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March/April 2004 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: The singing forest In-depth: Boreal birds The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

The new Nunavut
Only the slenderest of threads connects the people of Bathurst Inlet with the amenities of modern Canada. There are no roads to the tiny settlement, which lies due north of Saskatoon on a ragged tear in the central Arctic coastline. It has an airstrip but no regularly scheduled service. The nearest corner store is a 300-kilometre journey to the northeast, by boat in summer or snowmobile in winter.

Our cover story on the former fur-trading post is about the development choices facing Inuit of the central and eastern Arctic, whose land-claim settlement was followed in 1999 by the creation of Nunavut. Bathurst Inlet lies in the path of a major port and road project that many Inuit leaders hope will trigger a mining boom in the territory. This is a historic moment in northern development. The project is a statement of vision. It may not reflect the views of all Inuit, but it was created by, and has the support of, many of the territory’s political and business leaders. As it begins rolling through environmental assessments and regulatory reviews, expect a sharp and broad debate about the project’s impact and merits. Our story and photographer Patrice Halley’s crisp images reveal what’s at stake.

This summer marks the 400th anniversary of the founding of a French settlement on Saint Croix Island, which lies off the coast of present-day Maine and the New Brunswick border. That settlement is considered the genesis of what became La Cadie, or l’Acadie, and its remarkable people, the Acadians. The suffering they endured in 1755 when British forces rounded up 6,000 men, women and children, seized their property, razed their farms and deported them for disloyalty to the Crown is the great tragic historical moment of the Acadians. Late last year, after decades of lobbying, the Acadians astonished even themselves when they managed to wring from the British a formal acknowledgement of what is known in Acadian lore as le Grand Dérangement.

In "À la carte,"cartographer Steven Fick traces the deportations and locates the Acadian communities of Atlantic Canada. In our "Exploration" department, John DeMont visits Grand Pré in search of what it means to be Acadian in present-day Nova Scotia. In "Mosaic," Jon Wayne Brown visits Newfoundland’s Port au Port Peninsula, where descendants of Acadian exiles still live. And in our feature story on Quebec’s Cirque Éloize, we follow the founders of the troupe back to their homes on Îles-de-la-Madeleine. The people of this chain of islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence are Acadians too. After le Grand Dérangement, might this summer be la grande renaissance of the Acadians?

— Rick Boychuk

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