In this Nunavut community, Darrell Greer is the news
BY KATHLEEN LIPPA
May/June 2007 THIS MAGAZINE 33
Day breaks in the hamlet of Rankin Inlet, Nunavut. A dog barks in the distance. Another howls back. An Inuk buzzes loudly down a snow-covered road on his all-terrain vehicle. It’s Monday morning, and the temperature is -60 C with the wind chill. Darrell Greer is trudging over to Maani Ulujuk high school for an assignment: “I’ve got my long johns on. Then my jeans. I’ve got my quilted windpants on,” Greer reports. “I’m wearing a t-shirt, a regular shirt and a woolen sweater. Then I haul on my 20-pound Arctic parka, and my sealskin fur mitts.” Once he gets to the climate-controlled school to interview a student, he’ll take notes with sweat dripping into his eyes.
This is a typical day for the one-man show that runs the weekly Kivalliq News, where school events and town hall meetings are an important source of copy. The paper tends to follow stories that the area’s Inuit, who make up the majority of the readership, will most likely be discussing at the coffee shop that week. Recently, the News featured the following stories: a rare albino caribou was mistaken for a wolf and shot dead in Baker Lake; a fellow who grew up in Rankin Inlet was featured after partnering with Kenn Borek Airways to start an Inuktitut-based airline; Coral Harbour was finally getting a house-numbering system so emergency crews could find people in need faster.
But the News is not all happy hometown pieces and grin-and-grip photos. During his eight years at the paper, Greer has won more than 50 awards primarily for the Manitoba Community Newspaper Association, for documenting subjects as varied as hometown hockey heroes, domestic violence, and suicide.
He’s also just as harsh as hecklers. As Greer says matter-of-factly: “You can’t pick and choose your stories. You have to put the bad news in stories out there, too. But I really believe if you had everybody’s got a comment, you’ll all and asked them, they’d say they want a real newspaper. But you have to have thick skin to do it. You are going to hurt people.”
Whether his stories are fuzzy or infuriating, Greer is one of the few journalists in Canada who knows every piece he writes will be read. Because of the paper’s community focus, and the fact that getting other papers such as The Globe and Mail can be difficult, the Kivalliq News enjoys a wide, essentially captive readership of 45,000 copies each week.
“Most people in Rankin Inlet read the Kivalliq News,” confirms recent resident Jame Hunter. “It allows everybody to be on the same page about local issues.” Like the fact that we recognize somebody from the week’s paper, something that is almost impossible to say in every south.” Greer’s pieces will either be cut out and put on people’s fridge doors, or even framed, or they will be brought up by a store clerk or reader who ambushes him in the Internet at the grocery.
“I was stopped at the post office and a man raged at me for 15 minutes because there wasn’t much good news in the Kivalliq News. He was upset I was reporting the number of people in the drunk tank, and the number of people trying to break into places,” says Greer, who prides himself on the quality of his publication. “People can get any paper they want on the Internet. You can’t fool them. Either you’re doing a legitimate newspaper, or you aren’t.”
From a distance, the 49-year-old Greer could easily be mistaken for a local, with his handlebar moustache, short stature and baseball cap snug to his close-cropped dark hair. His voice is the giveaway—pure Cape Breton. He grew up in Port Morien, a one-time coal town and the site of the first coal mine in North America. By the time he was old enough to work, the coal was gone, but there were still jobs at the C.H. Hopkins fish plant. When the fishery collapsed in the early 1990s, the federal government paid for retraining. Greer, a natural storyteller, decided he wanted to be a journalist. Despite some negative comments from his friends and family about his career choice – mainly, the lack of money in writing – he pressed on, receiving his journalism diploma from Holland College in Prince Edward Island.
The Timmins Daily Press was one of the first newspapers to offer Greer a full-time reporting job. Greer, his wife, Debra, and daughter, Lindsay, then 10, relocated. Greer worked there for about a year before moving across the street to report for the Timmins Times. A year after he joined The Times, he heard Conrad Black’s Hollinger empire was taking control. Greer felt his job wasn’t safe under the new management, so he fired out his resume. This time he got a call from Northern News Services in Yellowknife, a main-chain of local papers in the North. The fact that the company was independent appealed to Greer’s fighting spirit, even though the workload was going to be heavy, involving writing 15 to 20 pieces a week as well as doing all the photography.
With his Timmins experience, and general toughness, Greer was seen as a suitable editor, and simply told, “You’re going to Rankin,”—a one-person operation known for burning reporters out. That was 1998, four years after the first issue of the Kivalliq News appeared.
The Kivalliq region, which is in the middle of mainland Nunavut, includes the communities of Baker Lake, Repulse Bay, Chesterfield Inlet, Coral Harbour, Arviat, Whale Cove and Rankin Inlet, and is about one-third of Nunavut’s two million square kilometers. There are no roads connecting Nunavut’s communities, so plane travel is key.
