Going behind the scenes of the Nunavut Quest
Stories we loved to tell: Partnership with Igloolik field course gave behind-the-scenes glimpse of annual dogsled race
Nanuraq Uttak, wearing number 9, leads his dog team on April 24, the sixth day of the Nunavut Quest race. Uttak was declared the winner of the Arctic Bay to Pond Inlet race, with the best overall time over six days of racing. (Photo by Leonard Siusangnark, special to Nunatsiaq News)
In April, a group of young people from Igloolik headed out to follow the Nunavut Quest, and they took Nunatsiaq News readers with them.
It started with an out-of-the-blue, off-the-wall email in March from Shanshan Tian, an educational consultant working in Igloolik.
She was putting together a field course to have young Inuit document the Nunavut Quest race, which this year was a 370-kilometre route from Arctic Bay to Pond Inlet that took 10 days to complete.
Along the way, they would write daily updates about each day’s progress and take pictures of the 10 mushers, the dogsleds, the teams that supported them, as well as the encampments they set up at the end of each day of racing.
Tian was looking for a place to publish their work so that it wasn’t just an academic exercise, and thought of Nunatsiaq News.
Her plan sounded wildly ambitious, but it quickly became apparent she thinks big, is a bundle of energy and wills things that seem nearly impossible into existence. It came together with financial support from Qikiqtani Inuit Association and the Ilagiiktunut Fund.
For the newspaper, it was a golden opportunity to get coverage of the annual dogsled race and a behind-the-scenes look at what happens along the route.
Journalists are supposed to be surrogates for readers — to be the eyes and ears for people who can’t be there themselves.
Every morning, like clockwork, there would be an email in my inbox from Tian. It usually had a half-dozen pictures that her group of young correspondents had taken and an account they had written the night before or early that morning.
After a little bit of editing, we’d have an account of the previous day’s racing ready to publish online — usually by 8 a.m.
The young correspondents filed consistently and on time — an editor’s dream come true.

Nunatsiaq News published a special 20-page commemorative edition on the 2024 Nunavut Quest, featuring the work of high-school-aged participants in a field course who followed the mushers from Arctic Bay to Pond Inlet. (Nunatsiaq News file photo)
It’s worth repeating who the special correspondents were: Cadence Arnatsiaq, Dylan Kayotak, Kenneth-Owen Angilirq, Leonard Siusangnark, Riley Michael Qamukaq and Bernice Satuqsi.
A few weeks after the race, we packaged their work in a special 20-page commemorative edition — in English and Inuktitut.
That very attractive edition came together quickly under the direction of web editor Gord Howard, with the design work of Krista Klassen and Andrea Gray. They added the special edition to their regular workload without skipping a beat. They are some of the unsung heroes of our print edition.
Five years ago, if you told me I’d be editing the work of young Inuit who were filing stories and pictures about a dogsled race above the Arctic Circle, it would have been unimaginable.
What started as longshot email about an ambitious idea resulted in a rewarding, high-quality project that benefited Tian’s young correspondents, Nunatsiaq News staff and our readers.
It was a fun project to be involved in. At times it was a bit chaotic. It was hastily put together. And it worked out great. That’s one of the thrills of working in journalism — going from nothing to having an exciting story you’re proud to share with readers within just a few hours.
Hopefully, it was a learning experience for the correspondents themselves. There’s no doubt it was a learning experience for us at Nunatsiaq News. We’re looking forward to doing it all over again for the 2025 edition of Nunavut Quest when the mushers run their teams from Pond Inlet to Igloolik.
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