Just Before Returning to Iqaluit, NU

This photo of Dennis Forcese and Patricia Reynolds [1] was taken in the hallway outside Centre for Initiatives in Education offices, Dunton Tower, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON was taken in April 1, 2002 just before I returned to Iqaluit, NU to complete the “winter term [2]” at Nunavut Arctic College.

Professor Forcese [3] was the key player in setting up Carleton’s Centre for Initiatives in Education and in nurturing the Nunavut BA Project, a joint project with Carleton’s Centre for Initiatives in Education and Nunavut Arctic College initiated in 2001 [4].

The first sessional contract for the Nunavut BA program ran from January to April 2002 when this picture was taken. The program started late. There were no students enrolled when I arrived in Iqaluit in January! Patricia was very concerned but I was incredibly optimistic. I really believed in this project. It made sense and it was worthwhile. So I worked full-time nurtured potential contacts at various institutions: Nunavut Research Institute, Inuksuk high school, the Justice department etc . . . I made guest appearances on CBC radio both National and local. (The former aired in Ottawa and a number of friends listened to it. Dennis was delighted.) I talked about it in taxis. I advertised and presented info sessions at Nunatta campus. I set up and paid for a phone line with an Internet connection in my own tiny room in the boarding house. I borrowed a small table and chair from Nunatta campus and added it to my tiny nun-like cell. to be continued . . .

Throughout that term I took dozens of digital photos and shared them as much as I could.

Those months from October 2002 through spring-summer? 2003, where I was traveling back and forth between Iqaluit and Gatineau, staying three weeks at a time in an Iqaluit boarding house while teaching at two institutions - one in Iqaluit and one in Ottawa while working on my PhD proved to be too much for me.

I could have managed perhaps if I was not struggling with the worst youth suicide epidemic [5]. I could have managed if Jennifer had not been brutally murdered. I could have managed if I my primary support system, my husband had been with me on all the trips. I could have managed if the person running the boarding house was not also completely overwhelmed and driven by her own inability to absorb the youth suicides. (Her brother was a suicide victim). I could have managed if there had been some support from at least one of the institutions I worked with. I could have managed if my Ontario Graduate Student funding was not mysteriously cut off in April 2003. I could have managed if the university provided me with sessional teaching or research assistantships on a predictable, regular basis. I could have managed if the university had provided me with a web-savvy Teaching Assistant like AG (who let me down three weeks into the course when it was too late to find someone else) when I was teaching Power and Everyday Life (2003-4) as they had promised, I could have managed if our departmental administer (notorious for such tardiness) had signed contracts in a timely fashion so PhD student sessional lecturers (such as myself) received their first month check on time not four weeks later (September-October 2003 and again in January - February 2004).

I could never understand how Professor John Shepherd would take the time to personally help me refine my SSHRC application in January 2003, with the Awards department encouraging me so enthusiastically about the possibilities of receiving the scholarship that year, and then to not only not receive the SSHRC but to also lose the OGC so unexpectedly and with no explanation. Then to have the Graduate Student Adviser tell me that because I had not kept up with the “pace” [6] I was not good scholarship material. What happened between January when I was working so hard to make the Nunavut BA project work and April of 2003 when the entire campus administration seemed to forget I existed? What happened to all the encouragement and support that I received when they listened with excitement to the CBC radio interview describing the Carleton University-Nunavut Arctic College success story? How could they turn me so effectively into a ghost?

In December, 2001 Dennis Forcese (left) approached me with the opportunity to replace Jill Vickers, who had to undergo emergency eye surgery. Professor Vickers was to be the first of what was hoped to be a series of professors who would reside in Iqaluit, Nunavut for a sessional term while offering BA level courses on-site at Nunatta Campus, Iqaluit to Nunavummiut. Dennis Forcese, Patricia Reynolds and Beth Hughes made me aware of how much the future of the Nunavut BA Project, launched in 2001 by Carleton’s Centre for Initiatives in Education in partnership with Nunavut Arctic College, depended on the success of these first courses.

Dennis and Charlie Gordon were a great solace to each other from 2002 until Charlie’s death from cancer in September 2004. At the time of Charlie’s death I began to make inquiries about the cancer rate on the 7th floor of the LOEB building. I asked if there had ever been a Health and Safety Audit of the floor given the seemingly unusually high number of professors who worked there and had cancer. It was such an unhealthy environment that most professors worked from home offices. Walking through the unusual maze-like architecture of the floor one was struck by the number of closed doors and the profusion of faded art prints. I felt empathy for Emily Carr every time I walked by the sad mechanical representation of her vibrant energy-filled West Coast paintings.

But it was the anthropology lab that was the darkest space in the tower.

I have been grateful ever since to that small group of urban Inuit students in the fall of (2003?) whose extreme discomfort in the presence of skulls and bones in glass cases made it impossible to use that room which had been assigned to us as the last possible space available to our group. Even after Professor Blundell covered the glass with paper, we were all too aware of their presence.

and Patricia Reynolds
April 1, 2002.

The photo accompanying this article was one I took in April 2002 while teaching Human Rights and Sociology at Nunatta Campus, Nunavut Arctic College, Iqaluit, Nunavut (January 2002 - June 2003). I provided Beth Hughes and Thierry Rodon with a CD of some of the photos I took.

the Nunavut BA Project, Carleton’s Centre for Initiatives in Education in partnership with Nunavut Arctic College,

In December, 2001 Dennis Forcese approached me with the opportunity to replace Jill Vickers, who had to undergo emergency eye surgery. Professor Vickers was to be the first of what was hoped to be a series of professors who would reside in Iqaluit, Nunavut for a sessional term while offering BA level courses on-site at Nunatta Campus, Iqaluit to Nunavummiut. Dennis Forcese, Patricia Reynolds and Beth Hughes made me aware of how much the future of the Nunavut BA Project, launched in 2001 by Carleton’s Centre for Initiatives in Education in partnership with Nunavut Arctic College, depended on the success of these first courses.

