Michele LeTourneau
Northern News Services

NNSL (Sep 06/99) - Last Wednesday at 7 p.m. Central Time, at the Forks Historic Site in Winnipeg, the final transformation of Television Northern Canada to the Aboriginal People's Network took place.

"What a day!" exclaims Jennifer David, director of communications for the network.

"It went fabulous. It was a really great show. I thought it went very well, good entertainment, and the segments were good. They were hosted George Tuccaro (from the NWT) and Evie Mark from Nunavik."

Juno Award-winning Susan Aglukark headlined the three-hour inaugural show with many, many other performers from across Canada joining her.

"We had classical choirs, we had guitarists from Winnipeg, we had a drum group, Inuvik drummers. There were dancers, traditional pow wow dancers. There were Metis fiddlers, jiggers," says David.

Comedy group "Susie and Sarah" from the Yukon took the stage, as did Brenda Lapointe's traditional Metis "message music" of youth vocal group Fifth Generation. The East was represented by the story-telling music of Cape Breton's Morning Star.

The stage hosts were Alanis Obomsawin, a pioneer in aboriginal documentary filmmaking and advocate for aboriginal broadcasting, and Marty Ballentyne, general manager of Missinipi Broadcasting Corporation and member of APTN's board of directors.

"Most people were here, most of our board and our staff were here so we saw the live show, but we haven't seen what it looked like on television yet," David says.

"I think it was great success. A lot of people had great things to say about it. We got a lot of press coverage, a lot of people were interested in the story."

It was a story that was long in the making. Back in March, in an interview with News/North, chairman of TVNC said the time factor would be difficult, "to get it up and running."

With the launch last week, what was considered the biggest challenge, was overcome.

The network will be available to nearly eight million Canadian households with cable as well as direct-to-home and wireless service customers. APTN will broadcast each day from 9 a.m. to 3 a.m. EDT.

Viewers will be able to catch everything from hard-hitting documentaries to profiles, current affairs programming and magazine-style series from across the country.

CBC Northbeat will continue to be broadcast on the new APTN -- CBC North has now entered into a business agreement with the network now that it is no longer a non-profit organization.