Iqaluit (Apr 04/05) - Though division happened more than five years ago, the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife, which functioned as the territorial museum before 1999, is still caring for artifacts that rightfully belong to Nunavut.

The good news is, planning for a Nunavut Heritage Centre has now entered a new phase.

Within four months, the Trilateral Working Group, made up of the Government of Nunavut, Nunavut Tunngavik and Inuit Heritage Trust will put forward a strategy on how to pay for the museum.

Its estimated cost is $60 million.

Ericka Chemko, project manager of the Inuit Heritage Trust, said the group will be looking at every funding option open to them.

"There's so much out there that people have never seen," said Chemko.

"It needs to be here in Nunavut."

The government of Nunavut has pledged to break ground on the project before the current legislative session wraps up, likely in 2008 or 2009.

When the territory divided, the museum's collection was also split between the NWT and Nunavut.

Curator of collections Joanne Bird estimated about 60 per cent of the items housed in the Prince of Wales in 1999 now belong to Nunavut and those artifacts take up at least half of the museum's storeroom. The museum has an agreement with the government of Nunavut to provide storage and care for the items.

That agreement ends next year.

Handing over the artifacts once the Nunavut Heritage Centre is built will require a specialized team to sort and properly pack the artifacts, as well as catalogue the data on each item.

"It's going to be a huge job," said Bird.

Division has meant a lot of change for the Prince of Wales museum.

Most of its exhibit galleries are closed while the building undergoes extensive renovations.

When they reopen, the exhibits will be retooled with a focus on NWT artifacts.

Once the heritage centre is built in Nunavut, the long process of assembling its collection will begin.

It will be a daunting task as Nunavut's material heritage is not only huge, but scattered across the territory and across North America.

Within Nunavut, small collections of artifacts are housed in visitors centres and schools.

The rest are housed at the Prince of Wales, the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa and various universities.

The reason Nunavut's artifacts can't come home until a heritage centre is built, is because, like all artifacts, they have special storage requirements.

"There are standards for environmental controls that the conservation community suggests for things like skins, for example, that contribute to the longevity of the collection," said Bird.

Though the artifacts survived for many years frozen in the ground or on the surface exposed to the Arctic climate, once recovered, they need to be kept at a constant temperature and level of humidity.

Rapid changes in temperature and humidity levels can damage artifacts made of organic materials, such as hide and bone. Ivory - a material common to Inuit artifacts - is particularly sensitive to changes in temperature. Not every collection of Inuit artifacts will be up for grabs.

"There's a difference between stuff that's legally ours and stuff that has been collected or bought over time," said Chemko.

"Just because there's an Inuit collection somewhere, doesn't mean we own it, or will get it back."

Chemko said the need for a Nunavut Heritage Centre becomes more urgent with each passing year.

"Especially with elders passing who can tell people what these things were for. People have never seen them because they've been out of the territory for decades."