Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I rise to pay tribute to a great lady who died last weekend in Iqaluit after living 107 years on Baffin Island, Leah Nutaraq.

Nutaraq was born in 1886 at Omanardjuaq, Blacklead Island in Cumberland Sound. She lived at Kekerten, other Inuit camps and in the 1950s in Pangnirtung. She moved to Iqaluit in 1962. She has had five children and five husbands, including Nukiruaq, a well known R.C.M.P. special constable.

Nutaraq lived life to the full. Here is how she was described by writer Matthew Fisher in a front-page article in the Globe & Mail, December 31, 1987, when she was 101. "Her face bore distinctive brown frost-bite scars, her eyes were red and watery, but despite these physical reminders of her age and of the 70 years she lived in snow and sod houses and tents, she was animated and loquacious. During an interview of more than five hours her arms frequently chopped the air. Her salt and pepper hair was pulled back in a jaunty braid. She wore seal skin boots and power blue checked trousers under a silvery green print dress. Ms. Nutaraq spoke insistently and with great passion, stopping only occasionally for a sip of tea or a few mouthfuls of boiled Arctic char head. Once or twice during the afternoon her legs moved smartly to demonstrate the complicated steps the whalers taught her."

Nutaraq vividly recalled the arrival of the first Europeans in whaling ships every summer when she was a toddler. She was always willing to tell these stories of the early days, of seeing the black smoke from the coal-powered whaling ships each summer, and of the stories of the great mounds of bowhead whale carcasses told by her grandmother who raised her. She told Mr. Fisher about a ship's doctor who came with the whalers and she recalled how, for the first time, they were told about God in their own language.

I will need some more time, Mr. Speaker.