PAULATUK - Paulatuk was a much quieter place when eight-year-old Edward Ruben arrived.

Respected elder Edward Ruben, the oldest man in Paulatuk, warns young people not to get old. - Katie May/NNSL photo

It was 1925 and most of the village hadn't yet been settled. During the years to come, Ruben would be instrumental in establishing the population. "Uncle Edward", as local residents affectionately know him, is now the patriarch of Paulatuk's largest family – he has 15 children and so many grandchildren he jokes that he's stopped counting. At 92, he is also the oldest man in the hamlet and he's seen it change from a dogsled-driven hunting settlement to a modernized municipality.

"Today, too many machines. They're scaring our game ... You could see all the animals being peaceful, you know. No noise mixed in. Look at today – too much noise," he says, just as an ATV roars down the road outside his house.

"You don't feel peaceful anymore. I can tell you that."

When he was a boy, Ruben and his family of hunters would sail to Aklavik in their schooner to spend the summers.

"Aklavik was the biggest city in the North," Ruben chuckles. "People used to have a lot of fun there."

He would often watch his father and older brother go hunting, longing for the day he would be allowed to go out on his own – a day that didn't arrive until he was 14 years old.

"I was like a little girl because my sister was not big enough to help mum. My dad would say, 'well, sonny, sorry. You're gonna help mummy, OK?' I would use a sewing machine, make shirts, pants that my mom cut out," Ruben says. "When I was a little boy and everybody was going to school, here I am doing something at home – cutting wood, getting ice, you know, helping my mother. I wished I could go to school. I kept thinking, I gotta take the right direction in my life. It was the only way I figured I could go ahead."

Ruben never went to school – something he's always regretted – but he taught himself English by slowing down the music on his grammaphone and listening to the words. He picked up more of the language working as a janitor with the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line operation for 18 years in Cape Parry and later in Cambridge Bay, leaving his family in Paulatuk.

He had been in Nunavut for two years when he decided to quit and come home, he says, because he met too many people who liked to party all the time.

"That was too much for me. I had to think of my kids – my wife and my kids," Ruben says. "If I kept that up, what (was) I gonna be? Nobody, maybe. My wife would have left me. My kids would have thought 'well, our dad's drinking too much.' I don't want to hear that. I wanted to live with my family."

His and his wife Mabel's youngest child, Chris, is now in his 30s and Ruben says he's proud to have such a large, loving family.

"No one gives me bad words when I talk to them," he smiles. "That's why I like my family."

Ruben, who finally quit hunting at 85 when he felt his body begin to slow down, says he tries to prepare younger generations to take over.

"I tell young people: don't get old. We only live once. We're only good-looking once, no seconds," he laughs.

"When you come to 90, you feel like howling like an old wolf."