The Citizen Amenities: Gravity, grace and seal meat: Forget the heavy science, the say, in order to build an igloo you need snow

Sun Mar 16 1997 Page: M7 Section: Arts - Weekly Byline: Ken MacQueen Dateline: Rankin Inlet, N.W.T. Illustrations: Color Photo: William Belsey Black & White Photo: Igloo builder Ollie Ittinuar says snow has to be of the best quality to construct an igloo Black & White Photo: William Belsey An igloo never dies, it just melts away. It is as new as the season and as old as Arctic history; a frozen piece Occasionally, the igloo builders of Rankin are of genius -- disposable, biodegradable and cheap. summoned south to demonstrate their skill at a winter carnival or a cultural event, but that is as close as Cheap? It is free. A free house. What a concept. they get to making money from the craft. Below the treeline, the igloo was long ago reduced to Another bit of Inuit ingenuity, the kayak, was more a cliche. There is not much use for frozen houses in successfully transplanted into the North American the South, and if there were, igloos would be wage economy, although not to the benefit of those outlawed, free housing being a danger to the who took nature's leftovers -- skin and bones, antlers economy. and driftwood -- and developed a classic hunting craft: sleek, light and seaworthy. It is southern In cartoons, and in the southern imagination, the factories and craftsmen who turn out kayaks today in igloo shell is drawn as a perfect hemisphere. Wrong. every colour and space-age material imaginable, Those who study igloos say its design is far more except, of course, seal hide or caribou. mathematically complex. On the northwest coast of Hudson Bay, kayak is The igloo is a catenoid, from the Latin for the shape usually spelled qayaq, and igloo is usually spelled assumed by a chain held only at the ends. The design iglu. There is a sense that southern people, usually uses compressive forces to hold it together, unlike a spelled qallunaaq, never get it right. hemisphere, which pushes down upon itself until its walls buckle and its top falls in. An igloo is made of snow, naturally, which is why you never see one in a museum. Not that the igloo is From Roman times until today, many of the world's an artefact. In May here, when spring is easier to major edifices are topped with domes. Yet most of imagine, there is Pakalak or `play around time', with the great domes of civilization would collapse if their games, dog-sled races and igloo building contests. bottoms weren't held together with iron hoops, chains or masonry buttresses. Not that the igloo is a plaything either. Igloo building is a near essential skill, as much as reading or The igloo needs no such help, notes Richard L. writing, says Mr Karetak, his hands wrapped around Handy of the Engineering Research Institute of Iowa a mug of tea in the family's cosy, cluttered kitchen. State University. His 1973 research, still quoted by His nose bears the frostbite of seven hours on a scientists in the field of igloo building, concludes that snowmobile yesterday, driving north from Whale the Inuit design is `structural perfection arrived at by Cove into the wind. trial-and-error, without benefit or prejudice from mathematical theory. Say your qallunaaq-made snowmobile craps out, or the batteries die in your Global Positioning System, `The design process constitutes an evolutionary for those dependent on such toys. Or a blizzard optimization for design of domed masonry structures, comes howling across the tundra. This is a land matched but hardly surpassed by modern scientific without trees or shelter or roads. Snow is what there engineering.' is; work with it. No kidding, says the average Inuk igloo builder in Igloo-building is passed down from elders to Rankin Inlet, who is prone to wonder whether children. It is also taught at Maani Ulujuk high scientists don't have too much time on their hands. school by Jack Kabvitok, the land skills teacher. You have to be a genius to live up here, says elder Igloos save lives. It happens all the time. Johnny Karetak, 67, who spent his formative winters in igloos. Ollie Ittinuar, who is 76, was born in an igloo at Chesterfield Inlet, the next settlement up the coast. `Our forefathers had to be highly intelligent in order His family lived traditionally, travelling to hunt, fish to survive and for us to be here today,' he says, and whale, using igloos when the season dictated. speaking through a translator. As a young boy, after carving many play houses, he

