Maria Canton
Northern News Services

Sanikiluaq (Nov 29/99) - What originally started with an editorial staff of 15 boys in a Grade 9 English class eventually turned into a school-wide effort to produce the Nuiyak Inuit, Sanikiluaq's first school newspaper.

In fact, most families in Nunavut's most southerly community probably have a copy of the paper in their house.

The class project was intended to inspire creativeness and interest, eventually making its way to local news stands of and the hamlet office.

The paper is an eclectic mix of each student's talents -- telling photographs, humourous cartoons, news facts, prose -- and teacher and acting editor Darrell Murray says from the start the project took a very fluid, creative path.

"The paper is a combination of cartoons, pictures and writing. The students went into the community and found out some pretty interesting things.

"And they immediately started drawing and writing."

After Murray came up with idea of producing a newspaper, he set out to teach his class the basics of conducting research, interviewing and giving direction with photographs.

"The class decided on what they wanted in the paper and became very active and aggressive, some of them were asking some pretty serious questions," he said.

And now with the first edition under their belts, the students are looking forward to producing a few more papers before the school year is out.

Grade 9 student Lucassie Meeko, who would hunt before going to school and work on the paper afterwards, says that although producing a paper is a lot of work, the students want to keep it going.

"It was a busy two weeks when we were in the middle of it and it's a lot of work, but we want to keep doing it -- it's fun," he said.

"We'll probably do two more issues before Christmas."

Moses Ippak, who drew many pictures and wrote a biography about the editor, says he thinks the paper was well-received by the other students.

"They say they like (the paper) and it's fun writing and drawing," he said.

Once the paper started to take shape, other classes began contributing,.

As for future editions, Murray says he would like to involve some of the students in the editing process.