Project co-ordinator Oleg Shakov said the tour was designed to give the delegates the opportunity to learn ways of helping aboriginals in Russia to organize themselves by seeing aboriginals in Canada.

"They suffer from a lack of resources, largely financial, but they also wanted to experience how to organize themselves," said the Russian official, who's based out of Ottawa.

The other four men -- Pavel Maximenko, Arthur Gayulsky, Yury Elsyukov, and Nikolai Novikov, who are all from different regions of Russia -- will take what they learned and bring it back to their country to help their aboriginal groups better organize their regional and national associations.

The officials visited Igalaaq, the community access centre, to see how the Internet might be used to improve communication between different groups in Russia.

"Getting on the Internet would also help them to communicate with their foreign counterparts (in Canada's North)," he said.

Aboriginal people in Russia and Canada have a lot in common including the role of traditional living like hunting, he added.

"We want to draw on the Canadian experience," he said. Shakov also said that Russia's 200,000 aboriginal people live in the northern portion of the country, which includes 70 per cent of its entire land mass. They experience massive distances between one another, not unlike aboriginal people in Canada's Arctic.

Pavel Maximenko, deputy head of the Russian Department of Foreign Relations, said that it's also important for them to see how aboriginal people can contribute to industry, particularly tourism.

"We want to develop exotic tourism in northern Russia," he said.

Approaching the end of the first year of the three-year project, Aboriginal Institution Building aims to take aboriginal policies and northern development strategies in Canada and, to some degree, apply them to Russia.

After leaving Rankin Inlet, the five officials travelled to Iqaluit where they expected to learn about the structure of the Nunavut government.