It’s not often a magazine publisher comes to a writer to request a piece, but in this case that’s exactly what happened. I received an email from Bert Pomeroy, publisher of Labrador Life, wondering if I would write a piece on Illusuak.

Apparently Dave Lough, Deputy Minister Culture, Recreation and Tourism for the Nunatsiavut Government had sent Bert a copy of my blog post on Illusuak and suggested he contact me to write an article.

Labrador Life is a human interest magazine for and about the people of Labrador. It is a quarterly print publication with no online presence, so I can’t provide a link to the story. However, here’s a little glimpse for you …

 

I thought it was supposed to be a week of meetings in stuffy board rooms, watching presentations, listening, asking questions, and taking copious notes.  Instead, I was standing on an iceberg.

Nunatsiavut, it seemed, was full of surprises.

 

 

The Inuit have a word for such abiding patience: quinuituq. The word doesn’t carry a straight English translation, but it has been described as a long wait in preparation for a sudden event.  It’s a deeply valued Inuit quality that many of the rest of us have somehow lost in the hustle of city life. It is the opposite of FedEx, fast food, and road rage.

Quinuituq will be part of the Inuit story we will tell.

 

 

All over Nunatsiavut, Inuit history is embedded in the stone, flowing through the waterways, woven into trails, shifting with snow and ice, and echoing in the mountains.

And we will tell those stories too.