FPinfomart.ca Page 1 asked his father's permission to build the entrance to the family igloo. He failed to fit the difficult curved The igloo, having weathered a harsh southern wind, top of the tunnel, and he recalls crying in frustration. survives as a modern symbol of Inuit pride. And a damn fine shelter. His `transition time' started in 1949, when he took on wage work for the RCMP. He was a guide, still One of the fathers of the new territory is John building many an igloo to keep the law alive and Amagoalik, the sinewy, sharp-tongued chief sheltered as the RCMP mushed north from Churchill, commissioner of the implementation commission. Man., to more remote settlements like Baker Lake and Repulse Bay. Mr Ittinuar also acted as mailman, He has not built an igloo since he was a teen. `If I had distributing government cheques and other to, I probably could,' he says over a bad phone line curiosities. from his office in . Could the next generation say the same? `I think young people have to For the younger generation of this post-war era, the recognize that there is some ingenuity in their transition from life on the land was profound and heritage, and being able to build an igloo and survive abrupt. The federal government and the Church, a blizzard is part of it.' represented at Chesterfield by the Roman Catholic mission, began a concerted effort to educate and The art and science of the igloo is an exercise in `civilize' Inuit children. grace, harmony and balance. Much like an Oriental martial art, it turns an enemy's power against the The pattern at Chesterfield's Joseph Bernier School enemy. during the 1950s and 1960s was depressingly similar to earlier experiencess at native residential schools in Or as Mr Amagoalik once put it: `A blizzard creates the South. The business of educating was often taken the right conditions so man can build shelter from it.' as a licence to proselytize, abuse and assimilate. The Inuit language was suppressed; the culture, with its It all comes down to snow, of which there is not as igloo building and other survival skills, was much in the Eastern Arctic as one might think. discouraged and devalued. This is a polar desert. The force of a blizzard is as apt The experiment across the Arctic did create an to be horizontal as vertical, the snow moaning across educated class, now a fortysomething generation of the tundra from afar, scouring all in its path before some of the most articulate and accomplished piling into drifts that are hard as plaster of Paris. aboriginal leaders in Canada. Many have had key roles in the creation of the Eastern Arctic territory of `Is it igloo quality snow?' asks Ollie Ittinuar, , which comes into being in 1999. warming to the subject. `It's just like wood. You don't use any kind of wood to build a house. If it's poor But the residential schools also created a twilight quality wood it reflects on your work, and if it is poor world of casualties who drift between traditional and quality snow it also reflects on you.' southern cultures without belonging to either. Earlier, Johnny Karetak, gazing out his kitchen Today, almost 30 years after the school's closing, the window, said much the same. He pointed to a bulletin board at the Rankin Inlet Co-op store snowbank where several children were sliding, advertises counselling for former Joseph Bernier oblivious to a brewing storm. `If you were to ask me students still trying to cope with the experience. to make an igloo right here, I would refuse you. It's not good.' Peter Ernerk, 50, now a commissioner of the Nunavut Implementation Commission, an advisory body for The best snow is rarely the freshest. It is older snow, the new territory, calls his removal to Bernier school often buried below the surface, laid down in a from his parents' hunting camp a sanctioned form of continuous layer during a single storm early in the kidnap. Until that day in 1958, his home had been a season. It is dense, but not so dense that it loses its series of tents, five-metre-diameter igloos and sod insulation value. houses. In the December issue of Arctic, a quarterly academic The three-storey school residence seemed huge and journal on northern issues, three scientists -- G. Peter terrifying. Kershaw, Peter Scott and Harold Welch -- made a determined effort to measure `The Shelter `Looking back,' he has written, `I realize my Characteristics of Traditional-Styled Inuit Snow departure was forever.' The emotional bond with his Houses.' parents was never the same. The effect upon a generation -- lost parenting skills, alcoholism and Considerable science went into constructing two social breakdown -- was devastating. igloos, three and four metres in diameter, at Resolute in the High Arctic. `Snow hardness averaged 12,000 Mr Ernerk has retained his language, and gained a Gcm-2 and the mean density of the snow was 397 renewed appreciation of his culture. This he passes to kgm-3. The energy required to build and heat each his five children. `I am determined to show my kids iglu was calculated from the snow characteristics, how to live on the land, how to survive on the land, construction activities and microclimate parameters even if it's just a small snow shelter.' measured during occupancy.'

