While Montrealers were just getting their first real dump of snow this winter, photographer Monique Dykstra and I were battling the cold (minus 52 with the windchill factor!) in Inukjuak, a Hudson-coast Inuit community of roughly 1,500 people.

But the cold didn't deter Crystal Speedie's amazing group of senior secondary students, who have been hard at work here since the start of the Quebec Roots project. Already, before we arrived, students had written multiple texts and taken a flurry of photos based on their chosen theme "Life in our Changing Culture." Jobie O. researched the High Arctic Relocation and wrote an account of how the federal government moved 19 families of Inukjuak to Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay in the 1950s as a way to create "human flagpoles." Aibellie B. C. wrote about the effects of global warming in his touching piece "Where Did the Blizzards Go?" Others wrote about hunting trips and about finding their way back on the land after a long day of fishing.

I arrived first, on Friday, and spent the better part of the day talking about writing - how hard it is even for a writer! - and about the pieces they had written, in particular. Students worked with Crystal and I in the classroom and in the computer lab tweaking, editing and revising their work. I explained that while this is a collaborative project, each of them is contributing an important piece of the puzzle, something to help paint a vivid picture of the community.

Speaking of pictures, Monique joined me on Monday and devoted much of her visit to her trademark mini-workshops in photography, a hands-on lesson in portraiture - which I myself participated in - and a picture-taking walk around town.

One of the highlights, for me, was watching Nanook of the North with the students in Crystal's class and finding out that this classic 1922 silent film by Robert J. Flaherty, considered to be the first feature-length documentary, was actually filmed in and around Inukjuak! As we watched  Nanook struggle to feed his family in the harshest of conditions, Aibellie piped up that he recognized the land. "I'm so jealous," he later said as he watched the hunting scenes depicted. Many of the students had already seen the film but wanted to sit through it again, anyway. Some giggled; others pointed at the screen and tried to figure out where their house would be. Afterwards, we asked them to consider how or what they would film if they were to make a new version of Nanook of the North. How would life in Inukjuak look in 2012, we asked them?

And things, definitely, have changed. While we were watching Nanook and his family put up an igloo in under an hour, the Culture teacher was just outside our window teaching his students the finer points of building an igloo, an art (or science) that could easily go the way of the dinosaur in another generation or two if the community isn't mindful. Crystal's energetic and imaginative students seem to know all this, and are finding their own way (Louisa Louie writes songs and sings in a band) to keep their culture alive while all the while enjoying many of the same things their southern counterparts do - television, Internet, Facebook, music.