Aug 93 - Starsearch winner, Nain, Northern Labrador
I flew here from Goose Bay to visit a friend from school and his family. This was taken the night before we headed south to Zoar bay for a few days.
- Nain is the northernmost inhabited town on the north Labrador coast. I was here only one month (!) before the Voisey Bay nickel discovery, "one of the world's richest deposits of nickel ore. The rush to stake out claims was dramatic. By '96, Diamond Fields Resources Inc. estimated that the complete deposit contained 100 million tonnes of ore." So Northern Labrador changed forever and dramatically one month after this was taken.
- Nain is one of a number of Moravian missions, with churches built with wood brought from Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. From the net: "These communities became centers for religious, social, and trade activities, but a sedentary resident population didn't develop. There were no alternatives to a subsistence economy based on hunting, fishing, and trapping [still the case]...Even today, villages are but stopping-off points in the yearly round of seasonal activities which cover huge areas of land and sea....In the face of highly commercial European operations over the centuries, the Moravians might have saved Inuit culture from extinction in Labrador. They arrived from Greenland already fluent in Inuktitut, developed an Inuit phonetic script, and opened trading posts. When a smallpox epidemic in the early 1800s wiped out most of the southern Inuit settlements, they moved them north to avoid further contact with the whites."
- Relevant NFB Canada vignette: www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-o2B8q84xQ&feature=related
Aug 93 - Starsearch winner, Nain, Northern Labrador
I flew here from Goose Bay to visit a friend from school and his family. This was taken the night before we headed south to Zoar bay for a few days.
- Nain is the northernmost inhabited town on the north Labrador coast. I was here only one month (!) before the Voisey Bay nickel discovery, "one of the world's richest deposits of nickel ore. The rush to stake out claims was dramatic. By '96, Diamond Fields Resources Inc. estimated that the complete deposit contained 100 million tonnes of ore." So Northern Labrador changed forever and dramatically one month after this was taken.
- Nain is one of a number of Moravian missions, with churches built with wood brought from Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. From the net: "These communities became centers for religious, social, and trade activities, but a sedentary resident population didn't develop. There were no alternatives to a subsistence economy based on hunting, fishing, and trapping [still the case]...Even today, villages are but stopping-off points in the yearly round of seasonal activities which cover huge areas of land and sea....In the face of highly commercial European operations over the centuries, the Moravians might have saved Inuit culture from extinction in Labrador. They arrived from Greenland already fluent in Inuktitut, developed an Inuit phonetic script, and opened trading posts. When a smallpox epidemic in the early 1800s wiped out most of the southern Inuit settlements, they moved them north to avoid further contact with the whites."
- Relevant NFB Canada vignette: www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-o2B8q84xQ&feature=related