 | Home page |  | Text size |  | E-mail this page |
Carving stone marked for artists Hamlets identify traditional sources during four-year government-funded program
Danielle Sachs
Northern News Services
Published Monday, July 29, 2013
IKALUKTUTIAK/CAMBRIDGE BAY
At 7 a.m., Mike Beauregard is waiting for the fog to lift in Cambridge Bay so he can hop on a helicopter and check out some identified carving stone sites.
An untouched major carving stone deposit of the Proterozoic age was found near the headwaters of the Kingora River on the western side of Melville Peninsula. - photo courtesy of EDT-Mineral Petroleum Resources |
Beauregard is the resident geologist working on the four-year Nunavut Carvingstone Deposit Evaluation Program.
Now in its final year, the team is spending the summer visiting the Kitikmeot Region as the final stop in the federal- and territorial-government-funded program.
The different carving stone sites are initially identified by people from the community. Local full-time carvers are hired and they identify the zone where stone is found.
"The towns know where the best sites are," said Beauregard.
"In the summer, we'll go out and mark where the areas are so in the winter people just have to dig to collect their stone."
The difference is in the winter, people would have a large area to look through. After the site has been marked, it narrows down the search so people know exactly where to look.
"The tickets up have been identified by the carvers. They know what the stone is like and have identified the key spots," said Beauregard.
To date, there have been more than 80 sites identified and Beauregard is still working on a few more around Cambridge Bay.
By the end of the summer, all 25 communities in Nunavut will have been consulted and 23 will have been visited.
"The two communities we haven't gone to, the carvers said they would look into it some more but they didn't have enough reason for a helicopter to come out," said Beauregard.
"Not everybody has stone. There are seven or eight communities that are impoverished for stone."
According to Beauregard, one-third of Nunavut communities have a fair bit of stone, one-third are making do with what they have and the remaining have no stone.
There's a quarry in Cape Dorset that services one-third of the carvers in Nunavut. The Korok Inlet quarry provides between 136,077 kg and 226,796 kg of stone per year.
Explosives are never used to harvest the stone because a blast would destroy it.
""What we've heard the most about this program is that it's working," said Beauregard.
"There are towns that are trying to find more stone and they've been re-energized by this program's visit."
| 
