OTTAWA
Researchers at the University of Victoria are placing greater emphasis on Inuit oral history as they launch a website which challenges people to discover missing pieces of the Franklin Expedition puzzle.

''For many years historians and researchers have not weighed those oral accounts as heavily as they should,'' said John Lutz of the

University of Victoria Department of History and co-director of Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History, a website project that will now feature the Franklin Expedition.

Inuit oral history seemed incongruous with more traditional research, said Lutz. But when the HMS Erebus was found last September right where Inuit said it was, researchers had to change their whole perspective.

''What we have in this case is physical evidence causing us to reorient how we weigh evidence,'' said Lutz.

From now on, Inuit oral history will be treated much more literally than it has been in the past, he said.

Lutz is debuting the Franklin Expedition in a series of 13 websites about unsolved mysteries in Canadian history in Ottawa this week.

The sites are devoted to bringing evidence of historical conundrums to the public to support high school and university courses.

The website for the Franklin Expedition will be called ''Life and Death in the Arctic.''

Lutz said a significant portion of it will be about examining how the Inuit people could survive in the Far North.

''It looks as much at the life of the Inuit and their life ways as it does about the history of Franklin,'' he said.

Providing all the answers isn't the focus of the website, said Lyle Dick, research director of The Franklin Mystery.

''It's to give them the material to read through and try and figure out for themselves,'' he said.

''We think it's a great way to excite people about Canadian history, about Northern history and the history of Nunavut, and especially about the history of Inuit and early contact between Inuit and Europeans.''

He echoed Lutz about placing a high emphasis on Inuit knowledge.

''We are trying to devote at least as much attention to the Inuit story as the story of European exploration and how Inuit have lived successfully in the Arctic for many hundreds of years while some explorers had great difficulty in this environment,'' said Dick.

''We want to look at the reasons for that and the strategies both groups brought to living in the Arctic.''

The website will officially launch on June 4 in Ottawa.

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