Yesterday’s News: Planning for a credit union, and time for fiddling

Back in 1996, leaders at Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. were ready to invest in a new credit union for the territory, as reported in our April 12 edition from that year.

But as the story shows, there were limits to how deeply they were prepared to dig into the NTI wallet. Despite a request for $4 million in grants and loans by Arctic Co-operatives Ltd. to start the project, the NTI executive was expected to commit only to $1 million in loans, spread over two years.

As a regular feature this year while Nunatsiaq News celebrates 50 years of providing news coverage to Nunavut and Nunavik, we are looking back at some of our front pages from the past half century.

The first edition of the paper rolled off the presses — actually, a Gestetner photocopier — in 1973 as Inukshuk, a community newsletter published in Frobisher Bay (prior to the city’s name being changed to Iqaluit).

Inukshuk was sold in 1976 and renamed Nunatsiaq News.

Even 27 years after the NTI story was published, the two men who headed the leadership group at the time — president Jose Kusugak and vice-president Raymond Ningeocheak — continue to hold honoured places in Nunavut’s history.

Last year, Canada Post unveiled a stamp honouring Kusugak, an Inuktitut and Inuit history teacher and CBC employee who played a role in Nunavut’s creation and oversaw land negotiations with the federal government and Northwest Territories. He died in 2011.

Ningeocheak was one of the signatories to the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement in 1993 as well as a longtime vice-president at NTI. He died in September 2022.

Meanwhile, the front-page photo from 27 years ago highlights players with the Iqaluit Children’s Fiddling Club. The Iqaluit Music Society still runs a fiddle club for kids age seven and older, according to its website.

And then there are what are called the teaser boxes, at the top of the page. Clearly, some of the headlines then could still be applied to issues today — the tragically high rate of suicide in the North, assistance for northern businesses.

And what of the photo of the airplane engine with the headline “Inside Boeing’s big bird”? The front page offers no further clues.

We do know that according to Statistics Canada, last year there were 17,678 “itinerant and local movements” in and out of the Iqaluit airport, up from 16,540 in 2021.