Kassina Ryder
Northern News Services
Published Monday, August 11, 2008

IQALUIT - It's all about making connections during The Inuit Cultural Skills program at Baffin Correctional Centre, where making uluit and qamutiik is therapy.

Inmates of the BCC participate in the three-week Inuit Cultural Skills program to learn or improve their traditional skills, according to Pauloosie Nuyalia, associate director of cultural and healing programs. The lessons they learn by making traditional tools and spending time on the land can then be applied to their daily lives.

"We try and make a connection with everything they do to their life," Nuyalia said.

In the first week of the program, each inmate makes an ulu. The program's land program officers assess the inmates' actions during the process.

"We can gauge how they are doing from their body language, how roughly they treat the tools and materials that they are making the ulu with," Nuyalia said. "When they complete it we ask them 'if you were making this for your wife, your mother, your sister, your aunt, would you want to give this to her?'"

Inmates then make a second ulu that will be given to a female member of their family.

Nuyalia said the goal is for inmates to consider the level of care they put into making the ulu and in turn, consider the respect they give to women in their lives.

Inmates also go hunting during the first week where they hunt, skin and butcher caribou in order to better understand their roles as hunter/providers for their families.

In another phase of the program, inmates learn land skills such as traditional and modern navigation methods. The concept of direction-finding is also used as a life lesson.

"We also use this land skills aspect also to show them from when they were a child to present day," Nuyalia said. "Sometimes in life we make a wrong turn and get lost and end up in jail."

Qamutiik building is used to teach the concept of connection.

"A qamutik is not just a qamutik. There are a lot of parts to it," Nuyalia said. "What we do is get them to learn what each part of the qamutik is."

In the third week, inmates are brought out on the land for three days to practise what they learned.

Dinos Tikivik, a former land program officer with the Inuit Cultural Skills program, said spending time on the land teaches skills some inmates were never taught and helps develop the skills they may already possess.

"It brings back some of the knowledge that wasn't given to them or it sharpens what they have: hunting, travelling on the land and being able to survive out there," he said.

The program began in the early 1970s, Nuyalia said. Inmates and land program officers formed connections by being on the land together, a relationship that is still a big part of the current program.

"When they developed a bond with correctional officers, who were primarily hunters back then, that's when the healing and counseling started, when they reached a comfort level and a bond with the correctional officers," he said. "With that in mind, we have tried to continue and enhance that aspect of working with inmates."

The program was formerly six weeks long, but was reduced to three weeks because of the brief incarceration period for inmates of the BCC. It is divided into separate phases where they learn different skills both on the land and in the classroom.

Young offenders also attend the program one day a week, but are kept separate from the adult inmates. They are taken out on week-long trips during school breaks.