Yesterday’s News: A Nunavut-Nunavik tour by dog team, and a controversial lease deal

Ninety years after his death from pneumonia apparently brought on by food poisoning, the Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen can still make news.

The history of his incredible Arctic exploits, including being the first European to cross the Northwest Passage via dogsled, are recounted in historian Kenn Harper’s Taissumani column that appears regularly in Nunatsiaq News.

And, as this Feb. 13, 1998, front page from Nunatsiaq News shows, people have been trying to match his feats of exploration for years.

Back then, Greenlanders Ono Fleischer and Mathias Ingemann captured the spirit of Rasmussen by touring through Nunavut and Nunavik by dog team in what reporter Jane George called a “gesture of Inuit solidarity.”

As Nunatsiaq News celebrates its 50^th anniversary, each week we are taking readers on a tour through the past half century by showcasing some of our front pages from years gone by.

The paper started out in 1973 as Inukshuk, a community newsletter published in Frobisher Bay (before it became known as Iqaluit). Inukshuk was sold in 1976 and renamed Nunatsiaq News.

Jane George and the stories she wrote will be familiar to a lot of Nunatsiaq News readers. She covered the Arctic as a reporter for 30 years, including nearly 24 years at Nunatsiaq News before leaving in June 2021.

In her front-page story here, she notes Fleischer and Ingemann had set out the month before from Kuujjuaq accompanied by 38 Greenlandic dogs pulling two sleds.

Meanwhile, who would guess that a story about an office lease would make the front page?

It happened 25 years ago, as the headline “Lahm Ridge lease consistent with new policy for free space, GNWT suggests” proves.

For all of you who are just dying to learn more about a lease agreement from back then, here it is in a nutshell: Bureaucrats in the Northwest Territories government’s Department of Public Works and Services said they expected to negotiate a long-term lease for the Lahm Ridge Tower in Yellowknife before its ownership changed hands.

The catch — the new owners were two businessmen with close ties to then-premier Don Morin. Many feathers were ruffled in the controversy.

Cab drivers made news in Iqaluit that week when they protested a local bylaw. And in what can only be written off as proof that some news stories age better than others, the front page noted that a Manitoba trade delegation was visiting Nunavut.