Television first came to the North in the late 1960s at the request of mining companies that wanted to keep their transient workers occupied through long, dark Arctic winters with southern sitcoms and soap operas. No one consulted the local Inuit population. Transmissions were in French and English and came in one direction: in. One broadcaster, who watched children turn away from their parents and Inuktitut language in Frobisher Bay (now Iqaluit), compared TV to a neutron bomb that “destroys the soul of a people while leaving the shell of a people walking around intact.”

Zacharias Kunuk, then an Inuk carver from Igloolik in what is now Nunavut, noticed that when television came, “everybody stopped listening, visiting one another and telling stories.” In 1975 and again in 1979, his hamlet rejected government offers to broadcast satellite signals from the South until Inuit had a broadcaster of their own. But Kunuk didn’t want to wait for Canada to restore his Inuit traditions. Born Atagutaluk Kigutikajuk Tagaaq Kuatuk Nujaktut, he was E5-1613 to the government, which rechristened him Kunuk. An Anglican priest called him Zacharias. Southern institutions had claimed enough of his culture. In 1981, the 24-year-old flew to Montreal and sold three of his carvings at Westmount’s Eskimo Art Gallery; he returned with a Sanyo beta camera, a VCR and a 26-inch television.

Kunuk tells only one story from one perspective: the Inuit one, and he tells it in his own language, Inuktitut. Inuit, he says, have gone from the Stone Age to the digital age in one generation, and he’s spent the past 30 years salvaging stories that were nearly forgotten in the transition from an oral culture to one where the written word determines political policy and power. In the process, he’s pressed the Canadian government to acknowledge past human rights offences against Inuit and challenged the effectiveness of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement. He’s created his own form of journalism, one that tells stories from the inside out, and he’s unrepentant about the one-sidedness of that approach. Kunuk’s documentaries sketch the first draft of the losers’ history, and he’s not looking for input or approval from the winners.

“Has it been a bad week?” I ask. It’s early July in Igloolik, the sun hasn’t set in months and it’s stiflingly dusty. I’m at the dump with Kunuk, searching for a ball joint that will connect the wheel to the axle of his burgundy Jeep. His company has just gone into receivership. His equipment and costumes have been repossessed, his office doors are padlocked and the receiver has requested his computer and his vehicle registration. A week ago, he blew a tire on that car and, two days ago, the wheel fell off completely.

Kunuk pulls his head from the wheel well of a half-crushed pickup truck and stops searching for a match to the car part in his hand. We walk back to a borrowed four-wheeler and he finally answers my question.

“Kch!” It’s a quick, percussive sound—not exactly a laugh—that he makes when disaster strikes and, after two weeks in Igloolik, I’m starting to recognize it. He revs up the four-wheeler and yells, “It’s too hot for the helmet” (it’s seven degrees) and “Companies go bankrupt all the time. You just start a new one.”

As in many of Nunavut’s 25 hamlets, the houses of Igloolik are bound by the graveyard on one side and the airport on the other, creating the impression that the only way out is through death or the air. This is the Igloolik—and the Nunavut—I recognize from news 2012

reports. It’s the Nunavut of the southernized political system, the astronomical suicide rate, 40 percent unemployment, alcohol abuse and a century of cultural oppression. Ole Gjerstad, a Nunavut documentarian, says it’s a world portrayed so negatively in newspapers: “You walk away from those six to eight pages devoted to Nunavut and man, oh man, we may as well just nuke the whole place and liberate the planet from all that misery.”

But there are two Iglooliks: the town and the island. The name means “place of houses” and refers to the land around the town where Inuit settled before contact with southerners. Kunuk drives through dirt, boulders and soft brown tundra clods to show me another, ruined Igloolik where the political units were families and elders held sway. Suicides were rare and predominantly practiced by elders in times of scarcity. He has made close to 30 docs and two features in as many years and, though roughly half of them are set in modern Nunavut, he never loses sight of this world. We stop the Jeep and get out. The air is absolutely silent. It’s so windless that contrails from the morning flights crisscross like pencil lines through the sky.

“This is where we lived,” Kunuk says, pointing at a square-shaped welt in the grass where a sod house once stood, eight feet wide by eight feet deep. There are six more like it stretching down the coastline. It’s the site of a community that died only decades ago, but it’s not marked on any map. The day he left his sod house, Kunuk says, “was the saddest day of my life.”

To read the rest of this story, please see our ebook anthology: RRJ in Review: 30 Years of Watching the Watchdogs.
 It can be purchased online here.

A: Toronto
B: Calgary
C: Baker Lake, NWT.

You’d be right only about the centre of Canadian insularity if you chose A. But we are trying to pinpoint the geographical centre-the exact heart of our nation. If you guessed Baker Lake, NWT, you win this round.

