Capilano College Media Program instructor, Keith Watt, teaches Inuit broadcasters in Cambridge Bay, NWT. (Photo by
Catherine Pigott.)

Summer Camp turns
into Towering Inferno

en we all gathered under sunny
Arctic skies at Cambridge Bay
for a simple summer camp for
prospective Inuit broadcasters, no one
realized they may end up covering the
story of their lives.

On April 1, the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation opened its
first new location in living memory
with the two-person Cambridge Bay
bureau. CBC was beginning its
countdown to the April 1, 1999 creation
of Nunavut, Canada’s newest political

by Keith Watt

entity. Cambridge Bay comprises
1,500 souls perched on the edge of the
Arctic Ocean on Victoria Island just
north of Bathurst Inlet, 2,000
kilometres north of Regina. The town’s
been waiting years for the station to
open, with many community leaders
petitioning various CBC management
to have a presence on the western
Arctic islands. Finally Marie Wilson,
CBC’s aggressive northern regional
director, was able to wrest the money
out of the system — quite magical in the

year of the disappearing $3 million.

The training project was step two in
the process, designed to scout for
potential community reporters and
future staff for the Cambridge Bay
bureau. This summer, six women and
two men from communities in the
Kitikmeot region of the western high
Arctic replied to job postings and
interviewed for this four-week training
project, two weeks in Cambridge and
two in their home communities, from
Yellowknife to Taloyoak.

@nformer