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IQALUIT
When Ooloota Maatiusi retires, she hopes her legacy is that more children in Iqaluit will speak Inuktitut.

Principal Ooloota Maatiusi gave up a career teaching teachers to return to the elementary school system at Joamie Ilinniarvik School in Iqaluit. Five of her former students in the Nunavut Teacher Education Program at Nunavut Arctic College are now her teaching colleagues. - Casey Lessard/NNSL photo

“I hope to make a difference in the Inuktitut language and culture, and I am going to keep pushing for more bilingual education,” Maatiusi said after her first month as principal at Joamie Ilinniarvik School in Iqaluit.

But don't get the impression she is a naive new principal: Maatiusi is a seasoned veteran who knows what can be accomplished in the education system. This clarity comes from a long career as a teacher and principal with the Nunavut Teacher Education Program (NTEP) at Nunavut Arctic College, where she taught many of the teachers she now works with.

“When Ooloota left NTEP to come here,” said former NTEP colleague and vice-principal Carol Horn, who left her job to join Maatiusi at Joamie, “I liked her vision of education, that she wanted education to be culturally relevant to the children, and linguistically strong. A government initiative, Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, is trying to have the work, school or community environment you are in reflect the culture and beliefs of the majority of the people in that community. I felt that before I retire, that I would love an opportunity to work in a truly IQ school, and this school had all the right pieces.”

For Horn, that meant strong Inuit teachers and non-Inuit teachers who want to contribute to the community. But mostly, it was to work with Maatiusi again.

“I came because Ooloota represented the person who could bring all of that together into a very strong IQ school,” Horn said.

Maatiusi is concerned about the way the Inuit culture is struggling in the face of Western culture, and believes children are the way to preserve it.

“I truly believe in our Inuktitut language and culture,” she said. “I'm strong in supporting that. It's our culture and in larger places especially, Inuktitut is not used the way it was before.”

To help preserve the language, she encourages parents to speak their first language at home.

“Inuktitut needs to get stronger here in Iqaluit,” she said, noting she is highly focused on encouraging the use of the language in the school as well.

Horn, who first arrived in the North in 1971 and left in 1983 believing Inuktitut was on the rise in schools, found a different situation when she returned in 1993.

“I was appalled at how little progress we had made in training enough teachers to teach in Inuktitut. We now have communities that cannot offer Inuktitut language in the classroom, and that's not okay. That's really a crime. The dream for Nunavut is not going to happen without that education happening. Now we're at the point of recovering language, not instructing Inuktitut.”

Maatiusi, though, is encouraged by the government's efforts to create a curriculum that allows this to happen.

“We have a lot more resources than we did before,” she said. “The Department of Education's curriculum department has done a good job of making more Inuktitut materials, books and resources. We could still use more, but it's much better than before (1980s).”

Both Maatiusi and Horn could have easily remained at the NTEP program until their retirement. But both were drawn to return to the classroom.

“I can never see anyone teaching teachers how to teach if they've been out of the classroom for more than five years,” Horn said. “You have no idea of what is happening in the real world, you have no idea of the latest initiatives, you can only talk about teaching but you can't share personal experiences.”

For Maatiusi, Joamie is a comfortable place to work, with many familiar faces. Five of the school's teachers graduated from NTEP during her tenure.

“I saw a lot of growth in them when they were at NTEP, and they're more mature,” she said. “It's interesting to see them as colleagues instead of students.”

But more than the staff, the elementary system is her home.

“Teaching elementary is where I started in 1984, and I wanted to get back before I retired. I really enjoy being around children and working with teachers at this level.”

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