McGregor has been in the North for almost 30 years and still has the passion her father did when it comes to civil rights.

She wants to see a territory that reflects the people who live there and won't leave until it happens.

News/North: Tell me how you came to be in Iqaluit?

Cathy McGregor: I was living in Toronto. My husband Cameron and I thought there must be something more to life then living in Toronto. We came to Kugluktuk in 1973. We were there for three years.

I took a year to go to graduate school at the University of Saskatchewan. Then my husband and I were in Fort Simpson for four years. We spent nine years in Yellowknife. We went to British Columbia for two years, where I was involved in education. Then we came here. It's coming up on 10 years now.

N/N: What did Iqaluit look like when you first arrived?

CM: It was a lot smaller. There were fewer cars. When you went down to the Bay, it was still known as the Bay then, you knew everybody. Iqaluit's always been different than the smaller communities. It's always had a higher proportion of Southerners. There's always been more English used. There's also a lot of Inuit people from different communities.

N/N: Have you seen a lot of changes over the years?

CM: I had a colleague of mine over for coffee when I came back from Alaska the year before last.

She told me that where my house is now was where her father used to go to look out at the bay to see if there were any narwhal. I live up near the (Aqsarniit) middle school.

N/N: What does your husband do?

CM: He's also a teacher. Right now, he's working for the Department of Human Resources in training and development.

N/N: How did you meet?

CM: We met in Kansas while going to university. I was 20 years old. He was born in Saskatchewan and I grew up in Chicago. I came to Canada because I married him.

N/N: How did you know he was the one?

CM: I was actually a disillusioned child of the '60s at the time. Cameron was very proud to be a Canadian. I had never met anyone who was proud of their nationality. My friends and I were certainly not proud of the United States at the time. He intrigued me, that he was proud intrigued me. It wasn't an option for me to be proud to be an American -- because of the Vietnam war and the disregard for civil rights.

N/N: Where do you think these strong feelings came from?

CM: My father was a strategist for the civil rights movements. He use to have meetings with Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson in our living room.

N/N: How did your father get involved in the movement?

CM: He was a professor of ethics and society at the University of Chicago. It was part of the school of divinity. He felt people should extend their Christian beliefs into every walk of life.

N/N: Do you remember anything from his conversations in the living room with Jackson and King Jr.?

CM: I wasn't around all the time. I was in university. But when I was around, we use to serve them coffee. Sometimes, I'd sit in our hallway and listen. What came across to me was passion. I don't remember the specific conversations, but I remember the determination. They knew what they were doing was worth all the hardships and the sacrifices.

N/N: Did you get involved in the movement?

CM: I remember protesting with my father. We were protesting the superintendent of education in Chicago. All the schools in the United States were supposed to be desegregating. We were trying to say that the superintendent should do a better job of it. When they told us to stop marching, we had a sit-in. We were all arrested. I was a teenager so they didn't keep me, but my father certainly went to jail. He'd probably gone to jail many other times as well.

N/N: Do you still have the civil rights mindset?

CM: My husband and I stayed in the North because we're trying to figure out the answer to the question of how you change institutions and organizations to better reflect the people they serve. In this case, these people are the Inuit. In the North, education reflects a Southern mindset, a Southern set of values. I think this orientation comes from my experience with the civil rights movement.

N/N: What do you think needs to change in education to make it work in the North?

CM: Parents should be making the decisions for their children when it comes to the school system. If they want their child to learn in Inuktitut, we should offer Inuktitut. But still the hours, the time of school is still set to Southern standards.

N/N: What kind of message is the country giving to Nunavummiut?

CM: Anything north of Thunder Bay is periphery. It's not part of the core and it doesn't really matter. This injustice goes way back to the way the traders and the church treated the Inuit. The formation of Nunavut is a step forward, but we still need more Inuit to be making decisions. Until that happens we're still perpetuating an unjust system. The message is that the way to do things is the Southern way and this means the Inuit way is wrong. Suicide, alcohol abuse and a lot of other problems all come back to this message. It all comes back to Inuit not feeling self-confident in being Inuit, even in their own homeland.

N/N: How can this problem be fixed?

CM: If you ask elders what values Inuit should have today, they're not very different to the values Southerners have today.

We need to build on these similarities. I think Nunavut created the opportunity to have a physical revolution. I think that out of the revolution, we can build a person that can take the best of both worlds. We need to talk about the fact that the RCMP shot the dogs. We need to talk about the fact that kids were taken away from their parents and forced to go to school. A lot of people still hate schools because of this. We need to talk about these things to move beyond them.

N/N: Where are you working now?

CM: I'm working at Nunavut Arctic College as the director of corporate services. I supervise a lot of the college-wide services like information technology, the libraries, public relations and planning. One of my areas of responsibility is the Inuit Employment Strategy. Right now, it is unbalanced. We need more Inuit teachers and more Inuktitut materials. This is true from kindergarten to the college level.

N/N: What's your favourite memory of the North?

CM: I think one of my most favourite memories is climbing to the top of the hills at Bloody Falls. The falls are just outside of Kugluktuk at the mouth of the Coppermine River.

It feels like you can see all the way South to Yellowknife. You feel like there's not a person out there except the snowy owls and caribou. It's a really special feeling to be up there. It puts the human race in its place. We're not so almighty after all.