And if you already knew that Baker Lake is at the geographical centre of Canada, you belong to a very small minority of Canadians. It’s a truism up here in the Northwest Territories that southern Canadians know nothing about the North. People say this all the time, in tones of practised contempt.

Call it regionalism, call it whining, but Northerners can’t be blamed. The information most Canadians get from their southern-based news media is scarce and biased.

There’s irony in the scarcity factor, since no other region of the country has the same symbolic importance the North has. This sprawling chunk of geography is the Great Wilderness that lies at the heart of our national identity: True North, that’s us. Canadians have long cast themselves within this flattering Northern myth, based on accounts of rugged individuals out to conquer a frozen frontier with which we were pleased to identify – but preferred not to know firsthand.

In fact, when southern Canadians speak comfortably about “our North,” Northerners grit their teeth. Most of the folks who live down there in cities strung along the US border have only the vaguest notions about what “our North” really is. The persistent cliche that our part of Canada is a huge emptiness, where Nature’s gifts lie in cold storage, isn’t very popular up here. Yet media coverage in the south does very little to dispel such thinking.

~ How come? Well, I think it has something to j do with the fact that for those whose job it is to ~ inform the country, the North is a single, heroic beat. There’s a print media tradition of oneS handed reportage (doubtless rooted in the literature of earlier romantics) that has created ~ the journalistic “Northern expert,” a sort of itinerant foreign correspondent. No matter what’s going on, from local politics to natural disasters, the North specialist is tapped for coverage that too often turns out to be an exercise in interpretation-by an outsider, for outsiders.

Farley Mowat, Pierre Berton and Mordecai Richler were among those who pioneered this peculiar mischief. And far lesser lights have followed after them. Most have been mere excursionists in our frozen land.
Such stories are necessarily selective in focus; they may be laced with misinformation or worse. What’s perceived by outsiders quite naturally creates a southern-shaped North. In their cosy affection for “our North,” Canadians have accepted a great deal of nonsense. Few ever actually see the place for themselves, after all.

To get to the Northwest Territories, you have to travel a very long way, through land that’s all lakes, bush, muskeg and bony outcroppings of glacier-scraped rock. If you fly into the North, you’re impressed as hell by how much time it takes to get across all that nothingness to the tiny grid of lights that marks whatever outpost of civilization you’re in search of. Not many can afford trips like this.

So the specialist is sent on tour, and comes back with enough for a magazine article or a series on the op-ed page: “The Exotic North as I Actually Saw It, Firsthand.” Others stay a week or two, examining social issues in depth. Some are even based here for a while as stringers. The trouble is, damned few spend years hunkered down in the cold with the rest of us up here, listening to what people really have to say.

And of course, Northerners do have plenty to say. The issues: language rights, the economy, the environment, the future political organization of the North, have a familiar ring. But in a northern setting, they have particular urgency. We have one of the highest birthrates in all of Canada, and the fewest prospects for jobs. We have the most fragile environment in Canada, yet the greatest prospects for resource development. And the federal government, to this very day, continues to treat the North as a colonial entity, voiceless at federal-provincial conferences despite occupying fully a third of Canada’s land mass.

Most interesting of all, we have a population that’s mainly native Inuit, Dene and Metis. We have six official languages, besides English and French. If you didn’t know that, you’re still influenced by bias in coverage of the North that long gave the impression Inuit were the only native group to occupy this land. Inuit were a romanticized people, at one with the simplified Northern Image we held dear. The Dene of the western Arctic and Mackenzie Valley were virtually invisible, appearing only sketchily in accounts of the adventurous bush pilots and prospectors who brought modern enterprise north just over half a century ago.

These people, considerably diverse in language and cultural expression, yet very similar in the ways they wrest a living from the lakes, rivers and subarctic forest, have occupied the North for thousands of years. With the emergence of political will on the part of native groups across the country, northern Dene and Metis have, with Inuit, become faces in the media of southern Canada.

Today’s Northern native people are taking control of their own lands and government, working with their own votes and through powerful and articulate organizations at the community, regional, and territorial levels.

The creation of a new Northern Territory by Inuit grabbed inside newspaper space last December, as did the election of a feisty Inuvialuit woman to the job of NWT premier. These are giant moves on the path to decolonization of Northern peoples, yet they still appear to be marginal events to southern media.

To correct the imbalance of information, Northern media will have to come to the fore. The birth this January of Canada’s first aboriginal television network is a landmark in the battle to provide Northern news, perspectives, entertainment and opinion to Northerners. Thanks to satellite technology, programming can begin to flow regularly out of the North to the south, too.
The magazine I edit, now soldiering into its eighth year of publication, has long carried images and information about Northern life to readers in southern Canada. We plan to continue to do so. In the face of lingering romanticism, careless stereotyping and plain indifference in much of what still passes for journalism about the North today, what else can we do?