Chesterfield Inlet (Feb 08/06) - Former Victor Sammurtok school Grade 12 graduate Rebecca Sammurtok brought a little elders' homework along during her recent visit to Chesterfield Inlet.

Sammurtok is in her first year of studies at the Nunavut Sivuniksavut (NS) program in Ottawa. She was asked by NS instructor Murray Angus to bring home some old photos from the area with hopes local elders could put a name to the faces.

"It's all part of Project Naming and I enjoyed looking at photos from 50 or 60 years ago and how our community looked at that time," said Sammurtok.

"Staff at the school helped me organize a special event to bring the elders in and look at the photos.

"It was kind of short notice, so we didn't have as many elders as I had hoped.

"But those who did come did a great job and were able to name the people in a lot of the photos."

Project Naming has come a long way since first being thought of by Angus, who used to take students to the national archives to have them look for photos from their home communities.

The Canadian national archives has about 50,000 Nunavut photos.

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) teamed up with the NS college in 2001 to start trying to uncover the identities of the thousands of unknown Inuit in the archive photos.

Elders and youth across Nunavut began working together to identify people in the photos and that effort led to the creation of a special LAC website, Project Naming.

Youth travelled across Nunavut with laptop computers to show elders scanned photographs of unidentified Inuit.

The people were identified by the elders and the information added to LAC's photographic database.

Today the website identifies hundreds of Nunavummiut from the 1920s through the 1950s.

Sammurtok said she enjoyed the experience, but if she had it to do over again, she'd make a few changes.

"The elders would rather have had the photos in their hands because they found a lot of them in the slide show too hard to see clearly.

"And I kept the elders a little too long because some of them were getting kind of cranky by the end of the session, but they all did their best to help and I appreciate that."