The Americas: The newest territory Story-Date: 04:11 a.m. PST Friday , April 2, 1999 ------------------------------------------------------------ The Americas: The newest territory Canada's inauguration of icy Nunavut region caps a long campaign by Eskimo population By Anthony DePalma New York Times IQALUIT, NUNAVUT A BOLD ATTEMPT to right past wrongs and bring hope to an entire region was launched as Thursday began and the map of Canada was redrawn to make room for the new territory of Nunavut. At midnight, with the wind chill here hovering around 45 below zero, Ottawa divided the old Northwest Territories in two, and Nunavut, which means "our land," was created from the eastern 60 percent of the region, with this remote city of 4,500 residents becoming the capital of the new territory. "What we affirm today, with the stroke of a pen, is the end of a very long road," said Prime Minister Jean Chretien, who came to Iqaluit on Thursday morning from Newfoundland, which is celebrating its own admission to Canada 50 years ago -- the last major change in the country's map before Thursday. While Chretien called Nunavut a "rare and precious opportunity," other Canadians criticized it as a waste of money and, worse, a dangerous precedent for fostering racial tribalism. "One-fifth of Canada will be put under a government whose purpose it is to represent one ethnic group," the Ottawa Citizen said in a recent editorial. "Canada will have its first Bantustan, an apartheid-style ethnic homeland." The creation of Nunavut (NOO-na-voot) caps a notable transformation not only for northern Canada's residents but for all Eskimos in polar regions around the globe. With Nunavut firmly in the hands of Eskimos, a people also called Inuit, roughly two-thirds of the estimated 150,000 Eskimos on earth, including about 7,000 in Alaska, have won some degree of self-determination. "It is now like a chain stretching from Greenland to the Russian Far East," said Oran R. Young, director of the Dickey Institute of Arctic Studies at Dartmouth College, "and Nunavut is a huge link in this chain." What is even more remarkable about Nunavut is that by conventional measures of political influence, like the votes they control or the funds they have access to, the new territory's 27,000 residents -- 85 percent of them Eskimos -- would have been considered almost powerless. Yet, over a generation, using a mixture of patience and compromise that reflected traditional Eskimo ways, they have made notable strides that are being watched by indigenous groups around the world. And what they accomplished they did without the court battles, angry protests or sporadic violence that have marked movements for American Indian rights throughout North America. But that is not to suggest the process of creating Nunavut was easy or painless. The first Eskimo call for a new territory came in 1976, and the law creating Nunavut was not enacted until 1993. That law also settled the largest Native land claim in Canada's history, giving the Eskimos -- who had never signed a treaty with the Canadian government -- outright title to 135,000 square miles of their traditional territory, with mineral rights in about one-tenth of that space. As part of the deal, the Eskimos surrendered claim to all other land in the north and accepted a financial settlement that will exceed $1 billion over 14 years. Nunavut encompasses 770,000 square miles of ice and snow that becomes a riot of mud and color in the brief spring and summer. Roughly equal in size to the land mass of Mexico, its southern boundary roughly follows the tree line above the province of Manitoba. It stretches north to the very top of the world. On the east it is bounded by Quebec's Ungava Peninsula. Nunavut's uneven western boundary was drawn to exclude the city of Yellowknife and the newly opened diamond mine near Lac de Gras. Technically, Nunavut is a territory like Yukon and the Northwest Territories, which have smaller populations and fewer taxing powers than Canada's provinces. Nunavut's non-partisan government is open to every resident, Eskimo or not. But demographics make this an Eskimo territory now and will see that it stays that way for some time. In the first local Parliament, sworn in Thursday at the local high school, 15 of the 19 legislators are Eskimo. And although some critics worry that Nunavut will exclude non-Eskimos, the first premier of Nunavut, Paul Okalik, a 34-year-old Eskimo lawyer, made clear Thursday that that would not happen. "We have established a public government that will represent all the people of Nunavut equally and democratically," Okalik said during a ceremony introducing Nunavut's new flag. ------------------------------------------------------------