Greer had used his hockey referee job to get around the vast territory in the early days. While in a community, Greer takes pictures and meets people for stories. The rest of the time he relies heavily on people emailing him pictures from digital cameras in the far-flung Inuit communities he covers. A majority of the residents are Inuktitut-speakers, so the paper is translated.
There are jokes locally that the Kivalliq News should be called the Hockey News because of Greer’s obvious interest in the sport—he refs local games four times a week and says once he realized the community was hockey crazy, he felt right at home.
Greer’s gruff, frank way of speaking is one measure of the effect on him of working in a largely Inuit community. Inuktitut has been described as a “no bullshit” language. While he may not speak it fluently, its essence permeates his every stubborn word. His tough attitude sometimes gets him into trouble with his editors in Yellowknife, where the paper is laid out. “I don’t always pay attention to the lawyers of the world, and I get my knuckles rapped for it,” he says. “Some of the hardest-hitting editorials I’ve ever written will never see the light of day. That’s just the nature of the beast in a world run by lawyers.”
But his often-contrarian stances on issues help keep the paper interesting, and people talking. For example, Greer does not hold the popular view on predictions about global warming’s dire effect on polar bears. He has attended his fair share of meetings where he says the views of visiting scientists are put ahead of the voices of Inuit who have their own views of what’s going on in their land.
Greer explains: “The polar bear in its environment is a shining example of adaptation—to not just adapt, but to flourish in the harshest, most unforgiving climate the good lord put on the planet,” Greer says incredulously, raising his voice. “To say this animal will be wiped out? Please.” He continues, “My roots are in the east coast fisheries. I saw literally thousands of people lose their livelihood because science refused for the longest time to listen to the opinion of the ‘uneducated fishermen’ until it was far too late.”
In fact, he’s decided to pass on covering global warming at all, if he can help it: “Gloom, doom and despair translates into industry. Right now global warming is becoming a multi-billion industry as more studies, more exploration teams head up North and sail around gathering data.” Or there’s his refusal to do what he calls “government stories”—pieces that expand on studies by Statistics Canada on subjects such as suicide rates or teenage moms, because he thinks statistics are essentially meaningless.
Readers can also have some strong views about some of his material, and it’s hard for him to escape their reactions. As Greer says, “I appreciate the ones who come into my office, far more than the ones who start hollering at me in the middle of the Northern Store: ‘Boy, I was really pissed off by that editorial Wednesday, Greer!’”
Rankin Inlet’s mayor, Lorne Kusugak, who was a CBC journalist for many years in the North, admits he’s disagreed with Greer in the past. Kusugak once recalls being angry over coverage he felt cast him in an unfairly negative light. But overall, he respects the journalist, admiring, for example, Greer’s decision to write an editorial praising Nunavut’s lone MP, Nancy Karetak-Lindell, a Liberal, for her support of the same-sex-marriage legislation, Bill C-38. Karetak-Lindell’s stance was deeply unpopular: the Kivalliq region prides itself on being socially conservative. Greer’s editorial praising Karetak-Lindell’s stand drew fire from residents who had long believed Greer didn’t understand their culture and views. Greer himself admits, “You could do this job for 100 years and never be given a chance to have a ringside seat to the formation of self-governance, especially Aboriginal self-governance,” he says. But Kusugak admired Greer’s guts on this issue: “He’s not one to shy away from controversy in his paper.”
Greer has also tackled issues few other journalists have, including the insidious hold the much-loved game of bingo can have on people in small towns. Greer won a national award in 2002 for his bingo series, “Under the ‘b’ for balance,” about how bingo revenues were helping northern communities, but how the game can be dangerously addictive.
The hardest part of his job, he admits, “has been the not-so-good news stories, when I’ve had to phone somebody that has become a good acquaintance, or who I deal with at the rink four nights a week, and I have to ask them some tough questions.”
Greer answers his critics with a story. In 2000, he visited Arviat, south of Rankin Inlet. Greer focused on the MuchMusic video dance party that swept into Arviat for two nights. “You have no idea how great that was for those kids, a sense of belonging—like they were just like any kid in Canada,” he says.
The other story he did was about Arviat’s new daycare, built by funds raised by local people. There was also a reporter from Iqaluit’s Nunatsiaq News in town. That paper’s headline screamed, “Babies having babies.” Greer wasn’t impressed. “In this period of history, Inuit are a young race of people. Nunatsiaq does this sensational story under the guise of ‘probing’ journalism. Well, you don’t need to be a probing journalist to go into a Kivalliq community and notice the populations are rather young.
“With the North, there are problems here. Of course there are. We’re a new territory. If you want crap, open your window every morning and throw a dart out. You’re sure to hit something. The real challenge is in trying to educate,” he continues— “fill a newspaper with positive stories because they are harder to find.”