One week on the Arctic Circle
Our trip to Naujaat, Nunnavut
By Zahra Duxbury
There were eighteen of us: 16 Glebe Collegiate students and two teachers. We flew from Ottawa to Winnipeg, then Rankin onto Naujaat. And for seven days exactly, we Glebites lived out our hyperborean fantasies (for the most part).
Our trip up north from April 8 to 15 was to facilitate a cultural exchange between our two communities. Mr. Yip and Ms. Jansen, teachers at Glebe, organized our end of it and came with us. It was funded by Experiences Canada, which sponsors exchanges to promote reconciliation and learning about Indigenous peoples.
The locals greeted us warmly; indeed, their good-naturedness would set the tone of the whole trip. There was no shortage of cheerful kids with toothy smiles who followed us around, asking our names and calling us “best friend.”
It’s best to get the worst out of the way first. We were hit by a horrible form of norovirus that wrecked our stomachs during the early days of the trip. On the worst night, a line of us crouched before the row of baby toilets – we were sleeping in the high school’s nursery – vomiting our guts out, repeatedly. At some point, one of the toilets clogged and began to overflow, eventually draining the school’s water supply and suspending school for a day. Not the highlight of our trip, to say the least, but after copious Gatorades and a day of rest, we were on our feet again. At least it helped us bond!
Throughout the week, we were lucky to visit many of Naujaat’s local sites. At the town hall, we met Richard, who graciously told us about his work as an administrative officer and the ins and outs of managing a northern community. Our Lady of the Snows, Naujaat’s Roman Catholic Mission, was certainly one of the most interesting churches we’d seen, with its qamutik-shaped altar and the polar bear skin and baleen that decorated its walls. At the Co-Op and Northern, we bought gifts for our families and bonded over our mutual shock at certain price tags: “Sixty-five dollars for a pack of soda?!”
Although we may have been thousands of kilometres from G.C.I., we still ended up spending a lot of time at school. Tuugaalik High School was where we were put up, and we spent many boisterous hours sprinting recklessly down hallways in games of tag or in elaborate rolling-chair relay races. We also visited Tusarvik, Naujaat’s elementary school, where we were greeted like bona fide celebrities by the schoolchildren.
As for setting in the Arctic, there are no words to describe the vastness of the land that surrounded us and the sheer awe it inspired. A land of endless rolling white, nearly unchanging but for the hints of mossy rock that nodded to its summer form. A land beautiful, yet unforgiving. It’s not just the cold that could do you in, it might also be a slip on the ice or the claws of the creature we saw stretched out on railings as we walked around town.
It’s easy to define a place by its dangers, but our two trips onto the land were undisputed favourites. We were pulled out of town on sleds attached to ski-doos, which bumped ferociously – and that’s putting it lightly.
The first outing was to go ice fishing. When we weren’t passing the reel around in search of Arctic char or carp, we sheltered in an igloo or hiked the surrounding hills. On the second outing, we were pulled across the bay towards Harbour Island, where in the old days, bowhead whalers docked their ships. In fact, there are still carvings left behind by these men: “Perseverance, 1885” was one and below that was an etching of a whale. We found this fascinating, for in a world where history usually marks places that change and grow, our Harbour Island was identical to theirs, despite the gap of time.
We saw no whales, but we visited a formidable set of Bowhead bones. In truth, our sightings of arctic wildlife were mostly limited to their skins, except for one of us lucky enough to go Caribou hunting with her exchange partner. There were also chance glimpses of seals from the back of our sled as we returned to Naujaat across the bay. We ran out each time, but they had already disappeared beneath the ice.
Before long, we disappeared, too, not beneath the ice, but into the sky heading home.
“So long, Naujaat, you were unforgettable.” But our trip is not yet over. At the end of May, students from Naujaat will come and visit us. Our home may not boast tundras or northern lights (oh yes, we saw those too!), but perhaps to them, it’ll be just as wondrous. We shall see.
Zahra Duxbury is a Grade 11 student at Glebe Collegiate Institute.