FPinfomart.ca Page 2 Ollie Ittinuar, sitting at the desk of the Inuit Cultural Institute of which he is president, takes a cursory He has something of a bias against excessive research look at the study, with its long lines of calculations since he `helped' someone who thought he had strung together like freight trains. learned igloo building from a book. What a mess. Still, the scientists are probably right, he concludes. What he does, Mr Ittinuar explains through a `Everything had to be used properly and consistently. translator, is take something, usually a harpoon, see? Everything had a purpose and worked in sync with He jams this into snowbanks until he finds a layer other things.' that feels right. The kudlik was very much like a furnace, he says, Then he starts cutting blocks, carefully sloping and cosying to his memories. Some of the wicks would angling the gradually diminishing blocks so they be snuffed out at night to save fuel and make sleeping spiral upward in a coil that closes overhead. It all gets more comfortable. In the day, and when cooking, locked into place with the last key block. more flames were added. How many blocks did the scientists use, he asks. Johnny Karetak and his wife, Rhoda, are respected `Seventy two for the large, and 46 for the small,' he is elders. A taxi drops a visitor at a house that looks told. He nods in approval. That, at least, makes sense. quite southern, except for the rifles and caribou skin clothes in the entrance, and the fact that it is raised on After a series of measures and calculations, the piles so as not to melt into the permafrost. scientists concluded that the energy used to lift the blocks for the big igloo was : A large wall unit by the kitchen table displays family photos, tributes and mementoes of lives well lived. A (249.10 kJ/3600.54 J) = 69.18 kWh. video game for the grandchildren is attached to the living room television. Mrs Karetak has assorted furs This means an Inuk burns about 3,000 calories, spread on the rug for a sewing project. double the daily intake, during the two hours required to build a large igloo. There is bannock on the table, baked in the oven, not cooked the old way in a pan over a flame. Two hours? Ittinuar says he can build one in 45 minutes, maybe 70 minutes tops. Though it takes Outside the sky is promising the fifth -- or is it the longer if he's caught a blizzard or if a qallunaaq sixth -- blizzard of the season. Could they live offers to help. It also depends on whether he's comfortably in an igloo tonight? A debate ensues slapping up an overnight shelter, or a more elaborate between husband and wife. A visitor, understanding hunting base. none of it, washes down bannock with tea. In the old days, he would cut the blocks with a bone Their daughter Selma, clearly bemused, offers a snow knife. Since `you guys' came north, he says of much-edited translation. `My Mom says ``No''. My whites in general, he also packs a saw, which does a Dad says ``Yes''.'' quick, clean job, he concedes, a bit regretfully. Comfortably or not, the key point is this: they could Kershaw, Scott and Welch wired their igloos to the if they had to. hilt, measuring internal and ambient temperatures, wind directions and speed, heat flux and wind chill. Today's elders recall whole communities of igloos -- They heated in the traditional way, burning seal fat in bedrooms, workrooms, common areas, crisp new a lamp or kudlik. Even in -41 C, the lamps heated the birthing rooms for each delivery. Warm, white bumps igloos comfortably above freezing, just warm enough on the snow, linked by tunnels. to glaze the interior with an ice film, sealing out the wind. Then comes spring, vivid and intense, and soon they vanish, melting into the tundra and into the collective Heat loss through the igloo, they found, `is equal to memory. This is where they endure, sheltered from that of an insulated standard modern 2 x 4 house the warmth and the endless summer sun, until the wall.' knowledge is needed again. The beauty of this study, once the heavy science is A snow house cannot be pressed between the pages lifted away, is its portrayal of a shelter in perfect of a book or fully captured in a mathematical balance with its environment. The smaller igloo, equation. An igloo is a gift of nature handed from one lined with caribou skin, requires the fat of one seal generation to the next. every 6.3 days for heating. The larger igloo needs the fat of one seal every 3.7 days. There is no way around it, Mr Karetak says. `You have to know your snow.' The seal meat feeds the family in each igloo for the same period of time. What could be more efficient? Ken MacQueen writes on national affairs for the Ottawa Citizen. Johnny Karetak considers this. Who knows? he shrugs. Nobody heats with seal fat any more. They use camp stoves.

FPinfomart.ca Page 3 The Ottawa Citizen The Inuit way of death: In a country with one of the highest life expectancies in the world, no group dies younger than Inuit men

Sat Mar 15 1997 Page: B1 / FRONT Section: Observer Byline: Ken MacQueen Dateline: RANKIN INLET, N.W.T. Source: The Ottawa Citizen Illustrations: Table: The Ottawa Citizen / (Statistics Canada, Royal commission on Aborginal Peoples) Life expectancy: Estimated life expectancy at birth, total and aborginal populations, 1991 Color Photo: Peter Ernerk, 50, of Rankin Inlet quit smoking in 1992. Cancer killed his mother, sister and uncle, all of them heavy smokers. Map: Robert Cross, Ottawa Citizen / Graphic portrays an upside down view of Northern Canada Black & White Photo: Germaine Arnaktauyok, Grampa and His Pipe / The children's book Grampa and his Pipe warns Inuit children of the dangers of smoking Jack Anawak was born on the tundra, in a turpik, a tent -- a biographical note listed in the Canadian Parliamentary Guide the way other MPs might It is no simple thing explaining death. The Inuit include a Rhodes Scholarship or the presidency of a suicide rate is the highest in Canada, but it is one Rotary Club. extreme in a land of extremes.

