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GRISE FIORD/RESOLUTE BAY
Muskoxen will be used to improve the literacy of adults in Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay through a Nunavut Arctic College pilot project starting in February.

Muskoxen, like these photographed near the Grise Fiord airport in 2008, will be the subject of a pilot literacy project in the hamlet and in Resolute Bay starting in February. Students can take courses involving every aspect of muskox hunting, including hunting, skinning, butchering, and wool harvesting, as well as related arts projects. - photo courtesy of Jimmie Qaapik

Students will explore every step of hunting and processing the animal, including skinning, meat processing and wool-making. The project will also result in a website featuring student writing, photography and web design.

"Each of the different parts of the project will include literacy training," said adult educator Jimmie Qaapik, who helped develop the program locally. "They have to write stories about what they did. Photography and video will be involved so we'll have images of muskox and the different parts of the training on the site so we can show the project and how it helps our communities."

The Department of Education gave the college about $50,000 from it's special literacy budget to fund the project, the college's North Baffin community programs co-ordinator Ellen Hamilton said. The program, which will run as short courses until December, targets adults looking to improve their Inuktitut and English skills.

"We also wanted something motivational that people would be interested in doing," Hamilton said, noting the importance of building the program around the schedule of students, most of whom are working full-time.

"We thought we'd do two- or three-week courses where people could take a leave from work," she said, "or courses that are delivered more flexibly, like once or twice a week on evenings or weekends."

The first aspect of the course will be catching about eight muskoxen.

"There are muskox nearby, but we aren't allowed to hunt muskox within a 40-km radius (of Grise Fiord), so we have to go out," Qaapik said. "Each area has their own number of tags and going up North overland over the glacier is usually where they have more tags available. If they were looking to get eight, that's where they would go."

The workshops will include hunting, skinning, butchering, meat processing, qiviuq extraction and processing, horn carving, tool making, theatre, print making, photography and web design, Hamilton said. Students will create a virtual book detailing the different stages and workshops.

The project will also test the effectiveness of delivering such classes by online distance education. Where possible, the college will connect students with specialists from outside of the communities.

"All of our programs require specialists, and the chances of us finding someone like that who is available to teach in the far North are limited," she said. "If we can connect these instructors by distance, that will really save money and allow people to learn skills they wouldn't otherwise."

Beyond these workshops, which will run in both Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay, some of the funding will be used to help Pond Inlet's Tununiq Aqsarniit theatre company develop a play for the website.

The workshops are free, and Hamilton expects about five to 11 people to attend each, estimating about 100 people from Grise Fiord, Resolute Bay and Pond Inlet will take part in the project.

"They'll be assessed for their literacy level before and after the course," she said of students taking the course. "We'll see if people really do improve their literacy skills. If so, what were the factors of the project that allowed them to do that and is this worth doing somewhere else?"

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