Eight students graduated from high school in Kugaaruk, Nunavut, this year.

That might sound like a tough year for education, but the graduating class of 2017 was the biggest on record for this Inuit hamlet of about 900 people. The milestone is all the more exceptional when you consider Kugaardjuq School’s secondary students finished the year after their school—the only one in the community—was destroyed by fire this past winter.

On March 1, the school’s 320 students awoke to find smoke and rubble in place of the 30-year-old building. The fire, caused by arson, was a massive loss for the isolated, fly-in community.

“It was tragic,” says Kugaardjuq principal Jerry Maciuk. “But after the initial horror, people really moved into action.” By mid-March, Kugaardjuq’s secondary students had been relocated to temporary classrooms in donated spaces around the community, like a daycare centre, a church basement, and local office spaces.

The toughest part was building morale and motivation among students, Maciuk says, who lost their regular routine and an important gathering space.

Educators in Nunavut have their work cut out for them, fires aside: Between 2001 and 2014, the territory had a 60 percent high school attendance rate, and only a third of 18-year-olds graduated from school in Nunavut.

The 2016 graduating class in Cape Dorset, another Nunavut community located farther east, on Baffin Island, knows all too well the challenges of trying to stay in school when there isn’t one.

Young arsonists (incendiary fires was the number one cause of fires in the territory in 2015) were charged with burning down the community’s Peter Pitseolak High School in September 2015, leaving those students sharing classroom space with students at the neighbouring elementary school on a split schedule. “It was hard,” says graduate Natasha Reid, who hails from Cape Dorset. “[There were] tons of students who just left.”

On top of being discouraged from staying in school, “It’s hard to forgive the people who did it,” she says of the young arsonists. “But it’s not healthy to keep a grudge. When you let go of that, you’ll be a better person.”

Reid and six other Grade 12 students persevered, graduating in June 2016.

But the school couldn’t host their graduation ceremony until this year because they needed to order new gowns, awards, and other supplies that were lost in the fire.

For students in Cape Dorset and Kugaaruk who’ll be waiting a few years until new schools are built, Reid has some advice: Don’t give up hope. “Education opens doors.”

Although the last residential school in Canada closed in 1996, the effects of its policies enacted to erase Indigenous culture remain. “These policies were extremely damaging to the language, which lies at the heart of who Inuit are,” writes Nikki Eegeesiak, executive director of the non-governmental Coalition of Nunavut District Education Authorities (CNDEA). In Nunavut, more than 85 percent of the population is Inuit. About 70 percent of Nunavummiut grow up learning Inuktitut, and one and a half percent grow up learning Inuinnaqtun.

The goal of the Nunavut Education Act is to establish a bilingual education system by 2019, with students from kindergarten to Grade 12 learning Inuktut (a term used by the Nunavut government to refer to Inuit language dialects used in the territory) and either English or French. But a 2013 report by the Auditor General of Canada found the territory was not going to meet its goal, due to a shortage of bilingual teachers and Inuktuk classroom materials.

In response, the Government of Nunavut proposed Bill 37 in March 2017, which would amend the Education Act and the Inuit Language Protection Act, a statute promising parents the right to have their children educated in Inuktut from kindergarten to Grade 3. This amendment would prolong Nunavut’s goal of having a bilingual education system by more than 10 years. With more than half of the Inuit population in Nunavut under the age of 25, many in the territory will not have received a formal bilingual education— disconnecting another generation of Nunavummiut from their culture.

If passed, Bill 37 would aim to create standardized education models that include Inuktuk and focus on increasing the number of bilingual teachers. This sounds hopeful, but vague. The bill has been critiqued for planning to restructure an entire education system when what it really needs is more teachers and classroom resources. “The [government] wants to control language of instruction, yet has taken no responsibly [sic] for the lack of planning for Inuktitut teachers or the shortage of learning materials,” Donna Adams, chairperson of the CNDEA, writes.

“Today, school systems in the Arctic are trying to rebuild the education systems so that Inuit language, culture, and history are at the foundation,” writes Eegeesiak. Without a system that prioritizes Inuktut, Nunavut, and Inuit culture will be lost.

Plus, it’s always fun to revisit our best reporting and writing, from the very talented contributors who helped make This Magazine what it is today, and what will continue to shape it in the future.

