Last month in our series about summer arts festivals run by nonprofits, we looked at the partnership between Toronto’s Luminato festival and The New Yorker Magazine. This month, we head way up north, to the town of Inuvik on the Mackenzie River Delta in the Northwest Territories, to look at the challenges and opportunities faced by coordinators of the Great Northern Arts Festival (GNAF).

A northern festival celebrating northern artists

Currently celebrating its 23rd year, GNAF is the premier celebration of aboriginal arts in Canada’s far north. “The goal of the festival is to give northern artists the same exposure and opportunity that southern artists have,” says Sasha Webb, executive director of the festival. “We get about 5,000 people attending each year, which is great considering that Inuvik is a town of about 3,500.”

The festival hosts artists and performers from across the Northwest Territories, Yukon and Nunavut working in a wide range of disciplines — traditional and new. Over the space of about ten days each July, they stage events, hold workshops and mount art displays.

“There will be about 70 artists this year,” says Webb. “The largest number we can accommodate is about 100 artists, including performers.”

Highlights of this years festival include a headline concert by the country and native-roots band Laura Vinson & Free Spirit, a performance by the Fort Good Hope Drummers, a hip-hop night with Iqaluit rapper M.O. with Geothermal MC, a knife throwing competition and an artic fashion show.

Workshops, which form the core of the festival, will feature artist-run classes in such disciplines as soapstone carving, qulliq (oil lamp) making, birch bark basketry, moose hair tufting, drop spindling, knitting, jewelry making and photography.

There will be about 70 workshops at this year’s festival, costing between $65 and $165 per person to attend. The festival also runs an artist’s gallery where works can be purchased, and each festival culminates with an awards ceremony on the closing day.

A new direction

Where in past years the festival was always built around grand themes with titles such as “Old Legends, New Dreams” and “Spirit of the Masters — Past, Present & Future,” organizers this year have taken a different approach.

“We chose themes for years and years,” says Marja van Nieuwenhuyzen, chair of the Great Northern Arts Society, the governing body of the festival, “and none of the artists really ever looked at that. After the last festival we asked ourselves why are we having themes? After 22 years of themes it is pretty hard to come up with something spiffy. You run out of ideas.”

They decided to experiment and give this year’s festival a focus: jewelry. “Because of the downturn in economics,” says Nieuwenhuyzen, “people don’t have the amount of money where they can pay $1,200 for a painting or $1,800 for a carving. We chose jewelry in particular this year to provide the public with some lower priced items.”

A logistics challenge

As can be imagined, coordinating a festival of this scope in such a remote location presents unique challenges. Yukon, NWT and Nunavut combined are over 3.5 million square kilometers. Inuvik sits 2° above the Arctic Circle (at about the same latitude as Murmansk Russia), and is 2,200 km north of Vancouver, just 97 km south of the Beaufort Sea.

“The north is extremely vast,” says van Nieuwenhuyzen. “We fundraise all year long in order to be able to pay for air flights for artists to come to the festival.”

Through a jury selection process, about 10 artists each year are formally invited to the festival, and the rest must apply and be accepted. The invited artists are hosted by the festival, and all their costs are covered, while others artists — once accepted — must pay a nominal fee of $200 for lodging and food.

The artists and their supplies must be brought in from locales as far away as Iqaluit, on Nunavut’s eastern coast, which at 2,840 km away, is closer to Greenland than it is to the North West Territories. A return air flight between Inuvik and Iqaluit can cost over $4,000.

The festival has a budget of $400 — $450 thousand this year, but much of that is in-kind donations such as accommodations from the MackenzieDelta Hotel Group and Aurora College, where dormitories are empty during the summer. The town of Inuvik donates both office space for year-round use by the festival and also the Midnight Sun Complex & Conference Centre that hosts festival proper. “We also have funding through the government of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, and from the Federal Government through Heritage Canada and the Canada Council,” says van Nieuwenhuyzen.

A key sponsor

Helping GNAF overcome geographical challenges is their key sponsor, festival partner Canadian North airlines, which donates flights to bring in some artists as well as discounted rates on airfares and cargo. “They offer an excellent flight and cargo package for the festival each year,” says Webb. “They are a dream sponsor.”

Lisa Hicks, marketing manager for Canadian North, stresses that the airline sees GNAF as a vital part of their overall sponsorship program. “We are owned equally by the Inuit of Nunavut and the Inuvialuit of the Northwest Territories,” she says, “so we want to give back to the communities.”

While the airline does not donate cash under its sponsorship policies, it does budget around $2 million in services and material for donations across the region each year, following a “four pillar” mandate to support northern nonprofits involved in youth, sports, the arts and communities. That support, says Hicks, can be anything from transporting free oranges and candy canes to remote communities at Christmas, to sponsoring large events like GNAf or the Canadian North Midnight Classic, a golf tournament that takes place in Yellowknife each year at midnight on July 21, the longest day of the year when the sun does not set.

The airline will also often donate flights that organizations can use as contest prizes, and they will sometimes provide free advertising in their in-flight magazine and on their website.

During GNAF and certain other festivals, Canadian North also offers discounted airfares to the general public headed to those locations as a way to help encourage attendance at the festivals. “The discount we provided customers for GNAF this year was 30% off our lowest year-round fare,” says Hicks.

Of course, the airline has expectations in return. “It depends on the level of sponsorship,” says Hicks. “If we are one of the top sponsors, we expect exposure.” That can take the form of signage at the event, their logo on advertising, the opportunity to distribute promotional material at the festival and sometimes even the privilege of introducing a major performer. They also like to receive free tickets to the event that can be used in cross promotional contests, or for their own staff, and they insist on exclusivity as airline sponsor.

An uncertain future

Other important corporate sponsors for GNAF include, NorthwesTel, Amirco Security, Matco Transport, ESSO and Imperial Oil. As with any location, the state of the general economy is always a factor when it comes to securing such sponsorship, but specialized factors do apply in such a small, northern community. A natural-gas pipeline originally proposed in the 1970s, to run 1,220 km from the Beaufort Sea down the Mackenzie River Valley to Alberta, has long been a holy grail of development for the region that has been bogged down in governmental review.

Uncertainty over that project and the recent recession caused a shrinkage in the regional economy over the past few years, drawing some corporate funding away from the festival. “There were a lot of businesses that came into town because of the proposed Mackenzie Delta pipeline,” says van Nieuwenhuyzen, “but things have slowed down there considerably.”

This “boom or bust” frontier dynamic has left GNAF with a $50 thousand funding gap. The pipeline was, in fact, approved by the federal government earlier this year, but it will be at least two years before any serious development begins. In the meantime, says Van Nieuwenhuyzen, the festival will be on the hunt a title sponsor to fill the gap for 2012 and beyond. “This year we can scrape by,” she says, “but next year we will not be in the same financial position.”

The arts are often overlooked in contemporary society, considered secondary to business, but no healthy society has ever existed without them. With determination, GNAF continues to tackle challenges and overcome obstacles to make certain that the heritage of our northern artists lives on.

Shaun Smith is a journalist and novelist in Toronto. He was co-founder of the literary event series This Is Not A Reading Series, and he has written extensively about books and the publishing industry for such publications as The Toronto Star, Quill & Quire, The Globe & Mail and CBC.ca. His YA novel Snakes & Ladders was published by the Dundurn Group in 2009.

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