From a more isolated and remote community than any other in Canada, Emily Kakkee, 15, travelled to Powell River. Her hometown of Grise Fiord, Nunavut, is the sixth most northernly town in the world and the largest on Ellesmere Island.
Its Inuktitut name, Aujuittuq, translates to “place that never thaws.”
“There are no trees and nothing much to do,” said Kakkee, who had never left the north prior to the trip. “There are only 127 people. I think there’s more dogs than people.”
Kakkee is in Powell River with three other teenagers from Nunavut as part of a five-week Northern Youth Abroad (NYA) education program, run by a non-profit charity that works with youth from Canada’s north.
“Youth from across Nunavut and the Northwest Territories come down to any one of the 10 southern provinces during the summer and stay with a host family,” said Nicholas Pelletier, NYA program officer.
According to Pelletier, the program was started by a group of educators in Nunavut after they noticed students with common experiences of travelling outside of their communities doing well in school, “then coming back to school, excited, energized and really motivated to finish school and pursue new options.”
Kakkee was paired with Julianne Angulalik, 15, from Kugluktuk, or Qurluktuk in Inuktituk, which means “the place of moving water.”
Mahasi Nateela, 16, from Arviat and Annie Nookiguak, 16, from Qikiqtarjuaq round out the group of young travellers.
While in Powell River, each of the foursome are required to participate in volunteer work.
“I’m doing my volunteer work with people with disabilities,” said Angulalik.
Kakkee was placed at BC SPCA, Nateela at Tla’amin Nations’ Child Development Resource Centre and Nookiguak at Cottage Creek Bakery.
“Powell River has been good to us over the years; we’ve had a number of placements there,” said Pelletier. “Both host families, Courtney Harrop and Bob and Cathy McLean, hosted with us previously, so we got in touch to see if they were interested in hosting again and both were.”
“I wish we had started much earlier,” said Cathy, who is hosting Angulalik and Kakkee with Bob. For different youth programs over the years, the McLeans have opened their home to 60 young people from Vietnam, Japan, Korea and Brazil. This is their third time hosting for NYA.
“You get to meet so many people and we learn as much from them as they learn from us,” said Bob. “We find out a lot about their culture we didn’t know.”
According to Pelletier, spending time away from home can be quite a culture shock for students.
“Imagine being from a community with maybe 200 or 300 people that’s a fly-in only community,” he said. “You finish school and want to go to college, university or some kind of training that’s in the south and everything from navigating a bus to being on a campus of 20,000 people, it’s pretty overwhelming.”
One goal of the program is to help with transitions to bigger centres in southern Canada and instil confidence in the youth on how to navigate that, said Pelletier.
“I applied because I wanted new opportunities and to get out of my community for a couple of weeks,” said Angulalik. “I don’t know right now, but I want to go to post-secondary school and maybe study to be a flight attendant or something like that.”
Angulalik joked that she wants to eventually move out of the north because “there are too many bugs and mosquitoes.”
