Yesterday’s News: Lawsuit over residential schools, and a European vacation

The Canada Day national holiday was just one day away but there was no mention of it on the front page of Nunatsiaq News back on June 30, 2006.

Instead, the lead item concerned a lawsuit stemming from the abuse many Inuit suffered at residential schools. To Canada’s everlasting shame, people continue to deal with the terrible legacy of those schools today even though the last one closed 27 years ago.

In 2023, Nunatsiaq News is celebrating its 50^th anniversary of serving Nunavut and Canada’s Arctic by revisiting some of our front pages from the past five decades.

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.

The top story from June 30, 2006, headlined “Res-school deal set to close this fall,” notes Inuit survivors face “one last hurdle.” In a narrow sense that was true concerning the lawsuit, but the issue remains active.

Seventeen years later, in January 2023, the federal government and 325 First Nations announced a $2.8-billion agreement to settle a class-action lawsuit related to residential schools.

And closer to home, when Pope Francis visited Iqaluit last July he met privately with about 100 Inuit survivors of residential schools and listened as they recounted the ways they were hurt by their time spent in those schools.

The Pope apologized to them for what they were put through, but Nunatsiaq News reported at the time there were mixed emotions in the crowd that greeted the Pope outside Nakasuk Elementary School.

One person held a sign that read: “This is not historic. This was in our lifetime.”

Also on the front page from that day in June 2006, we reported on a trip to southern Europe by a handful of Nunavik high school grads and school teacher Dave McMullen.

One of the grads, Mark Ruston, said the trip included stops at the Coliseum in Rome, Pompeii and bungee jumping into the Corinth canal in Greece.

“We just jumped in. The jump took about five seconds. It was very scary, but it was fun,” he said.

Meanwhile, the crew from the film Staking the Claim, a documentary on the history of land claim agreements, were on a tour of the North. Their guides were Stacey Aglok MacDonald and P.J. Akeeagok.