Our first Throwback Thursday is “The Streets of Iqaluit” by Gordon Laird from our 2002 March/April issue. This story examines the homelessness in Iqaluit—where Inuit line up at soup kitchens and fill homeless shelters—and what this says about modern Inuit life and the fight to maintain traditional ways  (plus Canada’s tendency to ignore the North’s myriad struggles). Too sadly, and despite Stephen Harper’s love affair with the North, for all that makes the territory amazing, Nunavut remains both underfunded, under-resourced, and replete with challenges, making Laird’s story especially poignant today.

At the helm of the June protests is Leesee Papatsie from Iqaluit. Papatsie started the facebook page Feeding My Family, which now boasts 21,500 members.

The page started as a forum for Nunavut residents to post pictures of the outrageous prices of their food. With a small jar of Kraft peanut butter cashing in at eighteen dollars, what are people eating?  The answer is, not much. Half of all kids in Nunavut between the ages of 11 and 15, for example, sometimes go to bed hungry.

The June 9 protests garnered some much-needed media attention, but not nearly enough response from Ottawa. It seems like local residents—armed with a network of facebook followers across the continent—are taking matters into their own hands.  Some organizers suggest that allies donate to food banks, while concerned Facebook members of the group offer to “adopt” a family or ship donations of food at their own expense. The seeming disconnect between the government’s response and the public’s concern is shocking.

Not much praise has been forthcoming for the federal initiative, Nutrition North, which replaced the Food Mail program on April 1, 2011. It aims to subsidize some basics, which include eggs, milk, bread and fruit and vegetables, but it excludes such imperishable necessities as diapers, pads and tampons, and toilet paper. Ever the dissenter, Federal Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq suggests that Nutrition North isn’t having much effect because the money goes to retailers who are supposed to pass on the benefits to local families by lowering prices. Aglukkaq says the problem is the retailers who are hiking up prices, a view echoed by local residents.

As I leave the coffee shop where I am working this morning, a sign on the door says “Thank you for supporting fair trade.” How is it that in southern Ontario we can choose to drink slightly-more-expensive-than-average coffee in order for coffee farmers to get a good deal, while some parents in Nunavut can’t afford to feed and diaper their kids?  It really makes my interest in fair trade coffee, rooftop gardening, and home made bread feel a little, well, precious.

A bowhead whale caught by Igloolik, Nunavut, hunters. Photo by Ansgar Walk.

Whale hunting is a fundamental practice in the North and should be celebrated, not restricted…

Gabriel Nirlungayuk can’t pinpoint when Inuit first began hunting bowheads. “Whaling, from an Inuit perspective, has been ongoing since time immemorial,” says the director of wildlife and environment for the land-claims group Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. But he knows one thing: It wasn’t always so heavily regulated.

Currently, Nunavummiut are permitted to harvest three bowhead whales per year. The territory’s 25 communities and two outpost camps compete each year—and the stakes are high. Whaling is an indispensable way of life for Nunavut’s predominantly coastal communities. In August, thanks to healthier bowhead whale numbers and favourable conditions, hunters in Iqaluit caught their first bowhead whale in more than a century.

Nothing on the 14-metre mammal was wasted. Everything—bones, blubber, skin, and meat—is used, and distributed throughout the community and beyond. “Within Inuit culture, the celebration of sharing the meat is one that is special to individuals who are harvesting,” says Nirlungayuk, “They’re not just hunting for themselves; they’re hunting for their family and extended family.” Inuit are working with government and the scientific community to establish a new quota that won’t threaten the whale population, he adds. “We know we could hunt more,” says Nirlungayuk. “We’re taking it slow.”

…But conservation methods must ensure the health of the Arctic whale population.

Whale hunting in the North has long been controversial. Governments and biologists carefully monitor whale numbers, with conservation officers enforcing quotas, licences, and inspections before and after hunts. Some conservation groups, such as Sea Shepherd, say it’s still not enough. “I do not believe in cultural justifications for slaughtering wildlife if other redress is available for survival,” says Sea Shepherd’s Capt. Paul Watson.

More moderate groups, such as the World Society for the Protection of Animals, believe subsistence hunts should become more humane, cautioning any form of whaling has the potential for severe negative impacts for animal welfare. “WSPA urges all whalers, including aboriginal subsistence whalers, to consider the increasing and irrefutable scientific evidence that all whaling causes immense and prolonged suffering,” says Joanna Toole, the oceans campaign coordinator for WSPA.

Bowheads have been precariously close to extinction: the zealous commercial whaling that ended decades before put the bowhead whale on the endangered species list in the 1980s, and they were only downgraded to “special concern” in 2009. However, numbers are on the incline off the coast of Nunavut and in the Hudson Bay. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans revised its estimates from hundreds to thousands in 2008 and continues to survey the population. As the whale population strengthens, so too does the Inuit argument for putting conservation and culture on equal footing.

