The deal includes hunting, trapping and fishing rights, and the subsurface mineral rights (underneath the ice are oil, gold, diamonds, silver, lead and zinc).
Although the target is to have 85 per cent of all management posts held by Inuit, this has been reduced to 50 per cent for the time being, as not enough trained and experienced indigenous people are yet available. There is still no Inuk doctor in all of Nunavut. Hunting is a way of life, and until recently many of the civil servants and office workers had probably lived off the land, so would be unused to a 40-hour week. Flexibility will be required on the part of the new government and its Inuit employees, with time off allowed to workers to pursue traditional seasonal activities such as seal hunts.
Inuit values are based on mutual respect and there is a genuine effort to infuse government with those values, but according to Fiona O'Donoghue, who is now director of early childhood and school services for the government of the Northwest Territories. there is already some evidence of neo-colonialism. "This is a society emerging from the legacy of colonisation. It is important that a Southern Ontario bureaucracy is not just transported north. The members of the legislature were only elected a few weeks ago and everybody is now waiting for them to articulate some direction and make commitments that might see a different kind of government."
Progress and the new prosperity brought about by the construction boom have brought with them the modern scourges. There is a flourishing cocaine trade and drug and alcohol abuse are endemic. Petrol-sniffing teenagers recently set fire to and destroyed seven new houses being built for government employees. Housebreaking is rife, AIDS and HIV are a huge problem and Iqaluit has the highest suicide rate of anywhere in North America. Nunavut, with the youngest population in Canada (56 per cent are under 25) will rank among the leaders in births, unemployment (29 per cent) teenage suicides, spousal abuse and solvent sniffing.
These are the problems the new government has to face. All of them are familiar to Paul Okalik, Member of the Legislative Assembly for Iqaluit West who will become Nunavut's first Premier. Thirty-four-year-old Paul Okalik was a typical child of Baffin Island, experiencing addiction, dropping out of school and getting into trouble with the law. But he got back on his feet, became a welder and mechanic and worked underground in the Nanisivik Mine in the early 1980s before going south to university. Okalik graduated as a lawyer and is the first Inuk to be called to the bar on Baffin Island.
The Inuit hope that in time Nunavut and its government will be the envy of the world. Fiona O'Donoghue is optimistic for this too: "It is felt by many of the leaders that healing has to be a very strong focus for this government, creating a system that looks not just at legislation, policies or economics but at the wellbeing of people and their recovery from cultural and linguistic losses. I believe there are some very fine young bureaucrats and committed people in the system, including the deputy minister of the executive, Joe Kunuk who believes in having institutions reflect more Inuit values. There is talk of having elders involved in critical decision-making which is an idea that would make Nunavut the first government in the world to rely on the wisdom and guidance of an Elders' Council, as they used to do in the traditional Inuit camps."