I would like to start this week's column with a tribute to Jack "Sig" Sigvaldason. He started this newspaper in 1972 on his kitchen table, after he had been fired from the News of the North. Not only did Yellowknifer grow and succeed but in a few years he even bought out News of the North. That's a bit of karmic irony for you. The business grew into NNSL, which publishes a number of papers across the NWT and Nunavut.
The North just wouldn't be the same without him and the newspapers he founded. He certainly did well from a journalistic point of view.
He helped a lot of reporters, columnists and editors find employment and develop their own styles. Local newspapers are special and they are often the training ground for people. Also, the papers have given a voice to a lot of Northerners as columnists. One they wouldn't have if it weren't for local papers.
Not only do papers encourage people to read but they also provide a record of the daily events, which in time become part of our historical record.
When people want to do historic research, they often turn to old newspapers as an archive of history and events.
Think about this as well, hundreds of people have worked for NNSL over the years and the newspapers are an important part of the North's economy.
So we all owe Jack a word of thanks for the chance he took back in 1972 of starting his own business and watching it grow and succeed. I am sure it wasn't easy at times.
I knew Jack for decades and had a lot of respect for the man.
I believe his family was originally from Iceland and that is one of the most literate countries on the planet.
Everyone there can read and write, and they had universal education long before many other countries even thought about it.
Per capita, they publish an incredible number of books, especially for such a small and somewhat isolated nation.
Also, they are great recorders of history as their sagas show. We could learn a lot from Iceland on how to do things. So I think being a newspaper person and publishing, at least in part, came naturally to him.
This, in a roundabout way, brings me to education and perhaps even the dump.
Do you have any idea how many things that could be considered school supplies get thrown away and buried at the dump every year?
I can tell you it is a lot and if we saved just a percentage of them and gave them away, this could ease the burden on parents trying to outfit their kids for school.
An even better plan would be to divert the materials before they end up in the dump.
There should be a place where government offices, businesses and individuals can drop off stuff that the schools and kids could use.
I also think the dump should be a part of every child's education in the North.
They should tour the dump, so they know where all the stuff we throw away goes and how it is processed.
If we don't want to turn the world into one big garbage dump we have to teach people that there are better ways of doing things and we might as well start when they are still young.
In fact, I think education should be about a whole lot more then just spending time in schools.
I don't want to criticize the Canadian school system too much because I know teaching can be very hard work and our teachers do a lot of things right.
However, I was one of those students who sat looking out the classroom window wondering why we couldn't spend more time outside doing something interesting.
As a student, I came to the conclusion that our schools were designed by bureaucrats and civil servants, basically to turn out more bureaucrats and civil servants.
That is why you spend all the time sitting inside at a desk and shuffling bits of paper back and forth.
Ideally, kids should spend a third of their time inside learning stuff, a third of their time doing stuff and a third of their time doing physical activities.
I think if we did that, kids would be healthier, happier and get a better education to boot.