Nunavut

A memorable junket: my 2003 journey with the GG

/ Jane George / Leave a comment

How many glasses of Canadian wine and how many rich meals can a journalist from Iqaluit consume?

The surprising — perhaps — answer to that, which I found during ex-Governor General Adrienne Clarkson’s 2003 state visit to Finland and Iceland, is not that many.

A few days into the 10-day junket I couldn’t face one more official toast, banquet or multi-course airplane meal.

John Ralston Saul quaffs win at a Helsinki wine tasting of Canadian wines during the 2003 state visit to Russia, Finland and Iceland. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

John Ralston Saul quaffs wine at a Helsinki wine tasting of Canadian wines during the 2003 state visit to Russia, Finland and Iceland. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

While the food and booze came my way non-stop , I didn’t forget the state visit was funded by taxpayers.

And I remembered that, thanks only to the Department of Foreign and International Affairs, which covered my costs, I was the only journalist along for the ride (allowed to come because I worked for northern news organization and, while on the state visit, wanted to explore the interest for the Siku circumpolar news service, which Greenlandic broadcaster Inga Hansen and I tried to develop.)

So, unlike some other “delegates” on the state visit, who could party late and hard, I tried to keep my mind clear for reporting for the newspaper I work for, Nunatsiaq News, and Maclean’s (to which I had pitched a column about the trip, eventually called Polar Gambit): being a journalist along for the ride was not always easy or even fun.

Now, more than 10 years later, I can look back at the stories I wrote on this state visit and be grateful for my sleepless nights: if I hadn’t written these stories, and somehow sent them via tediously slow internet connections, I wouldn’t remember a lot of what happened.

Why did I keep all the pieces of paper we received on the journey, every schedule, speech, briefing paper and menu? Their existence surprised me when I was going through my files, which are now at the Arctic Institute of North America in Calgary, Alberta, where you can also find the rest of my photos, notes and other northern paraphernalia from 20 years of working as a journalist and broadcaster in the Arctic.

But if I hadn’t kept those menus — those food offerings seemed stupendously over-the-top at the time — how would I recall that meal in Inari, Finland: salted white fish and trout “à la Inari,” fried reindeer sirloin, “lappish potatoes” and cloudberry cream jelly — with a selections of wine, of course.

Menus from two meals during the 2003 tour.

Menus from two meals during the 2003 tour.

Most of the 30-plus members of the official delegation, who spent five days in Finland and then another five days in Iceland in October, 2003, weren’t even from what most Canadian northerners would consider the North.

They were from Ontario, Quebec or British Columbia. The delegation included winemakers, authors, architects, musicians and a smattering of artists, officials and academics.

But Clarkson and her husband, John Ralston Saul, said all Canadians are northerners.

“Where do you draw a line? It’s not just two pieces. There’s Ellesmere Island and it’s definitely not in Iqaluit. Iqaluit isn’t Whitehorse or Yellowknife. There are many Norths in Canada,” Saul said at the time.

Canada, Saul and Clarkson said, is much like Finland and most other circumpolar nations, with a “North-North” and a “South-North.”

Helsinki, the capital of Finland, is, for example, 1,200 kilometres south of Utsjoki, a Saami community at the northern border of Finland.

Clarkson and Saul suggested to me that Canadians should start identifying themselves as northerners to share with each other and support each other.

“The whole of our country is a northern country,” Clarkson said. “You don’t want to segment out different parts of it.”

My tour companions: Shelia Watt-Cloutier, then president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, Nunavut's former commissioner Peter Irniq, Mary May Simon, who was the time Canada's Acrtic Ambassador. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

My tour companions: Shelia Watt-Cloutier, then president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (now Council), Nunavut’s first commissioner Peter Irniq, Mary May Simon, who was at that time Canada’s Arctic Ambassador. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

But if hadn’t been for the presence of Inuit  — Sheila Watt-Cloutier, then president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (now Council), who later would be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for her work on climate change, Nunavut’s first commissioner Peter Irniq. and Mary May Simon, who was at that time Canada’s Arctic Ambassador, one might have thought folks from Vancouver and Toronto or the careful, Anglo-Canadian accents of the GG couple or wine-tastings defined Canada’s North.

Alarmed by word that this state visit, which started in Russia and would end more than three weeks later in Iceland, would cost more than $1 million, the House of Commons standing committee on operations and estimates started to examine its spending. The price tag of the visit would eventually come in at more than $5 million.

That’s a cost estimate I had no trouble believing as we wined and dined our way through Finland and Iceland.

Read more later on A date with Siku girl about the 2003 journey from Ottawa to Helsinki, Oulu, Rovaniemi, Inari, Reykjavik, Akureyri and back to Ottawa.

Language learning: not hard at all

/ Jane George / Leave a comment

Most babies can learn to speak a language or languages without even trying  — and so can older children, too, as I saw when I started to absorb, then speak, Finnish.

But my success in learning Inuktitut later, as an adult, was less successful.

Jocelyn Barrett, Sylvia Cloutier and Siu-Ling Han participate in an exercise during the 1999 Intermediate Inuktitut class at Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit, which involves "shooting" the right person, according to the command in Inuktitut. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

Jocelyn Barrett, Sylvia Cloutier and Siu-Ling Han participate in an exercise during the 1999 Intermediate Inuktitut class at Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit, which involves “shooting” the right person, according to the command in Inuktitut. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

Why? For one thing, I was never immersed totally in the language outside my Nunavut Arctic College courses. In Iqaluit there are many English- and French-speakers, and even when in more unilingual communities, there was always the presence of another language somewhere in the background — on television or the internet.

Had I been able to visit an outpost camp and hear no English for a few months, I believe my mastery of Inuktitut could have quickly improved — but that was hard to do with job and family.

On the other hand, although my mainly school-learned French was imperfect,  I quickly became fluent when I worked in a unilingual French-language office as a young adult in Quebec. Perhaps if Nunavut or Nunavik had Inuktitut-only work environments, people would get better at speaking Inuktitut more quickly.

And if all Inuktitut dialects in Canada used Roman orthography for writing,  it might be easier to learn and use the language without mastering an entirely new alphabet. Even now, I can read and understand more of something written in Greenlandic or Inuinnaqtun than in syllabics, which require an additional level of effort to understand.

Based on my experiences, here’s what I think the list of ingredients for language-learning — which could be applied to Inuktitut teaching (or as it’s now called by the Government of Nunavut ,”Inuktut”) — include, namely to:

• start language-learning early when the brain is more open to learning language(s) in schools and child care centres (as is the rule in Nunavik child care centres) and at home;

• provide immersion in the language, at home and in the community, if possible;

• make the language worth learning — that’s because if there’s a need to speak, then you’ll want to learn it;

• draw on the language skills of unilingual elders;

• put the language into situations like social activities, sewing or hunting or whatever —because  it’s much easier to remember that way;

• adopt Roman orthography ASAP;

• put less emphasis on dialects and work on basic communication skills; and,

• foster more publishing of books, magazines and other reading materials.

None of these ideas are new. In fact, the above list reads like the to-do lists of many language specialists in Nunavut and Nunavik.

But although these are commonsense, already-accepted ideas, many have gone nowhere in Canada’s North or moved too slowly to have an impact.

Money isn’t the only issue, either: it’s will — if you just talk to your children in a language, they will learn.

Look for future A date with Siku girl posts on Arctic talk, travel, thoughts and news.