Northern lights and horses: students exchange experiences of a lifetime

Chatham Kent Secondary School students pose with their Ulluriaq School friends during a dog-sledding trip to Old Woman’s Lake near Kangiqsualujjuaq last month. (PHOTO BY GILLIAN WARNER)

Heather Rose Etok shows off a chocolate bar outside the Sugar Fix Candy Store in chatham-Kent where, according to their teacher, Ulluriaq students spent hundreds of dollars and at least 45 minutes shopping. (PHOTO BY GILLIAN WARNER)

Minnie Molly Snowball tries riding horses for the first time at TJ Stables during a recent student exchange to southern Ontario. The stable owner invited the group for a free lesson when he heard the Inuit students had never seen live horses before. (PHOTO BY GILLIAN WARNER)

None of the pictures that Emily Beacock had seen of Kangiqsualujjuaq could do the real place justice.

When the 16-year-old student from Chatham-Kent Secondary School in Ontario stepped off the plane March 23, she was impressed with the sunlit view.

“All the pictures I’d seen made the North seem kind of cold, barren and flat,” Beacock said.

Twenty-four hours and a skidoo ride later, she confirmed that “it’s gorgeous here.”

Beacock and 14 of her classmates from Chatham-Kent enjoyed their first northern adventure last month as part of a student exchange with nine high school students at Kangiqsualujjuaq’s Ulluriaq school.

During a week-long visit to Kangiqsualujjuaq, the Chatham-Kent students took their first dog sled ride, learned how to high kick and ate raw meat off of a piece of cardboard on the floor.

Beacock’s classmate, Elizabeth Shepherd, 17, called the trip a “totally amazing, scary, beautiful opportunity.”

As she was unprepared for the Arctic spring, Shepherd’s local host family suited her up in a warm jacket, boots and sunglasses.

Shepherd’s favourite moment: a night-time snowmobile ride down to the beach.

“We went down to the beach and it was so quiet and dark,” she said. “We lay down in the snow and watched the northern lights.”

Of the two groups, Shepherd believes the Chatham-Kent students faced the bigger cultural shock coming to Nunavik.

“This was totally new for us – some of us have never even been on a plane,” she said. “I’m sure [the Inuit students] have probably seen a lot of our culture on TV.”

Kangiqsualujjuaq students would say that is true – but that television and real life are still thousands of kilometres apart.

During their February visit to the community in southwestern Ontario, one of the Kangiqsualujjuaq students asked to see a horse.

Although horses are a common site in almost any rural setting in southern Canada, most of the Ulluriaq students had only ever seen a horse on television.

When a local stable owner in the region heard that, he offered the group free horseback riding lessons.

The horseback ride was a definite first for Ulluriaq student McCombie Annanack, 15, who said it was his favourite part of the trip.

Annanack also visited a haunted house, which he called “the most terrifying experience of his life.”

He toured a butterfly conservatory with his classmates where the winged creatures came and landed on his shoulder, which “was scary, too.”

The group also visited famous Ontario landmarks, like Niagara Falls and Uncle Tom’s cabin, a museum on the site of a former refuge for slaves coming to settle in Canada.

Ella Annanack had only been south once before, and found the experience exciting.

“They have a pretty different life,” she said of the Chatham-Kent students. “They live in a big city, but they say they don’t have much to do.”

Chatham-Kent is a small city of about 100,000 people — many times larger than Kangiqsualujjuaq, population 700.

Annanack and the other students stayed with host families there during their visit.

The host families — most of whom had never met an Inuk before — asked students a lot of questions, like what the weather was like in the North, what students normally ate at home, and where did their food come from, she said.

“The first night staying with the family was uncomfortable,” said Annanack, 19, “but at the end, it was the worst thing to have to leave. We were all crying.”

Annanack still keeps in touch with her host family by email.

Although Annanack is a shy student, Annanack’s teacher Gillian Warner said she is one of the students who benefitted most from the exchange.

“When the group came to Kangiqsualujjuaq, she was such a great host, checking in on the students and taking them out to do things,” Warner said. “She really came out of her shell and she feels much more prepared to tackle Cegep [college in the South].”

Three of Warner’s students who participated in the exchange have applied to go to college in Montreal next year, and Warner said the trip south helped to boost their confidence about living away from home.

“I really hadn’t expected that to be one of the outcomes,” Warner said. “On our trip back north, you could see that their whole fear of travelling was gone.”

“It was interesting to see both groups’ learning curves,” she said. “But I don’t think they’re nervous about staying away from home or with strangers any more.”

The Nunavik-Ontario student exchange was funded through the YMCA and Heritage Canada.

Kangiqsualujjuaq students say a tearful goodbye to their new friends on the steps of Chatham- Kent Secondary School before heading back North February 21. The southern students later spent a week in Kangiqsualujjuaq in March to round out the Nunavik-Ontario exchange program. (PHOTO BY GILLIAN WARNER)