Kerry McCluskey
Northern News Services

IQALUIT (Nov 30/98) - After nearly three decades of planning and negotiating to gain control back over their lands and lives, the president of Nunavut Tunngavik says he refuses to let Nunavut's grand finale go by without a proper, traditional Inuit blessing.

"It was what I called the communion of arrival, so that when we have on April 1 the actual signing ceremony, there are not just speeches and a ceremony in the western style," says Jose Kusugak.

To that end, Kusugak has enlisted the help of three elders, one from each region of Nunavut, to properly bless the creation of the new territory. Kusugak says the event will allow Inuit people to declare the day their own and it will reflect traditions similar to those performed at the birth of a child or with the change of seasons.

"It is talking to Nunavut as a living thing. We want the animals and so on to speak to the people through these older people, to say 'I am the caribou, this is how you are to treat me, I will provide for you.'"

Kusugak says the trio will produce a long and detailed document, but will keep their speech short to allow time for the actual communion aspect of the event.

"We want to have water from the three regions mixed and they want to burn our burning bushes to aromatize the room. That's the smell of the North," says Kusugak.

He also wants youths to pass around char sushi so that when the speech finishes, everyone in the room can have communion.

"It's not necessarily a spiritual creator thing. I want to manifest it symbolically that we're not just developing a government. Everything that's inside government is people related whether it's the rock or the animals or the sky."

Kusugak says when he first met with the elders in Cambridge Bay during NTI's general assembly two weeks ago, he asked them to go out on the hills that surround the hamlet and really look at the area. He says he told them to go out together and try and really have an artist's view of the smell, the area, the weather and, when they sit down to develop the event in March, they will also have had the opportunity to travel to the Kivalliq and Baffin regions.

Kusugak says the event will go a long way towards building a good working relationship between the cultures that will be shared in Nunavut.

"We're going to be the guardians again after a pretty abrupt interruption for 75-odd years. I think this would be a very good symbol of the handshake between Qallunnaq and Inuit."