Arviat (July 04/01) - An Arviat resident recently received two national awards for a magazine piece her editor calls "the most compelling story published all year."

Elisapee Karetak won the Western Magazine Awards Foundation story of the year award for the Alberta and NWT region and best human experience story award open to all magazines in Western Canada for "Kikkik: A Daughter's Story," published in Up Here magazine last fall.

"I couldn't believe it," said Karetak. "I had forgotten about it."

Karetak is waiting to receive two certificates and two envelopes for the awards. "I don't know what's in the envelopes," she said.

Kikkik, Karetak's mother, was involved in one of the most gripping trials in Canadian history.

1958 was a bleak year of hunger around Arviat and Kikkik was caught in the teeth of it. Out in the middle of nowhere her brother-in-law lost a child and fell apart, murdered her husband, and tried to murder Kikkik, who fought him off by plunging a knife into his chest.

She fled for the nearest settlement with her five children, dragging two on a sled. Facing certain death she left two of her children to die, wrapping them in caribou skins in a snow shelter.

Eventually she was rescued and an RCMP officer found one of the children alive in the shelter.

She was tried for murder and criminal negligence causing death in Rankin Inlet and acquitted on both counts. Karetak weaves her story into present-day and its impact on her life.

According to Cooper Langford, managing editor for Yellowknife-based Up Here magazine, Karetak's story takes a historical event and connects it to the present, something that is rarely done.

"It's like a continuum,. History wasn't isolated and treated as a closed event," said Langford. "It has an impact on how they live their lives in today's world," he said. "It had a lot of depth."

Karetak said she wrote the story to come to terms with her history and as a type of therapy. "I wanted to find out the complete truth about what happened to my mother, my people," she said.

"I wanted to understand as a woman how my mother felt while she was being tried," said Karetak. "There are so many misconceptions about her."

Karetak said she's recovering from acute depression and the process of rediscovery has helped her emerge from the dark. "From the time I started I was in deep depression, but in May I surprised myself by calling my work a celebration life," said Karetak. "I've come from total depression to victory," said Karetak.

Karetak is working on turning Kikkik's story into an Inuktituk film and she said a book could also be in the near future.