Support growing for a Nunavut university
“It begins to look like the bones of a university may emerge”
Participants at a workshop in Iqaluit held this past March to discuss a possible Nunavut-based university pose for a group photo. (PHOTO COURTESY OF SHEENA KENNEDY DALSEG)
In March of this year Iqaluit hosted a two-day gathering to discuss what a university could mean for Nunavut.
The resulting report Inuit Nunangat University Workshop Report envisioned an institution with a physical presence, dedicated to teaching and research, and having the academic independence to promote civil dialogue.
Not a transplanted southern institution, not a government or land claims institution, but a post-secondary centre with a fundamental respect for what students seek: opportunities to challenge and explore western and Inuit knowledge, qualifying students for the larger world and offering a profound knowledge of the northern dynamic they will be asked to shape.
Nunavut university detractors can still be heard whenever the topic is raised, but there is also a growing group of supporters: Nunavummiut with university educations, corporations who have pledged financial support, and the people who stood on stage in April 2014 when the Agnico Eagle’s $5 million pledge for capital infrastructure was announced.
Since 2009, the Ilitturvik Society has advocated for an independent university based in Iqaluit. In June the Commissioner’s Address included a commitment for a feasibility study, and in September an RFP appeared.
Not yet awarded, the study will take at least another six months, but it begins to look like the bones of a university may emerge within this mandate of the Nunavut government.
Nunavut has a huge proportion of its population under the age of 15, and a huge number of jobs unfilled or filled on a rotating basis by economic tourists and short-term contributors.
The 2013 Nunavut Economic Outlook warns that wages in Nunavut paid to non-residents increased 140 per cent over the last five years to $291 million – and all of that money pours out of Nunavut year after year.
A university is a means to begin fulfilling the obligations — and the promise — of Nunavut that economic activity and political control would evolve into the hands of the people being governed.
If a portion of those wages and a respectable slice of the research money, grants, jobs and scholarships offered each year in southern Canada for studies about the North were turned into funds for studies in the North, a Nunavut university would have no budget shortage.
Life is not that simple and change does not happen that fast. With focus and effort, gradually our post-secondary education levels and talented workforce can grow.
Not all funds or scholars will migrate north immediately, but gradually the legitimacy of research work will require active Nunavut participation. Having a university affiliation is the single most common criteria preventing otherwise eligible Nunavut institutions from accessing research grants.
Consider the contributions that the Nunavut Heritage Trust could make to northern knowledge if its researchers could access natural sciences and engineering research grants.
And the same can be said for the public health capacity of the Qaujigiartiit Health Research Centre, the northern work we all hope to see at CHARS, or the research being conducted in Igloolik.
Canada contributes tens of millions of dollars each year to First Nations universities and the obligation in Nunavut is no less. Some Nunavut students will need significant support before being ready for university studies — another good reason to underline the mandate of Arctic College and improved-caliber high school graduates.
Some professions currently taught elsewhere could prosper in a university — this was the experience in southern Canada as teaching colleges and nursing schools were moved into university settings.
And sometimes we simply have not recognized the extraordinary capacity in Nunavut to be held up for all to see: printmakers who stand side-by-side with any in the world, linguists in the first degree, astronomers and opportunities for astronomy, botanists and international and constitutional negotiators who would be lauded in any university.
Outside students are interested in attending a Nunavut university. Doubters may doubt, but I have seen southern university students line up and buy airline tickets to attend credit-earning courses in Nunavut for mid-January.
Outside students bring money, ideas and energy. Our students will visit other institutions and be shocked, amazed and energized. They may return with new ideas, insisting on change and accountabilities we were never expecting.
Archives and records held for Nunavut elsewhere can return and viewed in a place where their cultural context can be explored. And I personally have high hopes that the quality of coffee will improve.
Dialogue, debate, research and opportunity are all essential components of resources Nunavut needs to move forward. Many details and many discussions await, but at least now we can see some shape for an educational future that would sustain Nunavut in the long term.
Anne Crawford is a Director of the Illiturvik Society, which advocates for post-secondary education in Nunavut.
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