He is just 46 and he was born on the land, beyond Smoking is another. Few societies in the world even the tiny settlement of Repulse Bay at the top of smoke as much as Inuit. No other group in Canada Hudson Bay. comes close. When modern culture hit, it was with blizzard force, Peter Ernerk, 50, is sitting at one of the few a wrenching transition for the Liberal member for non-smoking tables in the dining room of the Nunatsiaq, Canada's northernmost federal riding. It Siniktarvik, the largest of two hotels in this hamlet of goes some way toward explaining the deadly mystery 2,000. He quit smoking in 1992, and some fellow he has spent two terms in Ottawa trying to solve. Inuit mutter that he's harped on the subject ever since. The mystery is this: What is killing Canada's Inuit? His mother, sister and uncle were heavy smokers. He watched them die of smoking-related cancers, ``a The men of the North are dying too soon, and the very inhumane, a very mean death.'' He wonders women too. about the priorities of animal rights groups who so damage the traditional economy by stirring public No group in Canada dies younger than Inuit men. sympathy against the hunting of seals. Their life expectancy, as reported by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, is 57.6 years. ``This death from cancer is worse than several moments of pain for a seal,'' he says. ``Inuit are This is one statistic from one volume of a report that humans.'' the federal Liberal government has barely acknowledged since its release last November. What is killing the Inuit? Every Inuk has a story. In a country with one of the highest life expectancies They are killed by the rush of change and by the lack in the world, Inuit men die 11 years earlier than Inuit of progress. By food and drink. By well-meaning women, and five years earlier than Indian men on missionaries, by bureaucrats and by themselves. By reserves, another group at high risk. gun and rope and pill. By fissures in the sea ice, by blizzard, by snow machine and potato chip. Inuit men die almost 18 years before men in the general Canadian population, who can now expect to They are killed by pipe and snuff and cigarettes, live beyond age 75. Inuit women die more than 12 selling here at $8.50 a pack. They are killed by the years before Canadian women as a whole. wage economy and by the other warm lies of television. They are killed by the hunting economy, The combined life expectancy of Inuit men and by poisons in the food chain, the high price of women, 63 years, just equals the average of the gasoline and by actresses who abhor the wearing of world's low-income economies. Inuit can expect to fur. outlive citizens of Burkina Faso (49 years) but not those of Mongolia (64 years). They are killed by isolation, and by cultural intrusion. They are killed by the fatalism that comes from Mr. Anawak had not noticed the sad statistic buried having always died young. And by the Inuit word in the royal commission report but it was not ajurnamat (Ah-yer-na-mat), which means ``it can't be necessary. He is an Inuk, and he mourns the death of helped.'' two brothers who committed suicide 20 years ago, and many deaths since. And that, as the old cliche goes, is the tip of the

