Northerners call southern Canada 'outside'. When they return from business or vacation in the South, they go back 'in' to the North.

Inuvik is the furthest point north connected to the Canadian and United States highway systems. For that reason alone, the mostly-Inuit village has become an exotic destination for tourists from Canada, the United States, and Germany. Adventurous German tourists, in particular, are found in the Canadian North.

Inuvik, which means 'place of man,' was originally built to replace the old town of Aklavik built on the low delta of the Mackenzie River. Alavik was a muddy trapping and trading settlement prone to flooding. In the 1950s, the federal government created a new town site on a higher bank, just inside the treeline. Not everyone agreed to move and Aklavik remains alive as a small community of holdouts.

With government services and investment concentrated at Inuvik, the new site rapidly became Canada's biggest community above the Arctic Circle. Today, Inuvik has 8,000 permanent residents - Inuit, Dene First Nation, Métis, and people of European descent.

A boom occurred during the 1970s when energy companies found oil and gas under the Beaufort Sea and wanted to build a pipeline down the Mackenzie Valley to the markets of southern Canada.

The prospect of such a huge construction project, and the continuing presence of an above-ground pipe, caused the northern Native Peoples to examine their own needs and goals. Finally, their objections to such disruption killed the project entirely and the boom years of Inuvik disappeared instantly.

Today, Inuvik is the main point of contact between the Inuit and non-Native cultures and economies.

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Before the Dempster Highway was punched through to Inuvik from the Yukon, the Inuit and non-Native contact was brief and infrequent. Coast Guard crews were treated like celebrities when they arrived each spring to open the short navigation season. The boats that followed with supplies for the year were all that most residents saw of southern goods.

Today, with the road open year round, the sense of isolation is diminished. Trucks can bring in fresh food and supplies at any time and strangers are no longer curiosities to the inhabitants.

Visitors, however, still find much at which to marvel. Though southern foods are easily available, Inuit hunters continue to feed their families from the land and the sea. The roofs of Inuvik's factory-built houses sprout the antlers of Caribou tossed there by the owners. Strips of whale blubber and fillets of Arctic char hang to dry on wooden racks.

With 24-hour daylight in mid-summer, Inuit children are allowed to play freely around their homes until early hours of the morning. People still dance and chant to the beat of skin drums. Annual sports days feature the traditional 'good woman' contest - a race to see who can start a fire and boil water the fastest.

Because the ground is permanently frozen, and would turn to mud if thawed, water and sewage pipes run through above-ground conduits between buildings.

While southerners often suffer a feeling of isolation, Inuvik's Inuit residents can feel the opposite sense of being over-crowded. Many leave periodically to camp in solitude far away from town.

Inuit families live in houses equipped with the usual North American range of appliances - including televisions. Those televisions bring into the North scenes of a way of life that is still culturally remote from theirs. This radical difference between Inuit traditional ways of life and the styles portrayed on television may be a source of frustration and unhappiness among young people.

This frustration, and the absence of college-level schools, leads many young people to leave Inuvik for cities further south. Many later return, having decided they in fact prefer life in the North.

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