Laserfiche WebLink
<br />WILFRED R. WOODS <br /> <br />River, 900 miles to the Arctic Ocean from here. <br /> <br />Northern hospitality in Yellowknife made us welcome. We had the rare opportunity of seeing <br />a gold pour. Little 50-pound bars worth $20,000 are made here. The mine did us an unusual favor of <br />delaying their pour a full day for our arrival. The last time this happened was when the Duke of Edin- <br />burgh visited, we were told. <br /> <br />With a million and quarter square miles of land and only 30,000 inhabitants, it is obvious that <br />there is plenty of room up here. Stuart Hodgson, territorial commissioner, was our host at the banquet <br />given in our honor. <br /> <br />We were told that tourist trade totals only 6,000 people annually. We joked that our plane <br />load added about one per cent to the white population of the whole territory during our short stay! <br /> <br />It was never dark the night we stayed here, though the sun did go below the horizon briefly. <br /> <br />INUVIK, NORTHWEST TERRITORIES: From Yellowknife it's all downhill as far as water is <br />concerned to Inuvik and the Arctic Ocean. <br /> <br />The Mackenzie River, which we followed, is a vast stream. The Northwest Territories and Yu- <br />kon have a total water supply equal to two Fraser Rivers, the Columbia River and the St. Lawrence. <br /> <br />And as we flew over the miles intervening, we could see the lines that the oil prospectors had <br />laid out in their seismic work. <br /> <br />We found the northern shelf of Canada, as in Alaska, alive with exploration for underground <br />riches. The charter planes criss-cross the northernmost stretches of this hemisphere routinely, serving <br />radar bases and exploration points. <br /> <br />Inuvik, north of the Arctic Circle, is where they turn night into day in summer. The sun rises <br />in summer May 25, never to go below the horizon until July 18. Inuvik is a new town, built on the <br />Mackenzie River Delta, a vast network of low-lying islands and multiple outlets of that river. <br /> <br />It is the site of a noble Canadian experiment in trying to bring 5,000 natives into the 20th cen- <br />tury and a spark of civilization to the Canadian Arctic. <br /> <br />Its director, Dick Hill, termed it a "Peace Corps" in reverse. <br /> <br />The idea was to build a modern town in the Arctic that will serve as a base for development <br />and medical care, and new opportunity to the Indians and Eskimos living in it. <br /> <br />After an extensive sear,h for the perfect site, Inuvik was selected. Construction lasted from <br />1955 to 1961. Now it has a school for 1,000 students, dormitories to house them, a I ,OOO-bed fully mod- <br />ern hospital, hotel, government building, and housing for the 3,000 people who live here. <br /> <br />About 40 per cent of the residents are natives. The rest are whites who are here to teach the <br />schools, administer the project, and operate the private businesses necessary for a community this size. <br /> <br />Children from 6 to 20 are brought here from all over the territory to attend school. They live <br />in the dormitories, called hostels, during the school year, but return to their native villages and camps <br />in the winter. Government planes gather them up in the bush, fly them to central locations from <br />which larger planes bring them to Inuvik. The idea is that, educated, they will be able to make a new <br />place for themselves in the Arctic world. <br /> <br />"Instead of sending our teachers out to them, as your peace corps does, we're bringing them <br />in to us," Hill explained. "It is more expensive, but we hope it will do a better job." <br /> <br /> <br />Inuvik is not a typical Arctic town, although it is built on stilts as other Arctic towns are. This <br />is because of the ground frost here. If a building were built on the ground, the permafrost would melt <br /> <br />-17- <br />