Qikiqtarjuaq (Jan 24/05) - Qikiqtarjuaq hunters are breathing new life in their fishing industry.

After years of meetings in Ottawa and more than $20,000 of their own dollars spent to get to those meetings and buy fishing equipment, the Nattivak Hunters and Trappers Association of Qikiqtarjuaq created an independent community fishery called Masiliit Corporation last week.

"We're becoming known as a community that is not being pushed around by government officials, the Baffin Fisheries Coalition or DFO (Department of Fisheries and Oceans). We're defending our community," said Samuel Nuqingaq of the Nattivak HTA. "We're doing this because Nunavut government is not giving us jobs. So we said, 'let's create jobs.'"

Masiliit - an old Inuktitut word that means breathing through gills - has made an agreement with a Canadian company to get the controlling interest in a fixed gear freezer vessel and a Canadian groundfish licence that will allow Masiliit to fish in Nunavut as well as southern Canadian waters.

According to the HTA, Masiliit is the first aboriginal company to own a groundfish licence.

It will employ up to 30 people from deck hands to supervisors. According to the Nattivak HTA, 80 to 90 per cent of Qikiqtarjuaq's 550 residents are unemployed.

A company has been hired to do a feasibility study to get a fish plant up and running for turbot, char and clams.

Masiliit is planning to fish the community's long-standing 330-tonne division OB turbot allocation in 2005 with their new vessel. However, they've had to re-apply for that quota and won't know if they get it until the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board (NWMB) makes a decision in February.

Qikiqtarjuaq has historically fished its allocation from NWMB for the past six years with Clearwater Fine Foods of Halifax under a royalty agreement.

The HTA was a member of the Baffin Fisheries Coalition until last year, when it decided not to renew its contract.

Ben Kovic, former chair of the NWMB and now head of the BFC, visited Qikiqtarjuaq on Jan. 19 to take part in a public meeting with the hunters involved with the new company.

"We were there to find a way to bring them back (to the BFC)," said Kovic in a phone interview on Thursday.

The BFC gave the group nine options to rejoin, but so far the group has decided not to.

"Nobody made an agreement," said Seemee Nookiguak of the Nattivak HTA.

"We didn't have a full board in town. Even if we did, the BFC wouldn't have swayed us. We'd have to think about it before we joined BFC."