Nunavut board will forge ahead with Kiggavik review

The Nunavut Impact Review Board won’t slow the environmental review process for a proposed uranium mine near Baker Lake to translate a mountain of technical documents into Inuktitut.

Baker Lake’s Hunters and Trappers Organization had asked NIRB to “pause the review” so draft guidelines for an environmental impact statement on Areva Resources’ proposed Kiggavik mine could be translated from English into Inuktitut.

“We feel that the issues that the community of Baker Lake [are] faced with are too important to neglect due process and the full involvement of Elders and other unilingual Inuit during this review,” wrote Richard Aksawnee, president of Baker Lake’s HTO, in a Feb. 27 submission to NIRB.

The HTO’s submission says Baker Lake residents are frustrated with the NIRB process because they feel the failure to translate all documents into Inuktitut effectively shuts elders out of the review process.

But Ryan Barry, NIRB’s director of technical services, shot down the request, saying “such a delay could prove to be indefinite.”

“The board is not equipped to develop new Inuktitut terminology and in unsure whether meaningful translations of these technical aspects… can be completed at present,” Barry wrote March 2.

NIRB does have a list of Inuktitut terms describing environmental contaminants that’s published by the Nunavut Research Institute, but Barry said it’s of limited use for describing issues related to uranium.

Barry said NIRB provides interpreters for public meetings with briefing materials ahead of time so they can translate technical jargon into Inuktitut as accurately as possible.

“NIRB is endeavouring… to make technical concepts as accessible as possible,” Barry wrote.

In a written response, anti-uranium group Nunavummiut Makitagunarningit said public consultation on the Kiggavik uranium site has been a long time coming.

The group said NIRB, Areva and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission should all have worked on the development of an Inuktitut glossary of uranium-related terms.

NIRB is hosting a public meeting on the Kiggavik project in Baker Lake March 21.