Northern elders view artifacts at British Museum

A group of people from Ulukhaktok, N.W.T., and Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, were at the British Museum in London this weekto seeartifacts that belonged to their Copper Inuit ancestors.

The museum has a collection ofobjects dating from the 1800s, around the time of the first encounters between Europeans and ancestors of the Inuinnait, which the group is working to visually repatriate back to the region.

"A lot of the museums still don't send objects from a particular area back to that area, so you can't actually repatriate or send back the objects," said Helen Balanoff with the NWT Literacy Council.

Instead, Balanoff said the group has a videographer and a photographer travelling with them. The photos and videos collected will be usedin aninteractive website about the area.

British Museum holds more than 200 Inuinnait artifacts

The project is the second phase of the Ulukhaktok Literacies Research Project, a collaboration between the community of Ulukhaktok, the NWT Literacy Council and the University of Lethbridge.

"We tend to think of literacy as only reading and writing, but this is an oral tradition, so it's much broader than that," Balanoff said.

The British Museum has more than 200 Inuinnait artifacts that include clothing, tools, hunting equipment and household items.

Adam Kudlak, Emily Kudlak and Helen Kitekudlak of Ulukhaktok, as well as Emily Angulalik, a founder of the Kitikmeot Heritage Society, and elders Mary Avalak and Annie Atigihioyak, all of Cambridge Bay, were part of the group that travelled to London.

Visit brought on 'tears, happiness'

"We're hoping to bring video footage and still pictures back to the community and also to Cambridge Bay and go through them with community members and elders and label clothing and parts of clothing, types of material used, in the old Inuinnaqtun language,"said Emily Kudlak.

"To come and actually hold them in the museum, there was a lot of tears and a lot of happiness."

Adam Kudlak, a tool maker, was particularly interested in the bows and arrows preserved at the museum.

"I haven't seen these bows in my life," he said. "I've seen pictures and heard stories about them and I've always wanted to make them but I've never had anyone to teach me."

Jack Davy of the British Museum said the learning goes both ways.

"We've learned an awful lot about the objects that we simply had no access to without their help," he said.

Theresults of the first phase of the projectwereincluded in a museum exhibit atYellowknife's Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in2009 and in thebook Pihuaqtiuyugut: We are the Long Distance Walkers.