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IQALUIT - The Nunavut Law Foundation is offering a bursary to post-secondary students in the hopes of educating more Inuit lawyers in the years to come.

The Lucien Ukaliannuk Award will be given to students who are in need of financial assistance and who have demonstrated a commitment to pursuing law, justice or social justice studies. Those selected will be eligible for awards up to $10,000 per year, with the possibility of renewed funding annually.

It's an initiative that fits with the foundation's mandate to provide financial assistance to persons or organizations assisting the provision of legal services to Nunavummiut or facilitating their access to justice.

"We thought that one of the things that this territory needed in a big way was more Inuit people trained in the law," said foundation chair Barth Curley. "It's our belief that Inuit-trained lawyers are more likely to stay here, commit here and continue to provide the benefit of their skills to the people here.

"Secondly, it's a question of having trained lawyers who speak Inuktitut and who can explain the law to most Inuit. They understand the culture, they understand the mindset (and) they understand the difficulties."

Lastly, the push to have more Inuit lawyers also speaks to the need to harmonize Inuit traditional knowledge with Canadian law.

Few understood this better than Lucien Ukaliannuk, whose memory is honoured through the bursary.

A respected Inuit elder and Inuit Quajimajatuqangit advisor for the Department of Justice in Iqaluit, Ukaliannuk, who died in September of last year, believed strongly in bringing together Inuit traditional law and Euro-Canadian law.

"Having felt inequity and seeing the resulting social issues and experiencing them in his own family ... he really believed that if the two were to come to understand each other more that it would only be for the betterment of Inuit and could only enrich the legal fabric of Canada," said Ukaliannuk's niece and Akitsiraq Law School graduate Siobhan Arnatsiaq-Murphy.

While Ukaliannuk met with tremendous challenges in pursuing a career in law, his hardships motivated him and those around him to begin a movement of change.

"Although he'd been employed in Iglulik for all those years and he had a resume as long as his arm ... the fact that he was a unilingual Inuit precluded him from getting jobs," said Arnatsiaq-Murphy, recalling the challenge her uncle faced when he first came to Iqaluit.

"So we were talking about it in my class and through that a movement started with the Northern director and liaising with Justice here, just saying, 'This is Nunavut. We're supposed to be working towards IQ and yet there's an elder here that's fully employable.'"

Along these lines, Arnatsiaq-Murphy has also played a role in bridging this gap. As a policy analyst for the GN, she helped set up the Akitsiraq Law School in Iqaluit - a program offered in partnership with the University of Victoria and Nunavut Arctic College.

Bringing post-secondary training to the North is the first step in overcoming some of the barriers for Inuk students with a desire to pursue studies in law.

"Instead of getting Inuit to go down and face all these barriers alone as young parents, it brought the school here so that we have a better chance of success," said Arnatsiaq-Murphy. "We proved to them that even with setbacks and hurdles and being single parents, all of this, that we can do it."