FPinfomart.ca Page 4 iceberg. The killers are known, and yet they roam Inuit were bad before Christianity came along,'' he with impunity. There is hardly an Inuk alive who isn't says. ``If that was the case, we wouldn't be around mourning an unnecessary death. today. It was our belief system, our spirituality and our tenacity that made us survive for thousands of This is true for the Inuit of Labrador, Inuit at the top years.'' of Quebec in a region they call Nunavik, and for the new Eastern Arctic territory of Nunavut, which is The spiritual toll weighs heavily on Mr. Anawak. In 85-per-cent Inuit. 1977 he lost both a natural and an adopted brother to suicide. Coincidentally, both were named Paul. These 18 lost years for men and 12 lost years for ``How dare they do this?'' he remembers thinking. women are a tragedy, a mystery, and a waste that ``They were my best friends.'' Nunavut can ill afford as it rushes toward creation on April 1, 1999. Such questions can't be answered with much satisfaction. The wage economy created conflict Nunavut, with a birth rate double the national between heart and head, that is for certain. ``All of a average, risks becoming a land of children and sudden,'' says Mr. Anawak, ``getting that caribou was widows. not quite as vital as getting some money to buy some stuff from the Co-op or The Bay.'' Dr. Ian Gilchrist, chief medical officer of health for the , has charted the many Mr. Anawak and his wife, Caroline, have worked 20 causes of death. years to raise the profile of suicide prevention -- a topic that Inuit, like most societies, want desperately ``A lot of patterns of illness you see in the North are to ignore. The rate continues to climb. like the patterns of illness in the Third World. They're related to lifestyle, they're related to few resources, In the hard past, in times of famine and need, the old low access to other services. They're related to and frail would walk alone into the snow and certain populations and cultures under stress and death -- a sacrifice to the greater good. Today, development,'' he says from the territorial capital of though, it is the young. . The suicide rate of Nunavut is almost six times the There is progress, of a sort. Statistics show national rate. improvement in infant mortality, declines in tuberculosis, meningitis and other infections. More than 80 per cent of those suicides are teens and people in their 20s, usually males, says a recent study ``In some ways, it's a bit of a trade-off,'' Dr. Gilchrist by Marc Stevenson of the Canadian Circumpolar concedes, ``because you trade a Third World disease Institute at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. for a First World disease.'' In Nunavik, the Quebec region, suicide among 15- to The new killers are cancers, diabetes, obesity, heart 24-year-olds is more than 20 times the national disease, vehicular accidents, and diseases of the average, 13 times the Quebec average and three times spirit: depression, alcoholism and suicide. the average for Canadian Indians. These First World changes hit later and harder here Mr. Stevenson argues that the collapse of the than anywhere else in Canada. seal-skin industry was a ``trigger'' initiating the unprecedented rise in Inuit suicide. There is hardly ``You've got to remember, in 1966, when I was 16 universal agreement on this among northerners, but years old, I had a dog team and I was basically in a few dispute Mr. Stevenson's findings that dismal hunting and gathering society,'' Mr. Anawak economic prospects and the collapse of the traditional explains. male hunting role are major contributing factors. ``Thirty years later, I'm a member of Parliament who Similarly, the Quebec health department, in a thinks that if I don't get a letter today that was written three-volume analysis of Inuit health published in this morning, that's too long. What's a fax machine 1995, blames much of the ``epidemic'' of suicides on for?'' the abrupt 20-year leap from nomadic society to the satellite age. It quotes an earlier study to haunting Where a 50-kilometre sled trip used to involve effect: ``No one has ever told them that it was normal overnighting in an igloo, he now chafes at the for a transitional culture to create victims.'' day-long commute from his home in Rankin to his office in Ottawa. ``Other nations normally (take) Not that it would do much good if anyone had, for hundreds of years to go through that kind of change.'' there is no going back. Nor was the past the golden age of cultural isolation it is sometimes made out to Mr. Anawak's push into the 20th century included be. The land has always been unforgiving and full of time at the Joseph Bernier Roman Catholic ways to die. It fostered the fatalism of ajurnamat, as residential school in Chesterfield Inlet. There, in the well as many comforting beliefs -- that the dead rise name of God and progress, he was expected to drop in those named after them; that the dancing northern his culture like a bad habit. lights are a great game of kickball played by those in the afterlife. ``We got to a point where we started believing that

