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January/February 2009 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Nunavut Feature: Royal Ontario Museum Feature: Hero school The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations À la carte

Feature story: Nunavut Territory of unrequited dreams More... Sidebar: Project Naming Map: Explore Nunavut Photos: Life in Nunavut Videos: Pond Inlet   Throat-singing teens Info: 10th Anniversary Celebration Resources Library and Archives Canada

Ask residents what’s changed in the 10 years that have passed since Nunavut was created by carving almost two million square kilometres from the Northwest Territories, and you’ll likely get a blank stare. Some say nothing has changed, aside from explosive growth in the capital city of Iqaluit, which has doubled to more than 6,200 residents since 1995. Nunavut Arctic College was on the northern edge of town when I was a newspaper reporter here a dozen years ago. Now there’s a whole neighbourhood behind it with Inuktitut street names that southerners can’t pronounce. Multicoloured mansions overlook the bay, multicultured customers buy fresh parsley at the grocer’s, and homeless men urinate in front of the new Salvation Army shelter every morning because there’s only one bathroom inside.

Nunavut was supposed to be different: a model mixture of indigenous and public government with transparency and accountability. But a decade after Nunavut adopted its inuksuk flag and stirring motto — Nunavut Sanginivut (“our land, our strength”) — scandal, conflicts of interest, government accounting disasters and social problems persist. Some Nunavummiut have lost patience awaiting the cultural renaissance and say the Northwest Territories was preferable to the Nunavut carousel that turns furiously but goes nowhere. Such doubts would have been heresy 30 years ago when, fuelled by Inuit nationalism, enthusiastic and fiercely proud twentysomething Inuit political activists began the intense discussions and negotiations with Ottawa from which Nunavut eventually emerged.

Jack Anawak was a young man during that heady awakening. A one-time Liberal MP and a father of 14 — 12 of them adopted — he is committed to self-determination for Inuit, and is a bit of a heretic. Nunavut was created before its time, he says: Inuit were uneducated and unprepared in 1999 to run a territorial government. However, he adds, sounding very Buddhist, what’s done is done, and Inuit should focus not on what Nunavut is, but on what it could be.

“We need visionaries and dreamers,” says Anawak. “We need a Department of Imagination in government. Why should we just copy the British parliamentary system? This is Nunavut. We didn’t survive for thousands of years just to copy someone else.” He’s just completed a contract with the Nunavut Employees Union, and aspires, once again, to political office. “A boat in a harbour is safe. That’s what the Nunavut government is now. But that’s not what a boat is for. It has to go out and explore. We need bold, decisive action on issues and there isn’t the leadership to say we are going forward. Nunavut is comprised mostly of young people. They’re more idealistic. When that population gets to be in charge, Inuit nationalism will come back.” We’re sitting in the restaurant of Iqaluit’s Navigator Inn buzzed on caffeine. I ask Anawak the time. Judging by the angle of the sun, he says, it’s just about 3 p.m. As I marvel at his precision, he points to a clock over my left shoulder and laughs softly into his mug. Touché.

We tend to think Inuit such as Anawak have special skills and superhuman endurance. How else could they have survived long, dark winters in the Arctic with only primitive tools and no wood to burn? And how else can they keep this start-up territory afloat? But their power lies in their shared history. Inuit know their fickle land with a kind of intimacy that has all but vanished from southern society. In few other places in Canada do residents feel such a deep sense of ownership, share such a unique past, speak predominantly one aboriginal language and successfully maintain close family ties within a population smaller than Moose Jaw scattered across a land mass the size of Mexico.

While leaders look to the future for economic and political independence, residents of Nunavut’s 26 communities — some as small as 150 people — hunt and go to work and play hockey and wonder what climate change will do to their land. Have their lives improved in 10 years? Circumstances vary across three time zones and three regions: Baffin in the east, with half the territory’s population; the central Kivalliq region; and the western Kitikmeot. The cost and logistics of binding such a wide, remote geography naturally fuel an east-west rivalry. Kitikmeot residents feel isolated from, and ignored by, Iqaluit, much like Albertans feel snubbed by Ottawa. But with its western boundary abutting N.W.T. diamond country, companies are scouring the Kitikmeot for more of the same and other minerals too, positioning the region favourably in Nunavut’s economic future. Despite that, says Charlie Lyall, president and CEO of the Inuitowned Kitikmeot Corporation, western Nunavut can’t even get money for training programs, let alone a new trades school like the one set to open in Kivalliq this year.