The way up

Back in the Arctic, a Kennedy School grad seeks political office

IQALUIT, Nunavut - Unlike a lot of graduates of that illustrious university in Harvard Square, Kirt Ejesiak doesn't usually tell people he went to Harvard. Where he comes from, it probably wouldn't be appreciated.

"I'll tell you why: People are intimidated," says Ejesiak, 39, who is of Inuit descent and is apparently the first resident of Canada's remote Arctic region of Nunavut to graduate from Harvard. "I want people to realize I am just a regular guy who had the same challenges as they did growing up in a dysfunctional society."

Characterizing your home turf as "dysfunctional" might not seem like the shrewdest tactic for a politician during his election campaign. But Ejesiak, a small business owner vying for a seat in Parliament in Canada's general election today, isn't your typical politician. He's running as the Liberal Party candidate for the vast, far-flung region of Nunavut (pronounced NOO-nah-voot), Canada's newest territory, which was created in 1999 as a result of a major land claims settlement between the Inuit of Nunavut and the federal government.

If he wins this election, he's going to have his hands full as Nunavut's only member of Parliament, and not just because he'd be representing 30,000 people in 25 small communities spread out over 770,000 square miles. It's also because Nunavut is a land of deep despair.

It's a place of severe and rugged beauty with rolling, tundra-covered hills, turquoise icebergs, and radiant light. But it has rapidly leapfrogged from being a nomadic society to a modern, economy-based one - "from the 19th century to the 21st century," as Ejesiak says - and the transition hasn't been smooth.

The cost of living is brutal. There is a housing crisis so severe that some families wait a decade for an apartment, doubling or tripling up with relatives and sleeping in shifts in the beds. There is rampant unemployment, widespread poverty, a student dropout rate of 75 percent, poor access to health care, and a suicide rate among Inuit 11 times higher than the rest of Canada. Nunavut is also beset by drug abuse, domestic violence, and other social ills that are a legacy of a disorienting federal government policy in the early 1950s to set up settlements and encourage people to move into them. Making matters worse, climate change is affecting the migration patterns of wildlife, affecting Inuit people who still depend on animals and fish for food and warm clothing to shield them from punishing winters, when temperatures can sink to 60 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

"People are struggling," says the soft-spoken, understated Ejesiak, who received a Fulbright grant that enabled him to earn a master's degree in public administration in 2005 from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "The problem we have up here is they feel there is no way out of the situation."

The fact that he managed to find a way out is part of his message. "I am running on a platform of hope," says Ejesiak, interviewed in a series of late-night telephone conversations at the end of long days spent campaigning across the High Arctic. (He canceled a scheduled interview in Iqaluit when he launched a three-day, 10-community blitz.) "I want to show the young people and not just say it, that I struggled through the school system, that I was a troubled youth, but I managed to do it."

Son of a stone carver

Ejesiak was born in Iqaluit, now Nunavut's capital, when it was known as Frobisher Bay; he grew up speaking Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit. His father was a stone carver, and until he was 8, Ejesiak spent summers on the land with his extended family hunting for seal, fish, and caribou. He is vague about his family life but alludes to alcoholism, abuse, and "the chaos of dysfunctional parents," and describes himself as a "pretty smart youth but on the wrong side of the tracks. I just about ended up in jail."

Things changed in high school when he went to France on an exchange program. "I realized there is a big world out there and I had to do things differently than my parents," he says. He earned an engineering diploma at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, then worked as a highway engineer in Yellowknife, studied Spanish in Spain, and worked for an Inuit organization in Ottawa. Drawn back to the North around the time Nunavut was being formed, he started several businesses in Iqaluit, including a multimedia communications firm, and ventured into politics as an Iqaluit city councilor and its deputy mayor.

Government, he decided, was his calling, a way to make change in a land that needed a lot of it. An Ottawa friend told him about Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and he decided he was interested. But applying to Harvard when you live in Iqaluit - a desolate city of 7,000 with no paved roads and certainly no Graduate Record Exam testing center - is a logistical nightmare.

"The GRE? Jeez, what a terrible thing," he says. He flew to Ottawa to find a study guide and to Montreal to take the exam. He had to persuade Harvard, in his application, to take a chance on someone with few academic credentials but a determination to find a way to improve the infrastructure of his Arctic homeland.

When he got his acceptance letter, he says, "I nearly jumped out of my skin." Then he panicked. "I thought, holy crap, where am I going to find all the money?" He tapped every local funding source he could think of, but came up with little. His friend told him about the Fulbright program; his first reaction was to dismiss it. "I thought, Fulbright? Isn't that for really smart people?" Still, time was running out, so he quickly applied, successfully, and before he knew it he was in Cambridge with his partner, Madeleine Cole, and their 6-week-old son.

Humidity and humility

The Inuit are known as adaptable people accustomed to handling extreme temperatures, but nothing prepared Ejesiak for late August in Cambridge. "I couldn't handle the humidity," he says. "We suffered." Nor did he know what to make of the Cambridge mentality. "People up here, we take care of each other and work as a collective, but there I just wanted to hide because of the me-me-me mentality. I found that was really tough to take."

He found the workload difficult, too, especially with a baby. "I was struggling," he acknowledges. "I was overwhelmed: I didn't see this as just one lonely person from the North going to Harvard. I believe in showing by example, and I was wanting to show people at home that it's possible for someone from Nunavut to do something like study at a prestigious university in the United States."

But he persevered and did well. "He asked very tough questions," recalls Canadian writer and journalist Michael Ignatieff, who was one of Ejesiak's professors and is now deputy leader of Canada's Liberal Party. "He is very, very sharp and unafraid in a room full of 125 people, all of whom think they are very strong. It is ironic we are both fighting for the same party in the same election, professor and student."

"What really struck me was his ability to maintain his sense of humility and family," says Harvard colleague and friend Jackie Old Coyote, director of education for the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. "You'd think someone from such a remote part of the world could get captivated by the intelligentsia. But he didn't."

Now, facing three opponents in what's said to be a tight contest for Nunavut's seat in the House of Commons, Ejesiak looks back on the experience at Harvard as a pivotal time in his life.

"Every time I got into a jam I'd think about our elders and how they struggled in winter when they had no animals to eat and yet they didn't give up," he said. "I thought, if my ancestors could do that, this is nothing."