Kerry McCluskey
Northern News Services

IQALUIT (May 11/98) - Popular Mechanics for Kids may not have known what they were getting into when they came to Iqaluit last week.

Based out of Montreal, the crew of the internationally-viewed children's television show travelled to Baffin Island to film an episode entitled The North Show.

"The idea of the show is to empower kids. Our hosts do things they'd never usually do," says Serge Marchil, the director of the program.

He says he wanted to include three different adventures in the production, one of which was the preparation of traditional food.

Marchil says they chose this activity in order to illustrate what life is really like in the North.

"Basically, it's a general understanding of what life is like up here," he says. "We looked at traditional Inuit food and what they eat and why, traditionally, it's not cooked -- the facts about their diet. You take concepts like that and make it fun."

"Eating raw seal is a bit cliched, so we talked about the diet in modern days and explained beyond the cliches what it's all about."

Enter Aaju Peter, the woman who was chosen to prepare the traditional Inuit feast for Popular Mechanics --and an activist who is working hard to show the positive side of the Inuit seal hunt.

"One of the guys contacted me and asked if I knew somebody who could help them," Peter says. "I said yes, I would, because I think the seal is very important."

"We need to promote the seal and promote more understanding of the Inuit's use of the seal."

Peter says she saw the opportunity as the perfect way to try and correct some of the damage that Greenpeace has done to the Inuit culture because of their uneducated push for a ban on hunting the seal.

"Greenpeace has screwed up people's image of the seal and there hasn't been enough publicity on how the Inuit hunt the seal, kill the seal and use the seal. A show like that helps the kids understand how the Inuit use the seal."

During her segment of the program, Peter demonstrated how she uses the entire animal and leaves none of it for waste.

"I cut up the whole seal. We had the seal head, brains, meat, liver, heart, flipper, even the earrings I was wearing," says Peter. "I wanted to show how rich native foods are in vitamins, iron and protein. I think it would be nice if they could distribute these to schools."

"We need shows like that."

Peter says through television programs like Popular Mechanics for Kids, people can help to change some of the assumptions about the seal hunt groups like Greenpeace have created. She says that some of the activists are completely ignorant about the amount of harm they have done to Inuit culture.

"From my perspective, I don't think they realize the damage they've done to the Inuit and the Inuit livelihood," she says. "If they did, they'd be ashamed of themselves.

"I don't think they have any connection to the lifestyle here."

Peter has raised her five children to understand where their meat comes from and to be comfortable with hunting for food. She says this is a concept that is foreign to many people in southern cultures.

"When you go down south, it's exactly the same. Too many people are so detached from the reality of living off the land and farming," says Peter, who plans to travel to Europe at the end of May with her classmates from the Inuit Studies program at Arctic College in Iqaluit to present a paper on the positive aspects of sealing.

"I invite Greenpeace to live up here for one year and they tell me after that we should not kill seals and use them," Peter says. "If it weren't for the seal, the Inuit wouldn't have survived."

The North Show episode of Popular Mechanics for Kids is scheduled to air later this spring on Global.