Creeping Yellowknification

. Forty years ago Kenneth Boulding cracked up Toronto's York University audience with an opening sequence to his celebrity lecture there. "I couldn't help but wonder at the architecture as I drove in." (a few snickers in the audience)

"I had some trouble, at first, placing it in the correct period." (more chuckles and a few outright guffaws)

"Then it came to me," he said. "Early Brutal!" (pandemonium of uncontrolled laughter.)

"I will suggest to you that it falls into the broad contemporary trend of creeping Wichitization, that remorseless and rather disconcerting pressure where Bangkok, Bombay, Beirut and Budapest become more and more like Wichita." (No more laughter.)

Twenty years later, in a column for Yellowknife's News North amidst the struggle for division of the old Northwest Territories and creation of Nunavut, I borrowed from Boulding by describing Yellowknife as a victim of creeping Sudburization. A tendency for once predominantly aboriginal communities across North America to become more and more like Sudbury, with increasingly white, Euro-Canadian administrations and business communities supplanting increasingly marginalized aboriginal and Métis inhabitants.

I concluded with a fervent plea to our N.W.T. neighbours to admit the demographics were hopeless in the West, to graciously relinquish the fractured and bare aboriginal majority they could only temporarily maintain with Inuit influence, and to allow the Eastern Arctic to go its own way in order to benefit from its overwhelming majority Inuit electorate.

They did. A deliberate and noble sacrifice. Surprising and historic.

So "Here's the question", as Jack Cafferty would say. What do you detect in the following sequences of names?

(1) Carmen Levi, Rosemary Keenainak, Koovian Flanagan, Alooki Rojas, Victor Tootoo, Melinda Janes and David Akeeagok, et al;

(2) Bob Long, Janet Slaughter, Kathleen Lausman, Louise Wasson and Markus Weber, et al.

That's correct. They have all been appointed Deputy or Assistant Deputy Ministers with the Government of Nunavut at some point.

Yet there are other thought provoking patterns that emerge. One group consist entirely of beneficiaries to the Inuit Land Claim, the other none, and the other has largely replaced the one.

Coincidence? Possibly. A sign of the times? Probably. Creeping Yellowknification and Ottawization? Almost certainly. Discouraging? Can the Nunavut and Tamapta dreams survive it? Too soon to tell.

Our kids will decide.

Meanwhile, we do need to clean up our finances, housing, health, educational effectiveness and the environment. Leona, Eva and Elisapi seem sincere in their desire to provide better governance and services to citizens in each of these regards.

But you tell me. Are the cultural distinctions, the deeper IQ, the language, the precious payload of Inuktitut Social Values slowly slipping away as an inevitable part of the process?

Say it ain't so. ..