By Sara Minogue Once a frontier outpost, dynamic Iqaluit is maturing fast. But some are wondering if the growing pains are worth it.
At a grocery store in downtown Iqaluit, there’s starfruit in the produce aisle, Thai and Indian spices by the potted plants, and Iguana food in the pet section. National newspapers arrive daily, and you can grind your own coffee beans. On the bulletin board is a notice about the latest movies at the Astro Theatre, which debut the same day they’re released in Hollywood. Pinned beside it is a flyer about upcoming yoga and pilates classes offered at the community gym.
Fresh-cut flowers, take-out espressos, skateboards, cell phones — in Iqaluit, urban luxury is already here. There’s aquasize at the swimming pool, line-ups at the bar, and a veterinarian who makes housecalls. At the margins of town, where the wilderness begins, there’s the usual hunting and boating and snowmobiling, but also new sports crazes: A growing number of locals have taken to rock-climbing on the cliffs of Sylvia Grinnell Territorial Park, while, in the river below, their friends practice “playboating” in multi-coloured kayaks. And lately, the ultimate in gentrification: Moms pushing babies in those three-wheeled, sport-utility prams so ubiquitous in Toronto’s suburbs.
No doubt about it: In Iqaluit, the signs of refined urbanity are, suddenly, everywhere. No longer is the community a backwater of wilted produce and dark, dull nights. For the first time ever, the city is being tamed and smoothed into a livable, workable place, designed for a long lifespan. And for many residents, that’s a blessing. But to others, cosmopolitan gains are tainted by losses, as the capital of Nunavut – “our land” in Inuktitut – begins to look more and more like everybody else’s land.
And so, as newcomers pour into the town – from St. John’s and Arviat and Ottawa and Clyde River and everywhere else – the city is at a crossroads, asking what few communities in Canada have had to: Can cosmopolitan growth be nurtured without losing what’s uniquely Northern?
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You can tell from the throng in Northmart, or the tight-packed condos of Legoland, or the gridlock at the Four Corners intersection: Iqaluit is a boomtown. In the past 10 years, the community’s population has roughly doubled in size, reaching 6,184 in the 2006 census. It’s the fastest growing capital in the country, and the government of Nunavut expects several thousand more people in the next decade. With such a large influx of residents, the trappings of a foreign culture perhaps inevitably follow.
In a sense, that’s nothing new. “Iqaluit was never small, and it’s still not small,” says Jonah Kelly, a well-known local who, at 61, is older than almost any building in his hometown. From the very start, he notes, Iqaluit was out of place on Baffin Island, an oasis of southern lifestyles set down wholesale on the tundra. Though Inuit had camped and fished in this part of Frobisher Bay, the first semi-permanent settlement here arrived in a box, some assembly required, in 1942, when the American military appeared one day to build an airstrip as a staging base for Europe-bound planes fighting in World War II. With a construction crew of 200, the GIs immediately dwarfed the Inuit population nearby.
From the beginning, Iqaluit was viewed as extravagant. In 1944, a visitor marvelled that the base had a “coffee-house; a theatre ... a laundry; a barber's shop and Turkish bath-house ... [and] every item of food or drink that a ‘super’ ice-cream machine and soda-fountain respectively can concoct.” The rest of the city grew up haphazardly around the base, until the 1960s when the federal government installed a townsite for civilians in the satellite community now known as Apex. Kelly remembers the Inuit living in makeshift shacks of leftover building materials, until Ottawa provided A-frame houses like the one his family huddled into.
Today, much of the town looks like it was dropped from the sky by a plane in a hurry. You can still find the odd old A-frame -- mostly used now as storage shacks -- but these days they’re surrounded by duplexes, apartment buildings and single-family homes. The latest construction boom began on or around December 1995, when Iqaluit was picked as capital of the soon-to-be territory of Nunavut. Multi-story office buildings, prefabricated in the south and shipped up on the summertime “sealift,” sprang section-by-section from the sandy soil downtown. New subdivisions were cut into the tundra, sprawling and intertwining like the ground-hugging limbs of dwarf willows.
Though new neighborhoods were planned, there was little thought given to the finer points of urban living. Sidewalks, for instance, are as rare in Iqaluit as the high-heeled pumps that might tread them. But slowly, the little extras are coming. The latest subdivisions will incorporate playgrounds and “green space.” This kind of forethought is also happening on a wider scale. The current city administration is in the middle of a massive project to string together the downtown core with walkways, rock gardens and a huge central square -- the first landscaping most Iqalummiut have ever seen. The goal is to create some order, in a distinctly northern fashion.
