Hall Beach, Nunavut
Many people here consider Nunavut a victory for the Inuit. We feel like this gives us a stronger voice as a minority group in Canada. We have a greater feeling of responsibility now to solve our own problems and pick our future path. We are more like leaders finally, rather than followers. We have more opportunities and options. We now have a reason to grow and participate with the outside world, and we see education as the key. It is an important key to filling all the new jobs Nunavut will create and which need to be filled. The future has never looked bright to some of us. Nunavut is the promise of a brighter future. Our attitudes and actions will control and guide this promise. Sometimes some of us wonder if we will know which is the right direction to take. We must rise to meet the challenge together if we are to succeed. Individuals alone are not strong enough. And we are growing.
Hall Beach is small, quiet and laid back. People know each other well. Our first language is Inuktitut; our second is English. We need both. Out of a population of 600 to 700 people, approximately 5% are non-Inuit. We are mountainless - completely flat. There are no trees, farm animals, cars, and the things that cities have. The climate is cold and can be unforgiving. It gets as cold as -45 degrees Celcius below. It is completely dark for two months of the year. But then there are three months of summer that the sun never goes down at all. Spring and summer are the best times of year. Our world, our air, is bright and clean. Outside of town there are caribou, arctic hares,polar bear, wolf, seal, fox, walrus geese, ptarmigan, and ravens. People go hunting all year around by skidoo and kamotik, by boat or 4-wheeler. The people of Hall Beach love igunaq - fermented walrus is considered a delicacy - and fresh caribou and seal. Some people still have dog teams and many remember and teach the old ways of doing things.
There are three different Thule ancestral sites near Hall Beach which are protected by our community. Stepping on Ugli Island is like stepping into echoes of the past. Now the community is growing quickly; many children are born every year. A lot of young and middle-aged people have babies. Hall Beach was originally created due to a Distant Early Warning system development and many Inuit moved to this area in the early 1950’s. In 1983 there was only one baby born that year in Hall Beach. Now there are 20 or thirty. We have an arena, a community hall for sports and games, a nursing station, a school, an RCMP detachment, and two stores. The Inuit name for Hall Beach is Sanirajak which means "the shoreline". Hall Beach is a very proud community. Hall Beach is special because we live here. It is our home. It is special because it is a small town and everybody knows everybody.
In ten years Hall Beach will probably double in size and the population will double too. Hopefully it will be more confident as a community as we do more things for ourselves. The Hamlet will be more supportive and create more community programs to meet our needs better. Maybe in the future suicide will not haunt the families living here and more pople will be educated and employed. We will have a stronger sense of purpose and identity if all goes well. As pre-school programs and help organizations will become more available to us we will see solutions to our community needs and problems. There will be less turnover of personnel in professional jobs as local people rise to fill them. Things will become more reliable and consistent. We will remember where we’ve come from and see where we are headed. We will combine the best of the old and the new. We will know where we fit in the bigger world.
The Nunavut of the future will become one of the safest places and most welcoming places to live in Canada if we achieve our dream.