Kevin Wilson
Northern News Services

Iqaluit (Jan 07/02) - She's back. After a brief hiatus to points south, Kelly Gallagher-Mackay is once again on the job in Nunavut.

Gallagher-Mackay took over as Northern director of the Akitsiraq Law School program when Andrejs Berzins stepped down in September.

A fixture in Nunavut's legal community since 1997, Gallagher-Mackay spent some time down south, lawyering in Manhattan before returning to Iqaluit.

"It's going great, I couldn't be happier," she said.

Gallagher-Mackay first came to Iqaluit in 1997. Then a graduate student at York University's Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, she worked in private practice, and developed her master's thesis.

Titled "Aboriginal government and the rule of law," Gallagher-Mackay's paper looked at ways to make the law responsive to the aspirations of First Nations and Inuit.

The law, said Gallagher-Mackay, "seemed like a really important lever of control for Inuit."

So it came to pass that Akitsiraq was born, giving Nunavummiut the opportunity to create their own legal community, with the help of the University of Victoria.

The 15 students "are performing extremely well," she said.

As for their Northern director, Gallagher-Mackay said her work to date has been a "challenge, but it's a really satisfying challenge ... balancing the student's needs with the community's needs has really been a 24-7 job -- it definitely keeps me awake at night sometimes."

Since September, she has focused primarily on the administrative end, making sure that Akitsiraq doesn't falter during its first tentative steps.

"The teaching end has been mostly taken off my plate for the time being," but Gallagher-Mackay will be returning to classroom duties in January, teaching a course on law, legislation, and policy.