Yellowknife (June 30/03) - The North is a land where old ways have mingled with the new for a long time.

That dance of old meeting new shows up in the language, where English words are sprinkled throughout an Inuktitut conversation.

It's also evident when traditional clothing, like the amauti, gets a new twist, worn over the latest style of jeans.

Long braided hair is multi-coloured now. Short hairstyles with flashes of bleached blonde highlights are definitely in.

And even when the rain and sleet comes, young women throughout the North will wear those thick-soled, high-heeled shoes outside. Sure, they make a girl's legs look longer. But those stylish shoes never look very comfortable here, especially as young women carry babies on their backs in the traditional fashion, navigating their way through Iqaluit's muddy streets.

The signs are all there now. The traditional looks of Inuit women are giving way to new trends inspired by movies, television and magazines.

But Inuit women say while they dye their hair and buy the latest clothes, they do not wish to look more "white." They are still true to their roots.

The schools were certainly trying to encourage kids to think about traditional ways last week.

During Aboriginal Day celebrations, Iqaluit students Pileeta Arnaquq, 11, and Margaret Sikkinerk, 10, got dressed up in traditional parkas and braided one another's hair.

They had to walk with care in those outfits, and you could tell they felt beautiful in them.

For Oolayoo Angurasuk, a 60-year-old resident of Iqaluit's elders home, long braided hair was always the ultimate in beauty for an Inuit woman. Angurasuk also remembers tattoos on the face were considered attractive.

Through a translator, Angurasuk explained that elders in general do not like it when Inuit girls cut off their hair.

"She remembers taking the hair and wrapping it around a stick with seal skin," said Angurasuk. "That was very beautiful."

Annie Ineak recalls that after she chopped off her long black hair, her grandmother was deeply upset and kept the sheared locks.

Today, Jeannie and Susie Kiguktak, who are cousins, like to cut and dye their hair. Keeping it long is just too much work.

"It's just to do something different," Jeannie said.

To make their black hair too light, though, "destroys it," Jeannie said. "But I do my own hair, I cut it myself. I don't trust anybody with my hair," she said, laughing.

Jayne Omilgoitok, 21, works at First Steps daycare in Iqaluit.

She has noticed a lot of people her age trying to imitate the looks of mostly white actors who grace the covers of magazines.

For Omilgoitok, such attempts to become more white-looking are not "beautiful" to her.

"Being able to get up in the morning and do something I want to achieve everyday and just being myself -- that, to me, is beautiful," she said.

"I notice there are people who try to look like actresses, but I don't pay attention to that. I see women -- they go down South and they come back with all this make-up on and these skanky clothes. I don't like that. I am who I am."