IKALUKTUTIAK/CAMBRIDGE BAY - Margaret Nakashook is more than 3,000 km away from the locked cabinet in Ottawa where pictures of Inuit from the DEW line era have been stored for the past 50 years, but she would know that face anywhere.

"She was really, really quiet at first and then she said really quietly to someone 'that’s my mother,'" said Renee Krucas, programs manager at the Kitikmeot Heritage Society. "Then she went up and looked at her for a long time. It was a really nice moment."

Nakashook, along with about 13 other elders, gathered in the Kitikmeot Heritage Society's cultural centre on Aug. 15 to share history about life in Cambridge Bay in the era of the DEW line.

Whitney Lackenbauer, chair of the history department with St. Jerome's University and Matthew Farish, assistant professor with the University of Toronto's geography department, are researching the effect DEW line sites had on Inuit throughout the North. Lackenbauer said he consulted with Krucas at KHS to determine the best way to introduce the project to elders in Cambridge Bay.

"We decided the best way is through photographs," he said.

Lackenbauer then set up a booth during the Saturday Market at the Luke Novoligak Community Hall on Aug. 15.

"One screen had photographs from 1956 that I had found and that had been hidden away in Ottawa in a locked cabinet for half a century," he said. "It was wonderful because a lot of people saw themselves or relatives on the screen. It was a basically way to inform the community about this project and everybody seemed very receptive to it and quite excited about it."

Elders in Cambridge Bay enjoyed sharing their personal stories about their first memories of Cambridge Bay, Krucas said.

Nakashook said she came to Cambridge Bay because her husband Matthew had found employment on board a ship.

“I came in 1955 on a ship for a short time so that Mathew could work, unloading barrels from a ship,” Nakashook said.

Matthew Nakashook recalled riding in a jeep after seeing a photograph of one of the old vehicles during Lackenbauer's presentation.

“I remember riding in a jeep for the first time," he said. "I kept bumping my head on the roof!”

Lackenbauer said the research done in Cambridge Bay is a pilot project that involves comparing information from the time of the town's creation with the stories of elders in the community.

"There were social scientists who went up and were anticipating impacts and were writing a lot, but we needed to go and get the stories from the elders who actually lived the experience," he said.

Lackenbauer said the information will be used to create a history of Cambridge Bay and to "figure out what a community-based history really looks like."

"The output would be almost a conversation piece between what was published or produced at the time in terms of reports and the responses of elders to both photographs and documents," Lackenbauer said. "So that will be something that we publish in cooperation with the Kitikmeot Heritage Society.

"We want this to be open to anyone the Kitikmeot Heritage Society thinks might be interested, it's meant to be a community resource."

Lackenbauer said he hopes to partner with Kiilinik High School to develop a local history curriculum that involves youth interviewing elders, a partnership he hopes will continue in other communities being researched.

"I hope elders will be at ease because they are sharing their stories orally, which is very culturally appropriate, and at the same time it's being recorded," Lackenbauer said.

Phase two of the project involves looking across the North. Researchers will also investigate Iqaluit, Tuktoyaktuk, Inuvik and Aklavik.

"The second part of the project that we're working on right now is a much larger study of modernization -- what was happening in the 1950s and 60s that was drawing Inuit into communities and what did being drawn into communities actually mean," Lackenbauer said. "The cold war is such an interesting time; it's very different than what we're experiencing today. A lot of what we see in communities now, a lot of the issues that are present, can relate back."

--with files from Renee Krucas