Tuktoyaktuk heritage centre expected to open next year

Work to provide Canada’s Western Arctic with its first visual and performing arts facility is inching closer to completion.

Annie Steen, who helped initiate a plan for Tuktoyaktuk to build a culture centre in 2017, said work to push it forward had to be paused during the pandemic.

Nonetheless, she said, Saliqmiut: Tuktuuyaqtuuq Centre for Arts is likely to be built next year.

“It’s a 23,000 sq ft facility that we’re going to bring to Tuk,” Steen told Cabin Radio during a 40th-anniversary event for the Inuvialuit Final Agreement staged in Yellowknife last week.

“There’s a group of us, we call ourselves Saliqmiut, or people from the coast – that’s the meaning in our language, and it’s a facility that celebrates the art and our heritage and our culture,” she said.

The museum space will allow locals to collect and bring in artifacts, Steen said, while the facility has three training rooms where people can sing, dance and perform by “merging traditional art with new technologies.”

The building will also have what Steen called a “great hall” in the shape of a sod house unique to the Inuvialuit, which can hold up to 150 people.

While Tuktoyaktuk already has Kitti Hall, which can accommodate more than 200 people, Steen said it’s “hard to keep the doors open.”

To address that, the Saliqmiut project includes a “self-sustaining” 10-year business plan through which a hotel and office space would be built near the centre. The idea is to generate revenue to support the centre’s programming and staff.

“The pandemic stopped us. Once the government freed up travel in the North again, we could meet again and I could jump back on to this,” said Steen.

“Right now, I am working with architects and engineers. We plan to have the facility built in 2025, with the doors open.”

Other board members include Darrel Nasogaluak, Maureen Gruben, Ikalualuq and former NWT premier Nellie Cournoyea. The group formally announced the project two years ago.

The project was able to raise $23 million over three years, Steen said, adding that finding funding was “not at all” difficult thanks to the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, which provided “more than 50-percent sponsorship.”

“Once you have that kind of input, it was easy to convince federal funders to give us the rest of the money,” she said. “We’re finishing up the actual design, the blueprint of it. Now we’re going to go into the cultural programming.”

Steen said the team will soon start looking for an executive director to run the facility. A staff of seven full-time employees will work at the centre year-round. The team is working in partnership with the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre to seek advice and input.

“Probably the only thing that can stop us is another pandemic but right now. Everything is on track,” she said.

Mayor Erwin Elias said the facility will offer exposure to local talent through sewing, carving, drum dancing, storytelling and preserving historical data. When construction starts, it’ll create small job opportunities that could turn into long-term positions once the facility is complete.

“The anticipation is there and the community will be even more excited once the construction starts,” said the mayor.

“This idea started a while back with a small group of community members, which I was part of as well, and we all knew that this was a huge need for the community.”

Elias said Cournoyea was the lead in getting the project off the ground. He credits Cournoyea and Steen as “the people that have stepped up to advocate and pressure this project to the end.”

“The heritage centre will signify the Inuvialuit culture and proudly showcase our way of life, with class,” he said, adding it will also provide accommodation and promote the growing tourism economy in the community.

“It’ll really touch on the tourism,” Steen agreed.

“There’s not infrastructure to keep people in Tuk, as well as no activities for them to do. [The facility] will have a coffee shop so people can come and have lunch, and a catering kitchen where we can keep our local harvesters.

“For the men and women that want to learn our traditional foods, there’ll be workshops to help people learn how to cut up fish, cut up muktuk or even prepare caribou and geese.

“There’s nowhere else in the Western Arctic where we would have a centre for the arts and culture. We have the Prince of Wales in Yellowknife, but nothing quite to the extent of what we’re doing in Tuk.”