Alana Kronstal's new public awareness campaign aims to cut Nunavut's sky-high smoking rates.

On the streets of Iqaluit, cheery Alana Kronstal is known as “the tobacco lady.” Young and old, everyone seems to know the 31-year-old, who is leading the charge against smoking in Nunavut, home of the highest smoking rates in Canada. “Nowhere in Canada has a campaign been launched starting with such a majority of smokers,” Kronstal says. “We’re trying to do something that hasn’t been done yet.”

The statistics are staggering when compared to the rest of the country: according to Statistics Canada, 53 percent of the Nunavut population smokes and private studies cite numbers as high as 70 percent among the territory’s predominantly Inuit population. Children as young as two pick butts off the street to imitate their parents. Studies show up to 80 percent of the territory’s pregnant women smoke.

Luckily for the anti-smoking faction, the federal government has granted Kronstal and her team $700,000 for a new public awareness campaign. Tentatively called Tobacco Has No Place Here, the PSA will focus on challenging the cultural norm of smoking in Nunavut. Kronstal’s team has hired two firms (one local) to grab the territory’s attention through social media buzz, YouTube vignettes, community feasts during the campaign’s rollout in January, an art installation in Iqaluit, and more.

“We’re a small community spread over a vast landscape. People know each other well,” says Kronstal, who has worked on smaller-scale campaigns in the Northwest Territories. “If we share personal stories, put a face to this issue, celebrate individuals who’ve successfully quit smoking, we’re getting somewhere.”

While sky-high lung cancer and tuberculosis rates are often overshadowed by Nunavut’s other struggles—high suicide rates, substance abuse, isolation, and poverty—Kronstal believes her campaign can change lives: “It’s having a very real impact on people’s health and the life expectancy of an entire population.”

Nunavut’s campaign is currently partially funded under the Federal Tobacco Control Strategy. Since the strategy launched 10 years ago, nationwide smoking rates have dropped to 21 percent, leaving the government to wonder if it still needs to invest in getting people to quit. The funding strategy is currently up for renewal, and Kronstal isn’t sure what will happen in Nunavut if it’s canned. “Is it a done deal now? Obviously for some of the provinces, the issue [of smoking] has changed,” she says. “But for people in Nunavut, it’s not a dead issue. It’s not an issue that’s been solved yet.”

As of today it’s official: every province and territory across Canada is on board with the 350.org climate movement. This Sunday, 350.org events will be held throughout Canada and around the world.

Last year, we saw the beginning of this movement. On Oct. 24th, 2009, several thousand youth took over Parliament Hill in Ottawa to give our leader a strong message: that we want action now.

But the politicians on the Hill haven’t given us that. If anything, the Canadian government has done the opposite, subsidizing $1.5 billion to the fossil fuel industry and cutting investments in renewable energy. Even worse, as we all know too well, the Copenhagen Climate Summit was a complete failure. It took us years, if not a decade, backward in negotiations.

So what do we do now? Is there any point to fighting or should we just give in to this suicidal path we seem to be on? These are the questions that have plagued me since I left the summit last December. It’s fair to tell you that I haven’t written much about this recently because I’ve been in a kind of “eco-coma.” I felt so pessimistic about our future, as I’m sure a lot of us have, that I found it difficult to have even the slightest bit of hope any more.

But maybe that was my mistake. I placed too much hope on some political leaders changing it all. I realize now that we’ve got to get to work ourselves for the change we want. We can’t leave it up to the top-tier powers that are so obviously controlled by the fossil fuel lobby. Throughout history, this has always been the way. It takes strong movements of millions to make change. This year is no exception. Despite our corrupt government, Canadians and people around the world are not backing down. Our movement is only getting stronger.

On Oct. 10th, there will be events happening across the country. In the Yukon Territories, people will weatherize low-income homes. In Nunavut they will take the day to walk instead of drive. While in Prince Edward Island, they will cycle on hybrid electric bikes across the coastal shorelines to promote alternative energies.

In Pakistan, women are learning how to use solar ovens, students in Zimbabwe are installing solar panels on a rural hospital, and sumo wrestlers in Japan are riding their bicycles to practice.

Sure, solving climate change won’t come one bike path at a time. But as Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, wrote, “It’s a key step in continuing to build the movement to safeguard the climate.”

This is probably the most important year yet to preserver in our fight. We’ve seen devastating floods in Pakistan, fires in Russia, and a heat-wave around the world.

But with this movement growing globally, today I am proud to write that I have hope again.

