Thank you very much, Chair.
I am from Cambridge Bay.
[English]
I am happy to be here. Thank you for the opportunity and for having us here. My name is Pamela Gross. Hakongak is my Inuinnaqtun name, given to me by my grandmother, and I'm named after one of her cousins.
I am representing the Inuit Heritage Trust, which is under article 33 in the Nunavut agreement. I'm a trustee for the trust, and I also work at the Kitikmeot Heritage Society. In Inuinnaqtun, we call it Pitquhirnikkut Ilihautiniq. It is a non-profit organization in Cambridge Bay that works to preserve, protect and promote Inuit culture.
I've been working in heritage for a number of years. I have had extensive role models and been able to work with the Inuit Heritage Trust throughout my university career. It is very important that we have a museum in Nunavut, so we can repatriate our artifacts that are housed in Ottawa and Winnipeg and bring them home for our people to use and to learn from in our home communities.
Iqaluit is the potential home of our territorial museum. It's a gracious pledge from Nunavut Tunngavik and the QIA that they have each pledged $5 million toward building a museum. It's been almost 25 years since the Nunavut agreement was assented to. It would be a great opportunity for us, as we are the only jurisdiction in Canada that does not have a territorial museum.
If you were to come to our territory—and I'm not sure who has been there before—you would see that we do have a few museums, such as the one I work at, but we do not have a territorial one. In the past several years, we have been able to regain a lot of our cultural pride. We're shifting our identity. We're reclaiming who we are in various ways. One really great way is by looking at old artifacts and taking our elders to museums. I've taken elders to Denmark, for example, to look at collections that are stored there because we don't have the opportunity to look at them in our own home community.
We need to learn that knowledge and have that knowledge retained in our culture to keep that identity. When you think of Canada and you ask people what they think of Canada, they'll often think of the inukshuk, the kayak and the igloo. Those are all important pieces that our ancestors worked hard to create with their ingenuity. Those tools and the objects that are stored within those tools—the knowledge, the wisdom, the words, the language—are all a vital part of our identity and who we are.
We are proud to be Canadian. We would like to have the opportunity to have more of our culture showcased in our communities and be used as lesson tools.
The first step for Nunavut is to have a territorial museum and have our objects brought back home. As mentioned, 140,000 objects are stored in Ottawa and Winnipeg. Those are ones we would like to have in our communities and use as tools to pass on to the next generation.
Quanaqqutit for your time.