Cedric Gallant

Every police officer in Nunavik, from rookie to veteran, is getting an approximately $30,000 pay raise this year.

That means officers in the Nunavik Police Service (NPS) will go from being among the lowest-paid regional police in Quebec to among the highest.

With officers who patrol Quebec’s 14 Inuit villages about to see a massive increase in compensation, activists in Nunavik point to the waning trust between the communities and police. Four Inuit have been killed during police interventions since Nov. 2024, and people in the territory say more efforts should be made to mend that relationship.

There are only a handful of journalists who work in Nunavik. Radio-Canada and Nunatsiaq News hold permanent reporter positions in Kuujjuaq, and CBC provides radio content, with most of its broadcast and reporting operations based in Iqaluit.

This is not enough.

Over 90 boys from Nunavik line up in front of the backboard at the Great Whale River Triple Gymnasium.

They’re in the middle of a free-throw competition. They have two attempts to make the throw; if not, they’re eliminated.

Seventeen-year-old Salluit athlete Nicolas Cameron steps up to the line. He is sporting his Ray-Ban glasses indoors, his white T-shirt draped over his shoulders like a cape, headphones in his ears, wired in, eyes focused on the rim. The gymnasium is loud with screams of encouragement, but also with those trying to psych out Cameron.

Puvirnituq is Nunavik’s only community that has not signed the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement that some consider Canada’s first modern treaty. And the political group behind the dissidence lives on, remaining at the forefront of the village’s mindset, 50 years after the treaty.

Puvirnituq elder Harry Tulugak has been a consistent voice, advocating for the ideals promoted by Inuit Tungavingat Nunamini, the political group that refused to sign the JBNQA.

In the early 1990s, Charlie Arngak, the then mayor of Kangiqsujuaq, an Inuit community in Nunavik, Quebec, took a stance for his people by travelling to Toronto to meet the CEO of Falconbridge, a Canadian mining company that was looking into mining nickel in the region at the time. What came of that initiative was a groundbreaking agreement that, 30 years later, remains world-class at improving relationships between mining corporations and Indigenous communities.