October 5/98

The students were all middle-
aged. Most had some sort of
broadcast experience. One, Roy
Goose, is the full-time Inuinactun
reporter in the Cambridge Bay
bureau. Most had active careers.
Some had done spoken and written
translating for years. One had run
restaurants and mining camp
kitchens, and others raised children
and grandchildren and now cared for
their parents. One was a veteran of
Nunavut Tunngavik, the huge group
that hands out the profits of the
massive Inuit land claim portfolio to
Inuit business and community
groups. Housed at hotels, college
residences and at relatives’ homes all
across town, we gathered each day
at 9 a.m.

It all started quite predictably.
Catherine Pigott, CBC’s new
production trainer in the north, and I
introduced the basics, such as,
what’s a news story and writing for
the ear, as well as using recording
equipment and the telephone system
for feeding material, an essential
part of northern broadcasting. They
got over hearing themselves
recorded, and started doing brief
interviews with one another.

We began each day with a story
meeting. Each participant was to
bring at least one story idea they
heard or read overnight. Some were
obvious, like why is that huge
windmill twirling on the hill at the
end of town? Or I'd like to do a tour
of the DEW-line site. But some
looked bravely at social issues such
as teen pregnancy or police
community relations. The meeting
soon became the crucible of all sorts
of issues, from storycraft to media
responsibility. They were all too
willing to talk.

But by Friday they were itching to
get out the door. We let them loose
in the community and they set on
potential interview subjects “like
flies on dead meat,” as Roy Goose
put it. Saturday evening we basked
in late Arctic afternoon sun with a
potluck feast of char, trout, caribou
ribs, musk-ox burgers and a caribou
roast that was so tender you could

cut it with a fork.

Monday dawned gray and cool and
it matched the attitude of the course
participants as they set out to do “real”
stories (a bit of a problem as the town
was empty on the long weekend). By
Monday’s end they all had a bit of tape
and some ideas about what to do the
next day.

Then, at 8:25 Monday evening, the
fire alarm sounded over town. We
scrambled out of the hotel restaurant
and arrived at the high school, the
biggest, most important building in
Cambridge Bay. Flames licked up
under the big front porch of the school.
The town water-delivery trucks
pumped spouts of water into the
smoke, and soon the fire department
and DEW-line fire trucks joined the
spray. But black, acrid clouds of smoke
plumped out the top of the first-floor
walls. The fire seemed trapped inside
the modular building walls packed
with smoldering blue Styrofoam. Then
at about 9 p.m., a big explosion blew
out one of the windows, sending glass
fragments flying and the gathered town
scurrying. It was going to be a long
night.

When I got there, one participant,
Mary Thompson, the veteran
community reporter from the Hudson’s
Bay community of Arviat, was already
gathering crowd reaction, but the rest
of them showed up without their tape
recorders. We all became spectators as
the firefighters battled in vain to
control the blaze.

I was in despair. We’d just spent a
week and a half talking about news,
and here they were seeing some and
they couldn’t stir themselves to cover
it??? I ran around encouraging them to
get their tape recorders, at one point
actually running back to the station to
get one. Then slowly, some an hour
after the fire began, some three hours,
one by one they slipped back home and
returned to record their neighbours
feelings as they watched the burning of
the heart of the town.

The building wasn’t just the high
school. The biggest gym in town was
there. The community library was
there. Arts and crafts workshops
housed years of student and teacher

work. And the archives — birth and
wedding records, old photographs and
possessions of the elders — were all
housed in the school. Our reporters
heard stories of sports tournaments, high
school dances, wedding photographs and
other memories destroyed in the blaze.
They collected the stories as their
neighbors laughed and cried over the
loss. By 3 a.m. the high school was a
twisted black hulk against the cold gray
line of an Arctic horizon.

The next day I asked why it had taken
them so long to react. They told me
what it was like to watch their memories
burn. They told me of their own shyness
to start that intrusive process of asking
questions, especially in the midst of
tragedy. But then they realized that the
fire was the story of this time, and
recording it does honour to the event
befitting the treasures that were lost that
night. They talked of the pride of
reporting, and how they realized many
friends and relatives who weren’t in
Cambridge Bay that night would want to
know the story. That night, hearing those
stories and voicing their eyewitness
reports, they learned the honour of being
a reporter in their own community.

Then they got on the phones, and by
11 a.m. they had hit first deadline with
the noon show in Iqaluit. After that,
Rankin Inlet, then Yellowknife and
Inuvik. One after one, the reports went
out to English and Inuktitut CBC
programs all over the north, finishing
with a final interview for the national
radio program, This Morning. By the
end of the day, all eight fledgling
broadcasters had been on the radio. They
had filed two dozen items, about 100
minutes of coverage to every English
and Inuktitut radio and TV station
between Alaska and Greenland. They
had become reporters.

As we gathered at the station for our
final banquet Thursday, the final story
was being told on the radio. Two 10-
year-old boys playing with camp stoves
stored under the school. No charges laid.

This article also appeared in
The Globe and Mail