After losing another job -- not because he couldn't do it but because he couldn't write a test proving that he could -- Allen decided it was time he learned how to read.

That was more than 10 years ago. Now Allen can read his bible in the morning, jot down memories of growing up in the bush with his mother and father and say hello in the halls to his five grandchildren who now attend SAMS.

"I didn't know," Allen said of his many years of having others fill out his forms and read labels to him.

"It was just like I was blind. The reading opened my eyes and my heart to see. It made me smarter."

All his life, Allen had been learning, and usually not at a slow pace. When he moved here in 1955 as Inuvik was being built, he spoke only a few words of English. He was put to work as a laborer at the airstrip, but within a year showed he was a hard, reliable worker and was promoted to driving a heavy truck.

"I felt like a real bigshot," Allen recalls with an infectious laugh.

"My dad never owned anything with a tire, never had anything that rolled and here I was at 19 driving this big truck. You didn't need a test back then -- as long as you could keep it in the road and didn't roll it over or crash, you were a truck driver."

After three years, he left Inuvik to work a number of jobs: as an ore-truck driver at a mine in the Yukon, on the DEW line and in Hay River, where he spent seven years as a brakeman on a locomotive, a job he says he loved. But he still could not read and lost his job when the company unionized and his job was given to someone who went to school.

He also lost out on further truck-driving jobs when the territorial government began insisting drivers have a permit, and he could not pass the written test.

"I could run the machinery, but I couldn't write it out," he recalled.

At age 48, he was back in Inuvik where he got a job at SAMS, and although he had a family of eight children to look after, got a tutor and spent three hours a day, two times a week, learning how to read and write.

"I realized pretty quick I had a steep hill to climb and it wouldn't be quick," he said of the difficult process.

"But I felt better when I started recognizing words without thinking, when I started hearing the sound of a "the" or the name of a month."

Now Allen likes to joke that his next stop will be university, but when school lets out for the summer, he hits the water in his 22-foot launch and takes tourists out whale-watching with his company, Kendall Island Beluga Whale Watching and Tourism.

And he finds time to read.

"It makes life easier," he said. "It takes out all your frustrations and you don't have to ask people for help. You go somewhere new, you don't have to be afraid, because you know you can get by there. You learn things every day, and as an elder, I know you don't learn things in three days or three months or three years -- it takes a lifetime to learn."