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The Adult Literacy Project of Kugluktuk, Nunavut, had hired me to teach writing, part-time, for six weeks, and when I wasn't promoting the written word, I was throwing away books. I had been in the Arctic for a month when I began work at the high-school library. Help for updating the library was requested when the principal said that the territorial government had not funded school libraries for three years. When southerners leave, the high-school library inherits stacks of Reader's Digest anthologies, mysteries, religious pamphlets, 1970s camping guides and books about investing. The librarian was one of the teachers I'd seen in pictures at the town's elder centre: her hair pulled back tight in a bun, she stared, unsmiling, at the camera, her starched clothing as unyielding as the uniforms--and the glum faces--of the Inuit children around her. The library's oldest books were southern stories about "what it's like to be an Eskimo." One dust-jacket preached that, as a boy in Ontario, the author "had to walk two miles through bush to school each day." Relative to the beatings that Inuit kids got for speaking their own language, that walk didn't seem much of a hardship. I don't know how the government of Nunavut will educate and employ enough Inuinnaqtun-speaking teachers to reach its goals for Inuit schooling in the next 20 years.