Nunavik book launches Arctic series

ODILE NELSON

The Arctic Institute of North America and the University of Calgary Press is launching a circumpolar book series with a text on Northern Quebec’s education system.

Nunavik: Inuit Controlled Education in Arctic Quebec and the Northern Lights series will be officially launched today in Calgary.

The book is a historical look at the development of self-government in education in the region.

It was originally co-published by the Arctic Institute and the University of Calgary Press in May but its official launch takes place today to coincide with the Arctic Institute’s annual directors’ meeting.

It covers education in Northern Quebec from the 1800s, when missionaries first arrived in the area, to the development of the Kativik School Board, Canada’s first Inuit-controlled school district.

Ann Vick-Westgate, the book’s author, is a Boston teacher who helps indigenous communities develop educational curriculums that reflect their culture and history.

She said she felt the need to write the text after her involvement with the Nunavik Education Task Force in the early 1990s.

“There needed to be a book to capture what had been learned through the whole process — particularly for those who were going to continue the process of education in the region,” Vick-Westgate said.

Before the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement of 1975, education in Northern Quebec fell under the jurisdiction of the federal and provincial governments.

Most communities contained both a federal and provincial school system but a southern Canadian curriculum dominated both systems.

After 1975, the KSB began to develop an education curriculum based on the culture and history of Nunavik’s aboriginal population.

The book chronicles the history of education in Nunavik through interviews with traditionally educated elders, missionary-taught aboriginals, residential school taught Inuit, current and recent KSB students and southern educators and policy makers.

Walter Hildebrandt, director of the University of Calgary Press, said Nunavik’s uniquely aboriginal perspective was what initially attracted him to publishing the book.

“It’s a book that genuinely provides the perspective of the community and it also provides the story of a community working with government officials and its own community members — how it mobilized to affect and change its education system,” he said.

Debbie Astroff, a spokesperson for the KSB, said though some at the school district had begun to read the book none had yet completed it.

“All we can really say is it’s well presented and it’s important for any school board to read — to learn from our experience, to learn that education in Nunavik is working,” she said.