Karen Mackenzie
Northern News Services
Published Monday, June 23, 2008

IQALUIT - From announcer to politician, interpreter to small business owner, Thomas Suluk has never been scared to follow life where it takes him.

Following his start on the land outside of Arviat in 1950, life has brought him in many directions.

"Back then I didn't know there was any Inuit anywhere else. Arviat, that's it," he remembered with a laugh.

Suluk first came to Iqaluit after graduating from the Arthur Turner Anglican theological school in Pangnirtung.

"I was posted to Apex but I was under-age yet for ordination - 22, not 23 - and I decided not to go onto it. I got into politics instead," he remembered. "That was the time when Inuit were becoming aware of land claims, government rights, and these kinds of things."

He began from "the bottom up," working first at the settlement council office.

"When I started, we had only tiny little budgets, like $12,000 a year, to do what little site-development we could, maybe gravel hauling and simple things like that," he explained. "We had to look for secondhand building, and depend on the generosity of some government department who had space in their building for our office."

From there, his interest grew into an involvement with the new Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, he remembered.

"We didn't want to be stuck just doing little community stuff," he said.

After a short stint as announcer with the CBC, it wasn't long until Suluk got caught up in federal politics as a Progressive Conservative Member of Parliament for Nunatsiaq.

His focus at the time was on land claims issues, as he also worked with the Tungavik Federation of Nunavut (TFN).

Those were the beginning of what he called his "travelling years."

"In those early days there was a lot of internal politics going on too," he said. "It was up to the rest of us to develop the nuts and bolts, to put the theories into some actual working process."

As Nunavut became a reality and politics less of a focus, his life took another turn in the 1990s, when he opened Neevee's Coffeeshop back in Arviat.

The cafe, which is named for his late wife, is now run by one of his three grown children.

Although Suluk's most recent project finds him behind a desk in the Nunavut Association of Municipalities (NAM) office in Iqaluit, he will soon do some travelling again.

He is working on logistics for the second stage of the Qanuippitali Health Survey, which will depart from Kugluktuk on Aug. 7 before travelling west into the Inuvialuit region and then through the Kitikmeot region.

"Qanuippitali came along and I got interested when the Amundsen was making its trip last summer. It's a chance to see Nunavut again," he said.