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TUKTOYAKTUK
A much-loved landmark is undergoing a major facelift in Tuktoyaktuk with community members, area businesses and other interested parties lending a hand wherever they can.

Seventy-five years ago this month the first board was nailed on a building that originally served as a schoolhouse in Shingle Bay. Three quarters of a century later, the structure has also housed a school in Aklavik before settling permanently in the hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk in the 1940s as that community's Catholic church.

Currently, work is well underway to restore and eventually reopen Our Lady of Grace Roman Catholic Church, which has not held mass for more than two years due to structural problems.

"After more than 70 years of weather and a roof without flashing in some places, it has rot in certain areas, and so it's being massively repaired," said Sister Fay Trombley, who has been the resident Catholic sister in the community for the last seven years.

The age of the building itself was only recently discovered, when a worker found a board underneath three layers of finishing that read, "John nailed this board summer of August 1937," Carmelle St Vincent told News/North.

The aging building is strongly connected in the minds of residents with Father Robert LeMeur, a long-time missionary in the hamlet from the 1940s until he died in 1985, said Trombley. LeMeur was a dedicated pastor and community member, and the hamlet has not had a full-time priest since his passing.

As an example of LeMeur's dedication to the community of Tuk, he requested to be buried next to Our Lady of Lourdes schooner, which is on display on the same property as the church. This is where his remains lie to this day.

It is the history of the building that makes saving it so important, said Trombley.

"They remember who built it, they remember who held services, remember the sisters," she said. "It just ties in to a lot of their story telling."

"It is important to our community. It's a historical site, especially because of the missionaries who built it," agreed Jean Gruben, who serves as elder leader for the church. "We didn't want it to be demolished or changed so we asked if they could rebuild it, and that's what we're trying to do."

The building was renovated multiple times over the years. In the 1950s, a bell tower was added and an addition was constructed which gave the church building a cross shape, said St Vincent.

Renovation work to the church began about three years ago but much has yet to be done, said Trombley. Originally, community members had hoped that the church could be reopened in time to hold Christmas mass this year, but because of the challenges of undertaking a community construction project in the isolated hamlet, the church will likely not be reopened until sometime next year.

Since the church became unusable for mass, services are normally held in the sister's residence and larger masses for Christmas and Easter are held in the Mangilaluk School gym, said Gruben. While this is an acceptable alternative for the short term, people are anxious to get back in to the church - especially for weddings and funerals.

"Our parents were married there,. It's got a lot of history in there, a lot of people got married in there - our parents got married, we got married in there," said Gruben, who is 69 years old.

Once it became clear that major repairs were needed to restore the building, the pews, altar and other artifacts from inside the building were removed and stored in sea containers that the church borrowed from NTCL, said Trombley.

This is only one of many examples of the community pitching in to help bring the building back up to code, said Trombley.

At least a handful people have been donating their time to work on the building, she said. Also, E. Gruben's Transport has been lending heavy equipment such as fork lifts and loaders as needed and as available. Airlines Canadian North and Aklak Air gave reduced rates for volunteer skilled labourers to fly to the hamlet, which is invaluable on this project because skilled labour is hard to come by in Tuk, said Trombley.

"The challenges are finding expertise to oversee a major project like this and getting skilled labour," she said.

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