A small town’s name honors a local man who advised helped locate an air base.
THE SCENIC ROUTE
Iqaluit, the largest community of the Nunavut Territory and its capital, owes its establishment to an enterprising man named (sort of) Nakasuk. During World War II, the U. S. Navy was looking for long, flat locations in Canada where it could build a chain of bases that would be used for flights connecting North America to the UK through arctic Canada, Greenland, and Iceland, all part of the DEW line, which stands for Distant Early Warning line, a system of radar stations.
Since Nakasuk knew the area well, he stepped up to help the U.S. military find a location for its base at Iqaluit (also called Frobisher Bay until 1987). The base at Iqaluit wasn’t used much by the Americans, but that didn’t stop other people, many of them Inuks, from moving to the area after word got around that the base would be there. Nakasuk, who had been raised at a nearby sealing camp near Pangnirtung, is considered Iqaluit’s original and founding resident. After advising the U.S. military to establish its base there, Nakasuk never left.
THE LEGACY FORMS
Although no historians theorize why Nakasuk stayed, it could be related to the meaning of Iqaluit’s name in the Inuk language: place of many fish. Or perhaps he was confident that the settlement would quickly grow thanks to the military base. Whatever the reason, this founding citizen’s name is memorialized in the name of one of Iqaluit’s two schools, Nakasuk School. Perhaps the reason no other places in the city bear the founding father’s name is that its meaning in Inuktitut is “bladder.” It actually took about sixty years from that fateful day Nakasuk chose the location for Iqaluit to become a city. It was officially named a city in 2001, and its population in 2013 was 6,699.
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