Glen Korstrom
Northern News Services

INUVIK (Feb 19/99) - George Lessard had only just arrived in Inuvik to work at the Inuvialuit Communications Society earlier this month when he went on his first road trip.

Along with about 45 other area residents, Lessard boarded a chartered plane to Barrow, Alaska, for a drum dancing festival that featured dancers from across Alaska and all Beaufort Delta Inuvialuit communities.

"We got lots of tape of lots of dancing," Lessard says enthusiastically of filming for a show possibly to air in March.

"We got too much tape for an hour program, let's put it that way."

Lessard, who will be training ICS staff in television production techniques from start to finish, says he is still learning various aspects of production himself due to new equipment or new systems.

"I'm the kind of person who learns all the time. It's a continuing, on-going learning process," he says.

"I like to help people learn to communicate using the media. I think in this day and age that if you believe in freedom of expression, you really should be able to use the media very freely and openly to say what you want to say."

He has worked in media in various capacities since the early 1970s and was in Inuvik for about six months in the late 1980s teaching production to those without any experience.

This time he will be working with people who have spent years at ICS.

"Culture and language changes. Nobody can stop that," says Lessard, who arrived in Inuvik from Montreal.

Still, his attraction to the ICS is partly because it gives the Inuvialuit the opportunity to be able to speak and express themselves in their own language about their own culture with little interference from others -- something he says much of the world's indigenous cultures lack.

Because he says his position would ideally be filled by an Inuvialuit, he is intending to stay for about one year.

Moving on may be part of his character since he has worked around the world -- from Northern Quebec to the Bahamas to India.

Though unemployed for much of last year, in 1997 he was in the Orissa region of India setting up an audio visual centre to document rural development work for a non-governmental organization.

That work helped native people in the region, or "tribal" people as he says they are known in India.

Part of what he remembers is that one city was "so conservative that three times there was a general strike because there was a rumour that someone had slaughtered a cow. I mean the whole city was closed."

To convey his media knowledge to more people in Inuvik, he says he is planning to teach a home video basics course, though he has yet to set the start date.

He will teach how to do more with less, as well as how to get the most out of all of a camera's features, how to shoot in cold weather and how to perform in-camera editing.