Below is a picture from Friday's Nunatsiaq News.
It shows, I think, a strange thing you start to notice if you spend any time in the Eastern Arctic. It is Inuit women, now, and not the men, who are most active in really attempting to provide some direction and leadership to the new territory.
Of course, this could simply be me drawing too quick a conclusion but it was a notion that was hard to avoid arriving at while working in Nunavut.
With rare exceptions my staff were all women who did bring to work their share of standard Northern problems but were hard working and generally determined to get on with actually building a public service from the ground up. In my experience it was also the women, or girls, who went out to Southern community colleges or universities to seek training.
Of the 3 Inuit in the picture, I don't know Elisapee well but both Leona and Eva I do. It's fun to see these last two - Leona now the Federal Minister of Health and Eva the Premier of Nunavut - standing around chitchatting, when I meet them they both were working as part of the Office of Nunavut Interim Commissioner, as I was, before the new territory actually separated from the Northwest Territories.
Boy 10 years, Nunavut just had its 10th official birthday on July 9th, and the old "father of Nunavut" - John Amagoalik - seem to have slipped off the page so-to-speak. The last time I remember seeing him, on my way to the airport to fly out somewhere, he was shuffling through town on his way to the post office, I think. I'd heard he had fallen on bad times which I hoped was just a rumour.
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