Lessons from Kugluktuk
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to travel to the village of Kugluktuk, in the Kitikmeot Region of Nunavut, Canada, to look at a planned bridge crossing for a new road. As a fisheries biologist, my job was to see how any damage to fish habitat could be avoided or offset. What I learned from my brief visit to this remote community went far beyond a simple fisheries assessment.
Kugluktuk is remote. It’s a village with an airport and a dock. There are no roads, other than a couple right in town and the only way to get there is by air in summer, ice road in the winter, or by ship. It’s the Arctic, so there are no trees, and everything is rock.
I was picked up from the tiny airport by the mayor in a tired, white pickup (it turns out he was also there to pick up the mail) and he took me to an ATCO trailer ‘hotel’ with a handful of rooms for guests. I’d only been there a few minutes when a knock at the door brought three local boys, maybe 9 or 10 years old, to my room. They were there to watch television. I invited them in, and they stayed for maybe an hour or so. Before they left, I helped one boy (his name was Eli) put the chain back on his bike so he could ride home instead of pushing it.
The next morning, we were to set off for the crossing site. My guide showed up at the hotel with an assortment of quads (all-terrain vehicles) and their owners so that I could pick on to borrow for the day (there is no such thing as renting what you need). I picked the only four-wheel drive unit in the bunch and we set off. He asked me what I was going to be wearing, so I showed him my chest-waders, survival suit, and other gear. With those preliminaries out of the way, the two of us headed out.
It was rugged riding. With no roads, the best bits were some packed trails along the route of the road they were planning to build. At one point, we had to cross a river. It was maybe a hundred feet across and it was moving pretty fast. To make it more challenging, there were large boulders to climb over and drop off of, so picking a route across was difficult. My guide asked me to lead the way.
I managed to get across without tipping or getting washed downstream, even though I had water up to and over the seat of the quad in a couple of places. Once I got across, I turned back and noticed my guide was having a bit of a challenge in one spot (his quad was two-wheel drive), so I waded out and helped him get the machine up over the boulder he was stuck on.
Once my look at the crossing site was done, we rode back, but my guide took me on a route that showed some of the area. I learned that there was a previous military installation, called the Distant Early Warning (or DEW line) site on a lake up the watershed from the village. I learned about how the community would fish the lake and travel around the area.
I completed my visit with a meeting of the mayor and some of the community members. We talked through what I had seen at the site and how hard it was going to be to suggest something to compensate for the area being affected by the bridge crossing. In the end, we together devised what I thought was a brilliant plan to have the community members use their boats to pick up some of the debris, including old fuel barrels, left over from the DEW line site from the shores of the lake. Given it was upstream of the town, it made perfect sense, because it was a tangible improvement to the environment, and the community members were more than capable and willing to do the work.
Somewhere near the end of my time in Kugluktuk, the mayor happened to mention to me that at least some of the time, they had been testing me. When they asked me about my gear and to pick a quad. It turns out, they had previously had a visitor from the city out to look at the same site. He’d been less than prepared (he came wearing dress shoes).
I recall and tell this story, because I’ve always thought that the final solution we devised together was genius in its simplicity and its effectiveness. It was creative and outside the ‘normal’ approach of “do some damage here, so you have to repair some damage there”.
But there are deeper lessons here. Ones that I was oblivious to at the time I was up in the community and have only really figured out years later.
Every action matters.
In a village the size of Kugluktuk, everybody knows everything about what everybody else is doing. Accepting the boys into my room so we could watch TV together and fixing Eli’s bike were, to me, minor things that helped shape how the community would see me. If I had closed my door and simply kept to myself, I question whether we would have ever gotten as far as the discussion that led to the innovative solution we created.
Our actions every day set the stage for how we are seen by others, and how successful we are in working together in a group. We will never know how the person we are interacting with right now might be connected to the person we are going to have to interact with two days from now on something that is important to us. It seems to me, it’s just easier to always “keep the door open”.
There’s always a test.
The mayor told me they were testing me after the fact, something he was comfortable doing I think, because we had already forged a connection through my short time in the community and by creating a solution to their bridge crossing question. If there had been no connection, I would never have known that detail.
Every collaborative effort begins with a test. People are always testing each other to see how they act and react, even if they don’t realize they are testing or being tested. We always look to see the character of the people we are working with; it shapes how we act and react. The real lesson here is that your actions should be consistent. Don’t act differently simply because you want or need to work with other people on a problem.
Creativity comes after.
Sharing something personal, like an idea or a feeling, isn’t something people do without first having some sense of how it will be received by the people with whom they are sharing. I think the community members and I got to a place where we could share and explore ideas together, only because of how things had gone in the previous days. In fact, the mayor had even said as much, simply by letting me know I had been tested.
***
We can’t expect creative solutions in the absence of the work and time it takes for people to test one another and be able to demonstrate their mindset and character through their actions. I am grateful for my experience in Kugluktuk, in part because of the people I had the privilege of meeting, in part because of our experience on the Arctic landscape, and in part because of the lessons I took from the whole experience and that took me years to fully understand.
I hope you are doing well Eli, wherever you are.
The image of Kugluktuk used for this blog post was taken by Andrew Johnson from Yellowknife, Canada. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Scott Millar often works as a "peacemaker" by gathering people with different experiences and values and helping them navigate beyond their differences to tackle complex problems together. Through Collaboration Dynamics, he offers a program in High Performance Collaboration, where he guides groups to explore the nature of collaboration, inclusivity, and innovation, and acquire new abilities to create the conditions that enable groups to contribute and thrive in challenging environments.
