Jennie Who?

Sunrise 9:22 Sunset 13:15
As I've mentioned in previous posts, I am teaching a program which is designed to get kids out in community job placements to build skills, resumes and portfolios in preparation for the workplace. It came to my attention early in the year that a number of my students didn't have social insurance numbers. Simple, I thought, I can help them get that. Just fill out the forms and send them in. That was o.k. for some of them. But, in order to get a SIN you need identification. Picture ID cards can be issued locally by a Government of Nunavut official, except that position was cut and there is no one in the community who can issue ID cards. To further complicate matters, some of my students don't have birth certificates. Again I thought, simple, I'll just fill out the forms and send them in. Keep in mind that my students have very limited spoken or written English so I had a hard time understanding why they don't have birth certificates. Apparently Jennie has been trying to get one for years. She is in her early twenties and is the mother of two children, but she doesn't possess a single piece of paper that says she exists. She can't work, file income tax, receive the child tax credit, GST refunds, or even travel any further than Iqaluit. Another teacher here tried to get her a birth certificate a few years ago and he filled me in on the issues. Jennie was born in Iqaluit and adopted by a local family. The problem is that the adoption wasn't registered. Apparently this is common among Inuit. Adoptions have been informal. So, I made contact with a number of government officials and we were able to trace the paperwork from the Court of Justice to the local adoption commissioner. An effort was made a few years back to register the adoption, but a glitch occurred somewhere along the line and the whole process just froze. Finally, I made phone contact with a very helpful woman in NWT Vital Statistics (don't forget that Nunavut was NWT when Jennie was born) who filled me in on some of the issues regarding Inuit identification. She has set the process in motion once again and although we are somewhat more optimistic, it is clear that this is going to be a lengthy process. All I can do now is keep calling on a regular basis to make sure that things keep moving.I learned so much from this experience about how the Inuit got their current names. Ancient names that had been passed on through the generations were changed by the missionaries who could not pronounce the names and (some would argue) feared their pagan power. Then, from the 1940's through the early 1970's Inuit were issued government Disk Names which they wore around their necks. These disks identified individuals by a combination of letters and numbers that were assigned in accordance with where they lived and when they were added to the census. In 1969 Project Surname was started when some Inuit people decided that they should no longer be called by numbers. A man named Abe Opik is said to have visited every Inuit home (quite an undertaking) and asked families to choose their surnames. So, imagine all these issues and add in the creation of Nunavut as a territory (with all its fledgling bureaucracies) and you have a picture of personal paperwork in the arctic.