Chesterfield Inlet becomes hot spot for kayak building

One of the smallest communities in Nunavut is gaining a reputation for kayak-building.

For a decade, students at Victor Sammurtok School in Chesterfield Inlet, pop. 375, have been making traditional-style kayaks.   

Glen Brocklebank helped start the kayak-building course in 2004.

The community now has a flotilla of 27 full-length kayaks.

“No one in Chester had ever made a kayak in the community,” he says. “There’s lots of umiaks [large skin boats], a lot of open boats, but no one had ever built kayaks.”

Nonetheless, he says there’s something about his students that makes them naturals for the handmade kayaks.

“It’s almost as if there’s something instinctual,” Brocklebank says. “That this skill is part of their genetic make-up. They get in and they excel immediately. The first five minutes is ‘Whoa!’, you know, getting used to the balancing point, and then they’re literally taking off.”

Students started small, with 18-inch kayaks, working up to two-foot, three-foot and seven-foot-long boats, eventually transforming the school gymnasium into a giant shop.

Brocklebank says it used to take students about 100 hours to build one boat. Now it takes them half that time.

After building them, students undertake a 10-kilometre kayak trip and portage where they learn land skills from elders.