N.W.T. museum, Nunavut divide up artifacts

Negotiations to divide the collection at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre are nearly complete.

About half of the 113,000 items will stay in Yellowknife and the rest will eventually go to Nunavut.

Chuck Arnold, standing in front of two caribou coat skins in a display, says negotiators from the two territories readily agreed the parka made on Baffin Island would be moved to Nunavut.

The director of the museum adds that deciding what to do with the other coat was more complicated. It was sewn by Copper Inuit who lived on both sides of what is now the Northwest Territories and Nunavut border.

"Something like this is a grey area and really required a lot of discussion as we decided where it would go," Arnold explains.

Negotiators looked at how many Copper Inuit garments the Prince of Wales had and decided they could share.

After a year and a half of discussions that Arnold describes as friendly, negotiators decided what to do with 95 per cent of the artifacts and records at the Prince of Wales.

"In the rare instances where there might be non-agreement as to how a particular collection should be divided, we are then going to have it settled through a settlement mechanism," explains Anthony Saez with Nunavut's Department of Culture, Language, Elders and Youth.

The next questions involve what to do with the display area at the Prince of Wales once the artifacts have been packed away and where Nunavut will store and display the items destined for the new territory.