Winners of the 2010 Governor General's Awards for Visual and Media Arts. Left to right: Claude Tousignant, Ione Thorkelsson, Rita Letendre, Gabor Szilasi, Tom Sherman, Terry Ryan, Robert Davidson, André Forcier.

The winners of the 2010 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts were announced today in Montreal. The winners receive $25,000 to support their work and recognize their contributions to Canadian visual art. From the press release:

Haida sculptor Robert Davidson, filmmaker André Forcier, painter Rita Letendre, video artist Tom Sherman, photographer Gabor Szilasi and painter Claude Tousignant won the awards for artistic achievement. Glass sculptor Ione Thorkelsson won the Saidye Bronfman Award for excellence in fine crafts, while Terry Ryan received the Outstanding Contribution Award as long-time general manager of West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative in Cape Dorset, Nunavut and director of Dorset Fine Arts in Toronto.

Click on any of the thumbnails below to see some of the winning works.

Aaju Peter. Illustration by David Donald.

A majority of the 27 member states of the European Union voted to ban the trade of seal product imports such as pelts, oil, and meat last July. The ban comes into effect in August 2010. Although the EU did allow a partial exemption for Inuit populations, the ban will nonetheless have devastating consequences for Canada’s northern indigenous people, according to Aaju Peter, an Inuk clothing designer, lawyer, and activist. We spoke with Peter in Ottawa, where she is pursuing an additional degree in international law.

This: What work do you do with sealskins?

Peter: I design contemporary clothes that are inspired by traditional Inuit designs.

This: Such as?

Peter: Everything from tank tops, vests, skirts, pants, jackets, to mittens and slippers.

This: What do they cost?

Peter: A sealskin bag I can make for $350. For a jacket it can be between $1,500 and $4,000.

This: Where do you sell them?

Peter: Mostly in Iqaluit [in Nunavut]. Or by special order. [Former] governor general Adrienne Clarkson has a coat.

This: Is sealskin difficult to work with?

Peter: If you have 10 or 20 years experience it’s not that difficult. It takes a long time to acquire the skills that are needed to work with it.

This: How is business?

Peter: It’s slow right now because I’m working on my degree. But if I did sealskin full time I could be very, very wealthy.

This: What is your reaction to the EU ban?

Peter: It will have a devastating effect. It already has on the hunters. They normally would get $60 to $90 for a skin. Now they get about $5. The cost of living is very high in the Arctic. They won’t be able to get enough money to sustain their families.

This: Won’t the Inuit exemption protect them?

Peter: The exemption is very restrictive and absolutely useless. I won’t be able to sell my clothes in Europe. If [the seal] is traditionally hunted and is used for cultural trading purposes only, then it’s okay. They want us to be like little stick Eskimos who are stuck on the land and go out in our little Eskimo clothes with a harpoon. They will not let us hunt with rifles and snow machines. They will not let us sell commercial products. It’s a form of cultural colonization. A journalist in the Netherlands called it the Bambification of the Inuit, like we’re in some Disney movie.

This: Can you understand the opposition to the seal hunt?

Peter: I don’t wish to understand it. I can explain it. It’s become a moral issue that it’s not right to kill animals. It stems from a society that lives in large urban areas that are totally detached from nature and detached from a subsistence economy where you go out and catch what you need and try to make money out of that. It’s a culture that is pushed by a people who have absolutely no connection to the people they are affecting because it’s not affecting them.

This: Any chance of changing people’s minds?

Peter: I always try to be positive, which is why I went to Europe [to fight against the ban]. But I’ve come to realize that people who are living on selling or eating seal don’t have the same amount of money that special interest groups have. For instance, the animal rights groups had a humongous truck outside [the European Parliament] with a humongous screen where they were showing films of seals being slaughtered. And they put pictures of a seal head with “Vote Yes,” for a ban and put them on the doors of all the 800 members of parliament. We couldn’t [afford] anything like that.

This: What would you have wanted the Parliamentarians to understand?

Peter: That this is an issue that is very, very important for Inuit survival. I travel with the courts to the smaller communities. In the winter you see a frame with sealskin on it outside every home. You can see the importance for these families, who have nothing else, no other form of economy, to be able to sell the skins for what they’re worth. I see the harm that is being done to the communities but they’re not able to communicate this. How can a group of people who know nothing about this pass legislation that can have such harmful effects on others? I have a hard time believing those 800 parliamentarians would be able to sleep at night if they knew the harm they are causing.

Providing midwifery in a public health system presents challenges, but they're worth it. Creative Commons photo by Flickr user limaoscarjuliet.

