Because Nunavut does not have a heritage facility as a territory, the focus for us is how to get the 140,000 objects that are currently housed outside Nunavut—which the Government of Nunavut is currently paying to have housed outside of Nunavut—repatriated back into Nunavut.
I recognize that there's a discussion about how these artifacts are of interest to other Canadians, to the Canadian public, but I think the focus for me at this point is how to get them to Nunavut so that Nunavut Inuit can see the artifacts that belonged to our ancestors.
Inuit in Nunavut have gone through a very drastic change in a very short period of time, so it's in living history. My father's generation is a generation that was living on the land, not in communities. Any time artifacts are brought into our communities, it sparks a lot of discussion and there's a lot of knowledge transfer between young Inuit and older Inuit. It sparks the memories, and that is what is so crucially important for us right now.
We need to have a facility in our territory where we can house them, and then we can start looking at whether or not we can have rotating exhibits going into our communities as an educational tool for Inuit about Inuit.