Darrell Greer
Northern News Services

ARVIAT (Jan 20/99) - Both teachers and students at Arviat's Levi Angmak elementary school are benefitting from the traditional knowledge being passed on to them by the school's six participants in the Aboriginal Language Certificate program.

Now in its second year, the program is run through the Nunavut Teacher Education Program (NTEP) in Iqaluit and, upon completion, students will receive a certificate through NTEP and McGill University. The program has two second-year and four first-year students involved.

The course is co-instructed by Mark Kalluak, Shirley Tagalik and Elisapee Karetak.

Tagalik says four of the students are elders and instructors refer to the other two as "elders in training."

"We went after this program because we need to get traditional knowledge experts into our schools who have quality Inuktitut language skills even our trained teachers don't have," says Tagalik. "They work with qualified teachers on the vocabulary they need for their teaching units and their spoken and written Inuktitut skills."

Students spend half their time in practicum in the school and the other half in course work. During practical applications, some students work in classrooms with teachers and some run cultural programs.

Tagalik says one elder takes students on the land hunting on a regular basis and, when he's not out hunting, he and another elder work on a shop and technology program for students in grades 4 through 6. The group also features a sewing instructor who does traditional sewing -- pattern-making, skin preparation, etc.

Participants also help organize some of the cultural programs, such as the fall caribou camp and next month's annual classroom in the igloo.

"The participants are excellent advocates for this program. One of the men, Donald Uluadluak Sr., is so anxious to share his knowledge with the teachers working here and their students. During the summer, Donald took six high school students and some of our teachers out on the land for a month and he taught them every word for every thing they found out there," says Tagalik with a laugh.

"He's a fabulous artist and drew illustrations of everything. In the second month of the program, they entered all of this into the computers and have created a Web site called the Arviat

Pictionary Project. Unfortunately, we ran out of time and money, so the project is not complete, but we're hoping it will be running on Jan. 21. We're very proud of it."

With well over 100 more drawings to add, Tagalik says the school is looking for funding to continue work on the project.

"There's another section of Web site which looks at the history of Arviat, so our students will be going to Winnipeg and Ottawa to the National Archives to collect photos and interview elders to collect stories so, by the year 2000, we can have on the Web site a comprehensive history of our community.

"I think it's probably going to be one of the first things on the Internet that people across Nunavut or Nunavik, wherever, can access in Inuktitut."