In March 2009, Nova Scotia became the seventh province to incorporate midwifery into the public health care system. Instead of paying and arranging for the service privately, residents now have it covered and regulated by the provincial government.

Midwifery should be seen as the progressive (yet traditional) and cost-effective method of childbirth in Canada. But the upfront cost of creating a regulatory body for midwives, especially in smaller provinces with few practitioners, is offputting for governments. Still, this community-based model of birth, with its decreased hospital time (due to homebirths, shorter hospital stays for hospital births, and less frequent obstetrical interventions) and on-call services, creates significant long-term savings for the health care system.

Nova Scotia’s example offers important lessons to New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, the Yukon, and Nunavut, all of which will soon regulate midwifery. (New Brunswick will institute legislation and begin hiring midwives in just a few months.) Nova Scotia’s transition hasn’t come without kinks: there remains a shortage of midwives, a lack of public funds allocated to midwifery and the entire health care system faces geographical challenges—rural communities still have trouble accessing public services.

On the positive side, the change means that midwifery services will now be free in Nova Scotia, as they are from British Columbia to Quebec. “Just the very fact of covering midwifery in a provincial health plan and making that known will attract women of all different backgrounds,” explains Aimee Carbonneau, a Toronto midwife who has only ever worked in a public system. Ontario was the first province to regulate midwifery, in 1994. “If it is not supported and paid for by the government, you end up seeing a clientele that is mostly white, middle-class and up, with post-secondary education,” she says.

Maren Dietze, past president of the Association of Nova Scotia Midwives and a practicing midwife in Nova Scotia’s South Shore District, says regulation also gives midwives a new level of legitimacy: “Before we couldn’t deliver in hospital and we couldn’t order ultrasounds. Now we are accepted as part of the team.”

Midwife groups in Nova Scotia have struggled with successive governments since the early ’80s for public care, yet it remains available in only three of the province’s nine health districts. The other six District Health Authorities did not respond to the province’s call for model midwifery sites. According to Jan Catano, co-founder of the Midwifery Coalition of Nova Scotia, “The province didn’t want to roll out midwifery to the whole province at once because there were not enough midwives.”

Instead, a two-year budget for seven fulltime midwives was created. They work from sites in Halifax, Antigonish, and Bridgewater, leaving most of the province without access. Even if more midwives become available to Nova Scotia, from new graduates and a strong pool of internationally trained talent, the money isn’t yet budgeted to hire them.

Consequently, some midwives were essentially forced out of business in the transition.

To create universal access, Dietze says, “We would need more funding for midwives and we would need to be promoting midwifery to all the health districts,” so that local District Health Authorities demand the service and funding.

In the meantime, any Nova Scotian mother living outside the model districts in the centre of the province will lack access. And the situation is not unique to Nova Scotia. “I think for most of Canada, geography represents a big challenge,” Carbonneau says. “Many northern and especially Aboriginal northern communities are trying to bring birth back, but it’s quite tricky juggling the low numbers with the allocation of resources.” The Association of Ontario Midwives, for example, estimates its members serve only 60 percent of their demand.

Meanwhile, the three midwifery centres in Nova Scotia are swamped. And demand seems to be skyrocketing in some areas, such as Dietze’s South Shore District.

“A year ago we had five or six births here; now we have 40 on our books and we’ll have 70 or 80 people next year,” she says.

But, despite the increased demand regulation brings, midwifery is still not a financial priority in the province; compared to other health issues such as senior care or, more recently, H1N1.

The irony is that midwifery is less expensive than the medical model of childbirth, which treats pregnancy as an illness requiring costly medical interventions like drugs or surgeries. Further, midwives have a rich

Canadian history of catching babies in the most remote locations, especially when doctors weren’t available. In that traditional system, midwives went where doctors couldn’t or wouldn’t.

Now, as more provinces regulate midwifery, those remote areas are being left behind. Midwifery can’t properly be called “public” until access is universal.

To make that happen, more midwives are needed and that requires more Canadian midwifery graduates and greater integration of internationally trained midwives. Provincial governments need to make a special effort to promote midwifery to rural health districts and back up their words with trained midwives ready to live in and serve rural communities and First Nations reserves. And a culture change is needed in the medical institutions hosting midwives. To do their jobs properly, midwives need the freedom, flexibility, and mobility to provide homebirths and travel significant distances when necessary.

All of these changes require upfront investments, but collectively they will save taxpayer dollars currently being wasted on unnecessary birthing interventions and hospital stays that only hurt women and their families.