To keep this trend going, last summer the city welcomed a consultant from the International Centre for Sustainable Cities in Vancouver to organize long-term sustainable planning, looking 100 years down the road. Isabel Budke arrived to find many of the same problems that plague southern municipalities, like the overflowing garbage dump and too many cars. But she’s also discovered something less common: signs of culture clash, such as the constant complaint that there’s not enough “country food” available in the capital. There are other frustrations, too. The rush to make room for new residents has meant haphazard destruction of certain parts of town. Older women point to great berry-picking spots now buried under new neighborhoods. The brand-new justice centre looms over a small corner of land where, just two years ago, igloo-making contests were held. A three-story hotel recently paved over what was once a modest snowmobile repair shop.
Gord Rennie first came north with the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1947. He remembers his first day in Frobisher Bay, back when the RCMP owned the only non-military vehicle in town. Five decades later, Rennie is grateful when a meeting breaks before noon, so he can beat the lunchtime rush-hour. That traffic has sparked another debate that occasionally surfaces in city council meetings: whether snowmobiles should be allowed downtown. The growing number of people and cars make urban skidooing increasingly dangerous. But a ban, beyond likely being unenforceable, is widely viewed as an affront to the town’s fundamental Arcticness, and would be a genuine hardship to the people who still spend large swaths of winter on the land.
Other issues highlight this conflict even more dramatically. In 2004, an Iqaluit resident wrote to City Hall to complain about finding fox traps set in Apex Park. She tripped them, and was shocked when she later found them re-set. Council was not sympathetic. Under Nunavut’s land-claims agreement, Inuit are entitled to trap within city limits, subject only to the rules set by the Hunters and Trappers Association. “If this individual has taken the time to write to us on this issue, it’s time for this individual to be enlightened on the land-claim agreement,” said councilor Glenn Williams at the time. Setting off the traps, he added, was an offense under the territory’s Wildlife Act.
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It’s easy for Iqaluit residents from the south to be surprised by an encounter with Inuit tradition or culture. The same thing happens to newcomers from around Nunavut, who are also adding to the growing population of the city. Compared to Nunavut’s smaller towns, where 80 percent of Nunavummiut still live, Iqaluit is virtually unrecognizable as an Inuit settlement.
Twenty-one-year-old Sherry Parks moved here from Pond Inlet three years ago to attend the nursing program at Nunavut Arctic College’s Iqaluit campus. She likes the city and the amenities it has to offer, but says her husband is having a harder time. When they first arrived, Parks encouraged him to buy a car, but he was accustomed to spending time on the land and bought a snowmobile instead. During their first winter, they used it about three times. His job at Northmart left him with little free time for traditional activities, and besides, they didn’t know the land here and hadn’t met many people their age who did.
Veronica Dewar sympathizes. She grew up in Coral Harbour, population 750, and now lives in Rankin Inlet, but she’s spent a lot of time in Iqaluit on business. On a recent trip, she had to ask around for a good place to have lunch – two new restaurants had opened since she was last year, and another had all new staff. When Dewar goes to buy a sandwich to take to her hotel room, she says, the staff in the café don’t look her in the eye – they’re looking at the next customer in line. She still bumps into people she knows, but they quickly say hello and move on. The pace is different here and, she says, something is missing. “In our small communities, people talk to you. That’s how I grew up and I miss that when I’m here. This is more like a city. It’s really shifted.”
Dewar has noticed something else, too. “Inuit are not visible here. You don’t see them on the street. That feels strange.” Others concur. When Jonah Kelly tells the history of Iqaluit, he’s careful to note what Inuit were and were not permitted to do. Inuit were not allowed at the military base, he says, nor at the military bar. Nor, for a long time, in the government housing provided to federal employees from the south.
The rules have changed dramatically since then, with Inuit taking greater control of many aspects of life, but Kelly is quick to point out that Iqaluit is still not integrated. “Come to bingo tonight, and you’ll see everyone has black hair,” he says. The problem persists even among Inuit, Kelly says, who are divided according to which region or even which community they come from.
Crammed into a new and growing city, however, these populations inevitably mix, and there are moments where it seems as though the future of this city is clear. On a crisp evening in September, about 150 Iqalummiut are gathered in the Parish Hall. As the lights dim the spotlight comes up, reflecting off a glittering trombone, a French horn, and a deep, dark bass violin built in the Czech Republic 150 years ago. The crowd hushes for a performance by the CBC Radio Orchestra -- its first ever visit to Iqaluit. But chiefly, the crowd is here for the debut of a new piece composed in collaboration with Nunavut’s accordionist extraordinaire, Simeonie Keenainak of Pangnirtung, who is also on stage.
Keenainak starts first, launching into a dance tune familiar to anyone who’s spent any time at all in the Baffin region. The accompanying orchestra is subtle, modern, largely following its own patterns until it builds into a flourish that stops suddenly, leaving just Keenainak’s accordion. It’s a unique and challenging and wonderful performance. It’s not the first collaboration of its kind, but it’s the first time such a piece has debuted in front of a Nunavut audience.
It could only happen in Iqaluit.