FPinfomart.ca Page 5 almost a generation younger than Ernerk, witnessed a These were ways to cope with hard, short lives. As similar case in Whale Cove, just south of Rankin. late as 1948, the Quebec government estimates, Inuit ``She was four years old and she was named after this life expectancy was 26 years. person who smoked Export A. They were making that little girl smoke Export A. Four years old.'' Even in 1963, federal health minister Judy LaMarsh estimated that Inuit typically lived ``between 30 and Until last month, Gerry Pfleuger had spent 11 years 40 years, probably nearer 30 than 40.'' This was due, here in public nursing and health promotion. She has in part, to a staggering infant mortality rate of about seen death develop as a shadow on too many X-rays 200 deaths among 1,000 babies born alive. at the local health centre, and mourned with too many families over an inexplicable suicide. Today, in an age when most settlements of any size have a medical clinic, the Inuit infant mortality rate is She has also witnessed tremendous medical advances considered high at 18 deaths per thousand births, in immunization, infant mortality rates and about three times the national rate. The tragedy now, preventive medicine. Now, she says, it's up to the unlike the past, is that so many premature deaths are community to heal itself. preventable. Recently, she was hired by the hamlet as Rankin's ``The Inuit are not scientific people in the southern first ``community wellness'' officer. She sees this role context,'' says Roda Grey, national health as that of an animator and a facilitator. ``The basic co-ordinator for the Inuit women's association social problems aren't going to change until the Pauktuutit. ``In the past, if there was a death, they communities seize them in their hands and say, `We didn't ask questions why the person died, they have to do something about it.' '' accepted it.'' Smoking won't stop while a community is The Ottawa-based Pauktuutit is determined to change preoccupied with the crisis of suicide, and suicide that on many fronts, most recently in a new campaign won't stop until young people find some hope and against tobacco use. This includes television ads purpose in this abrupt transition to the satellite age, broadcast across the Eastern Arctic, and a she says. wonderfully illustrated reader, Grampa and His Pipe, the story of children's determination to wean one What optimism there is rests with the creation of grandfather off tobacco after losing the other to Nunavut, a territory that will be dominated by Inuit cancer. and designed largely by northerners. The working language will be Inuktitut, the capital will be Iqaluit It is an all too familiar fate. Just three per cent of the on Baffin Island, but even now -- less than 750 days population of Nunavut is 65 or older, compared with from creation -- the detail of government remains a 12 per cent of all Canadians. ``Even though we value work in progress. elders, we have few of them,'' says Dr. Gilchrist, the chief territorial health officer. ``Smoking is a major One of the architects is John Amagoalik, chief cause of death among elders ... The institutional commissioner of an advisory body, the Nunavut memory, the cultural memory, all those kind of Implementation Commission. Yes, Nunavut promises things are being lost.'' to be another accelerated dash into the unknown, but it is also an essential act of taking control, he says. In Nunavut, the aboriginal smoking rate is almost 71 per cent of all persons 15 and older, compared with ``The cause of many of our problems have been 27 per cent nationally. An unpublished study for the external, colonialism and all this stuff, but the N.W.T. government pegs the smoking rate for Inuit solution has to come from us,'' Mr. Amagoalik says. women at 81 per cent, falling only slightly during ``We have to take ownership of the problem and the pregnancy to 78 per cent. Such levels are among the solution has to come from us. It can't come from highest in the world. Ottawa. It can't come from Yellowknife. It has to come from our community.'' Tobacco arrived last century with the traders and whalers. Often this precious commodity was mixed One of the contenders for a key federal appointment with tundra leaves and flowers to make it last longer. as interim commissioner of Nunavut is Jack Anawak, Often, as written in Grampa and His Pipe, it was the Liberal MP. An announcement is essential soon if conferred as a reward on children. there is to be hope of having a government and bureaucracy in place by 1999. The Inuit practice of ``naming'' infants as a way of reincarnating the dead also plays a part. ``I remember Recently, Mr. Anawak moved his family from in Repulse Bay there were kids, even a year old Ottawa back to Rankin Inlet. He always feels maybe, they were taught to smoke,'' says Mr. Ernerk. ``claustrophobic'' in the south, where trees are forever blocking the view. ``Inuit used to say, `Well, his namesake used to smoke a lot. I'm going to make sure this little kid -- Outside of Rankin, on the tundra, he has a cabin. And because he or she is named after this individual -- has beyond the cabin last month he built an igloo, as sufficient tobacco to smoke.' '' though, at some level, he was peeling back the layers of southern life. Selma Keretak, a CBC northern radio reporter who is

FPinfomart.ca Page 6 Looking back, he can hardly imagine how one generation has survived so much change to become, with Nunavut, ``initiators of change.'' The next generations, that vast bulge of Inuit youth, face further turmoil still. They are more at home with computers than dog teams, he says. Their survival as Inuit depends on drawing strength from their past and building hope for their future. They must shake off this deadly malaise and take control. ``No,'' says Mr. Anawak, ``it's not ajurnamat any more.'' Life expectancy around the world Life expectancy in years for a person born in 1994: Japan 79 Canada 78 United States 77

Mexico 71 World 67 Mongolia 64 Inuit * 63 India 62 Burkina Faso 49 *Figure is for a person born in 1991 Source: World Development Report 1996 and Statistics Canada Tomorrow: Igloos a symbol of pride

FPinfomart.ca Page 7