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January/February 1999 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Inside Story Feature: Nunavut - On the land Mapping migrations

Scattered across the wintry expanse of Nunavut, an area roughly the size of British Columbia, Alberta and the Yukon combined, are 28 small, isolated settlements. Twenty-seven of them are coastal communities. The 28th, Baker Lake, fans out along a body of water large enough to be called a sea.

They are a maritime people, the 23,136 Inuit who inhabit the new territory of Nunavut, direct descendants of the Thule who first moved into the eastern Arctic 1,000 years ago. A generation back they were still semi-nomadic hunters and fishers who came together in seasonal gatherings around church missions and trading posts. Today they lead settled — and in many cases impoverished and tragic — lives in communities connected by satellite and separated by winter. For them, Nunavut is an ambitious act of self-definition.

It is the vehicle by which the Inuit of the eastern Arctic will decide for themselves what is to become of their culture, their way of life. Not as autonomous, nationalistic northerners, but as elected administrators of the new territory.

"We want southern Canada to feel a part of this," says the eloquent John Amagoalik, chairman of the Nunavut Implementation Commission. "We want Canadians to understand that this is not just ours. This is Canada’s baby."

The eastern Arctic has always been governed from afar, mostly by civil servants working in Ottawa or Yellowknife. Although it has been part of the Northwest Territories since 1870, the Inuit sent no elected representatives to the territorial government until 1966, when three separate electoral districts for the eastern Arctic were created.

The idea of Nunavut was born not long after. Since then, Inuit leaders have quietly and persistently advanced arguments for a land claim and for the creation of a new territory. They have avoided confrontations, blockades, occupations. The essence of the deal they placed on the table is simple and straightforward and democratic: Nunavut is the northernmost territory to which Canada has laid a historic claim; we, the Inuit, live here; allow us to administer this territory with an elected government; to manage its wildlife, safeguard its environment, develop its resources and deliver services essential to its people.

To its credit, the federal government was persuaded that this was a fair bargain, one that was also an expression of the collective will of the people of the eastern Arctic. And so we have Nunavut, which comes into being on, of all days, April 1. Why that date? Because it is the beginning of the federal government’s fiscal year. Critics have said that the creation of a new government in the North will be costly and that the new territory will be almost entirely reliant on revenues from Ottawa. The date highlights that relationship. "One of our objectives is to become less dependent on the Canadian taxpayer," says Amagoalik, adding that the new government will need to diversify the economy and create jobs. But it will move slowly, cautiously, he says. "Sometimes government is like a ptarmigan without a head, running around. We’re hoping that the politics will be much more sane, that it will not be so much in a hurry all the time."

To mark the creation of Nunavut, we have assembled a special report that includes a satellite image of the new territory; an essay on how and why Nunavut came about; a poster-map that features the geography of Nunavut; photojournalist Robert Semeniuk’s portrait of life in a hunting camp for an Igloolik family; and, finally, a story about the return of the kayak to Pelly Bay.

After three years in the magazine, Bill Casselman’s crisply-written column Our Home and Native Tongue has ended. What a tour d’horizon it was — from salty folk sayings, to a lament over the lame name chosen for the Confederation Bridge, to learned discourses on the origins of words like ‘deke.’ While he won’t be appearing in every issue, he has promised to contribute the occasional piece on his specialty — the peculiarities and delights of Canadian English.

Replacing it is Curious by Nature, a new column on wildlife by Saskatoon-based author Candace Savage, who has written more than a dozen books on animals, birds, environmental issues and other topics. In her first column, Savage talks to Peter Flood, custodian of the only captive herd of muskox in Canada, about winter’s warmest beasts.

— Rick Boychuk

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