KUGLUKTUK/COPPERMINE
In the winter of 2014, Millie Kuliktana received a priceless gift.

The longtime educator and language advocate, whose passion for the revitalization of Inuinnaqtun was captured in an 18-minute film, titled Millie's Dream: Revitalizing Inuinnaqtun, was given a collection of documents by the family of the late Anglican Bishop of the North, Jack Sperry.

Millie Kuliktana, a longtime educator and language advocate, received a collection of documents that together form an Inuinnaqtun dictionary from the family of the late Anglican Bishop of the North, Jack Sperry, in the winter of 2014. - photo courtesy of Millie Kuliktana

It's a first draft of sorts, titled English to Inuinnaqtun Dictionary (Phonetic Points), and its origins date back to 1916 and Hubert Girling, who, from 1915 to 1919, was a "missionary with the Eskimos in the Bernard Harbour and Coronation Gulf areas," according to the Anglican Church of Canada website. "During that time he made extensive travels and did significant translation in the Copper Eskimo language."

Through the years, additional entries were made into the collection, including by the bishop, until it rested in the hands of the Sperry family.

"(They) thought of me and entrusted me with this collection," said Kuliktana, her voice occasionally heavy with emotion. "Their hopes were that I would be able to take it forward on behalf of their father and the people who started the project years before."

Kuliktana is working to transform the collection into a published book with her partners at Inuinnait Services Limited, Suzie Evyagotailak and Edna Elias, who is her sister and a former commissioner of Nunavut.

The project is a huge responsibility but merges well with her work as a language advocate.

"I was so touched that they entrusted me with this project," Kuliktana said.

"Our hope is that we will complete it into a published dictionary that portrays on the left page the photo of an original page and on the right-side page would be a mirror image but re-written in the standard Inuinnaqtun writing system."

As Kuliktana explains, the entries were made by English men who did not speak the Inuit language. "They were learning Inuinnaqtun. So their words were all phonetically spelled."

She describes the collection: "It's the size eight-and-a-half by 11, standard size paper. It's in an old three-ring binder. It's fragile. The top layers of the cover are peeling. And it has a scent to it. It's so old that you can smell it, like the smell if you walked into an attic.

"The oldest pages are in handwriting. In the handwritten notes, some are done in pencil and some are done with quills, in calligraphy writing. There's a little bunch in there that are held together with brass clips that were typewritten, on the first original typewriters, I guess."

Because the documents are so fragile, Kuliktana has not leafed through page by page.

"But I have flipped through certain sections as I show it to key individuals that I want to look at it," she said.

In March, Kuliktana will travel to Toronto and meet with officials and archivists with the Anglican Church of Canada. The hope is that by the time she leaves Toronto a plan will be in place to digitize and protect the documents, "so that we can have a working copy and can begin the process of making it into a publishable project."

"At the archives, they're very excited, too. One archivist that I spoke to said that she had just been working on stuff that was attached to the name Girling. When I told her that's the signature on the collection we have, she was very excited."

But far beyond the archival interest exists the practical goal - ensuring Inuinnaqtun, a threatened language, resurges strongly.

"There are so many possibilities," said Kuliktana. "It will be an amazing tool for schools and also for families. The children that are in school learning the language today are bringing that home. You see the language being revitalized in the families as they are regaining the language. The joy of it, being a 100-year-old document, there are going to be words in there that are old terminology that we may not hear today."

She also imagines an interactive CD.

"There's a collection of place names that are different from 100 years ago to today. There's some kinship terms in there that might vary a little bit from the way kinship terms are used today. And there are definitely a lot of nouns and verbs that would demonstrate what Inuit life was like 100 years ago. In the past, based on the words that were collected - they give you a good picture of life in an iglu village, for example."

Sperry first arrived in Kugluktuk, then Coppermine, as a newly ordained Anglican minister in 1950 and married his wife Elizabeth at the hamlet's mission church two years later.

They spent 19 years in Kugluktuk.

"He was fluent in the local language and did a lot of translation work (in the local Copper dialect) with the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, as well as hymns and Common Book of Prayer," said Terry Buckle, former Bishop of the Yukon, to Nunavut News/North after Sperry's death. "It was a major amount of work."

Kuliktana says the project is "something we can do to honour the late Bishop Sperry and his fellow missionaries - to complete a project for them that they were not able to complete."