Professor Forcese was the Supervisor of Graduate Studies in the Sociology and Anthropology department when I first entered their PhD program as part-time student taking one course at a time. He was aware that I had been sessional lecturer in 1997 teaching Inuit art history and sessional lecturer as a fly-in professor since January 2000 with Carleton University’s Social Work Off-Campus Aboriginal Program offering BA level courses to First Nations social work students in Akwasasne, Fort Francis and Moose Factory. My Canadian Studies MA (1995) was linked to Inuit culture and I worked from the beginning in both a teaching and advisory capacity with the Inuit Art Foundations CITProgram which offered courses to urban Inuit.

Notes

[1] I knew Patricia Reynolds through my involvement with the Nunavut BA Project, a joint project with Carleton’s Centre for Initiatives in Education and Nunavut Arctic College. According to a recent Google search Patricia Reynolds was still working in 2006 with the Centre for Initiatives in Education’s branch project offering BA courses in Nunavut.

[2] The official university term runs for 13 weeks from January through April. Sinc

[3] Dennis is now enjoying his retirement and continues to participate in at least one of his many projects, providing courses for lifelong learning to retirees. He now gives lectures on wines. His abrupt departure sometime in the fall of 2002? for urgent health reasons from the University and from the BA project unexpectedly and negatively transformed my relationship with the BA project. Until that time I could depend on Dennis as the bridge between my PhD project and my Nunavut experience. When he left there was no institutional memory. I think I full shock began to unsettle my everyday life when I learned that I had lost the Ontario Graduate Scholarship upon returning from Nunavut. I had not managed to keep up with the anticipated pace for my cohort. Dennis, maverick that he was would have seen the unfairness of this and found some creative solution. There was an aura of unreality in those months now. I remember something about an urgent need to return the Project’s laptop. I remember standing in line at the Registrar’s Office trying to get a transcript of marks for an Inuit student who thanks to the successful completion of one of the BA Project courses I taught in 2002-3, was applying for entrance to Harvard [4]. Without Dennis I just could not seem to break through the labyrinth of departmental and divisional bureaucracies. After I returned from Iqaluit for the last time (spring 2003) I no longer officially worked for the BA Project. I no longer had access to offices or materials. I was simply a grad student who’d fallen behind in terms of anticipated outcomes. But at the time I was advised to not bother Dennis with my concerns because of his ill health. The message that I heard over and over was simply to forget it all, move on and complete my PhD. One Sociology Professor advised me to work in an ice-cream store to pay for my studies. As the full extent of my own loss became apparent, I was then advised that I should contact Dennis but by then my own health was jeopardized. Strange. He is such a good man and his work for at-risk groups is what attracted me to working with him. I remember a conversation in which he tried to encourage me to not place all my confidence in him. I think he was trying to tell me that he had many roles to play. One was as my adviser for my PhD studies, the man who helped me to get into the PhD program, who encouraged me in my studies; but the other, and inevitably more important, was his role as the catalyst and maverick behind this exciting, pioneering project in Nunavut. And of course, the role he finally played in 2003 until my final role exit as PhD student, sessional lecturer and contract cultural worker, Carleton University and Ottawa in 2005, was that of a man struggling with cancer. How do you weigh and measure these things?

[4]. Susan Burhoe and Patricia Reynolds made an initial visit to Iqaluit in the fall of 2001 to investigate potential needs and resources. Nunavut Arctic College English Professor, , began offering first year BA level English courses to interested BA level courses on-site at Nunatta Campus, Iqaluit to Nunavummiut. (I believe his first student(s) were students already registered in the Dalhousie Nursing Program or perhaps already registered in the McGill Law Program. Both these programs operated separately from Nunavut Arctic College Nunatta Campus administration although they occupied offices and classrooms?)

[5] In Iqaluit and other hamlets in the eastern portion of Nunavut, Nunavummiut struggled with the youth suicide epidemic. I was the wrong person to be at the epicentre in both time and space. In the 18 month period in which I was connected to the BA project in Nunavut, the youth suicide was the highest on the planet, this small physical area was the epicentre of youth suicide worldwide!

[6] My PhD graduating class should have completed our PhDs c. 2005-6. How many actually did? Anne Galloway who began a year after I did, received a generous SSHRC grant, is still working as sessional lecturer in 2008 and probably will be after her graduation. I didn’t know when I entered the program, but Carleton University’s Sociology and Anthropology Department is notorious for misuse and abuse of sessional lecturers, for PhD attrition and/or for PhD students taking up to ten years to complete their dissertation. Compare that the a Canadian student who took three years to complete a PhD in Sociology at the University of Essex! One student sacrificed everything to complete her PhD and began working as a sessional lecturer c. 2002-2003. It took her a few years to realize that they had no intention of ever hiring her on as professor or even as instructor. Sessional lecturers earned the same as or less than their own teaching assistants. They were often assigned courses three weeks before the class began when all the professors or sessionals with more sway had declined. They were not informed of a special fund (I believe is was c. $50,000 university wide) set aside for sessional lecturers so they could purchase books, etc for their courses. I was told that this information was kept secret because there would not be enough money to go around if all sessional lecturers knew about it.)

[6] He was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and did successfully complete an MA from Harvard, the first Inuk to do so.