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INUVIK - "the place of man" - is the farthest north you can drive on a public highway in North America, unless, that is, you wait for the winter freeze and follow the ice road carved across the frozen sea to the north. Canada's first planned town north of the Arctic Circle, Inuvik was begun in 1954 as an administrative centre to replace Aklavik, a settlement to the west wrongly thought to be doomed to envelopment by the Mackenzie's swirling waters and shifting mud flats. Finished in 1961, it's a strange melting pot of around 3000 people, with Dene, Metis and Inuvialuit living alongside the trappers, pilots, scientists and frontier entrepreneurs drawn here in the 1970s when a boom followed the oil exploration in the delta. Falling oil prices and the rising cost of exploitation, however, soon toppled the delta's vast rigs and it seems the oil is destined to remain largely untapped until well into this century. Today the local economy also relies on government jobs, services and the town's role as a supply and communication centre for much of the western Arctic. Wandering the town provides an eye-opening introduction to the vagaries of northern life, from the strange stilted buildings designed to prevent their heat melting the permafrost (which would have disastrous effects on foundations, assuming any could be dug), to the strange pipes, or "utilidors", which snake round the streets carrying water, power and sewage lines - again, to prevent problems with permafrost. There are also the all-too-visible signs of the alcoholism that affects this and many northern communities - a problem rarely alluded to outside them, partly because the region's aboriginal groups seem to be disproportionately afflicted: suicides here are four times the national average for groups of aboriginal people. On a happier note, the influence of Inuvialuit people in local political and economic life has increased, to the extent that the Western Claims Settlement Act of 1984 saw the government cede titles to various lands in the area, returning control that had been lost to the fur trade, the church, oil companies and national government. A potent symbol of the church's local role in particular resides in the town's most-photographed building, the Igloo Church , or Our Lady of Victory, a rather incongruous cultural mix. It's on Mackenzie Road, the main street which runs west to east through town, but isn't always open: ask at the rectory for a glimpse inside and for the paintings of local Inuvialuit artist, Mona Thrasher. Much further west on Mackenzie Road you might also want to take a look at the Ingamo Hall , a three-storey building built almost entirely from 1000 white-spruce logs brought up the Mackenzie River (local trees, such as there are, don't grow sufficiently to provide the timber required for building).
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