By the time winter sets in Tuktoyaktuk, the entire community could very well have a new homemade winter wardrobe after the Tuktoyaktuk Community Corporation distributed over 100 sewing kits through the community.
Assistant corporate manager Dolly Loreen said she had distributed 124 kits so far and still had another 22 to go. Each kit contains enough material to make a parkie, stroud for slippers, canvas for shoes and either a fox pelt or a seal skin.
Photo courtesy Tuktoyaktuk Community Corporation
"We started the distribution on Monday," she said. "As this pandemic is going on, they wanted to keep everyone at home busy with something to do, because we're not gathering or leaving our homes. They can do what they please with it, either make something for themselves or their children."
Funded by the Inuvialuit Cultural Resource Centre, Loreen said the one-time kit giveaway is intended to provide residents with constructive activities as the region remains mostly shut down from the Covid-19 pandemic.
People are free to make and do what they wish with the sewing kits, whether that be making clothes for family or designing products to sell.
This is only one of several efforts TCC has put forward in recent weeks to help the community. Corporate Manager Jocelyn Noksana said the next project was finding homes for a shipment of equipment TCC just got.
Now sitting on a collection of meat grinders, life jackets, chain saws, fishnets, knives electric generators and other supplies, Noksana said she didn't get enough to give a package to everyone, but was trying to figure out how to best distribute the equipment fairly.
"We have a whole bunch of stuff, how we're going to do all of this is going to the board," she said. "We don't have enough for everybody, but we'll do our best to be fair. I don't know if we're going to be giving them away or if we'll have a pool for usage, to come and borrow them.
"I was just given all of this yesterday."
In addition to the equipment, Noksana added TCC was planning to distribute over 100 Youth Activity Kits throughout the community. All this is on the heels of the community harvest, which Mayor Erwin Elias had previously described as the "largest in the community's history." Noksana said as a result of that harvest, 106 country food bundles were distributed throughout the community including moose meat, muktuk, geese, muskox and fish.
Noksana said anyone wanting to keep up with the TCC's distributions should follow the TCC's Facebook page.