Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to address the Assembly today on the aspect of storytelling. It is something that we in this Assembly try to do. We spin the odd tall tale, and the odd fantasy sometimes, but there are a couple of events that have recently happened that I would like to draw attention to.
As you entered the Legislative Assembly through the Great Hall, many of us would have seen one very interesting and very innovative aspect of storytelling, and this relates very much, Mr. Speaker, to our concern and belief in literacy and capacity building in the Northwest Territories.
I speak of a display set up by the Northwest Territories Literacy Council. It is called the Story Sack display. It is a hands-on reading activity that started in Great Britain and has spread around the world. Each story sack is a large cloth bag containing a good children's book, toys, puppets and other child-friendly items that parents can use to make the book come alive.
With this project, Mr. Speaker, the Literacy Council hopes that parents who have trouble reading and do not often read with their kids, can get one of these story sacks and get right into the enjoyment of discovering and reading books together with their children.
The Literacy Council has established 20 of these projects in Yellowknife and hope to spin this out more into the communities. Two generous businesses, the Yellowknife Book Cellar and Northland Utilities, have helped to make this a success.
While on the subject of storytelling, Mr. Speaker, it is with great pleasure that I recognize the 50 years of outstanding service of the Third Anglican Bishop of the Arctic, John Sperry, to the people of the Northwest Territories and the Kitikmeot region. John Sperry's book, Igloo Dwellers Were My Church, was presented to Yellowknifers this weekend at the Baker's Centre. The book was designed by Outcrop Communications, a northern company, and it chronicles his stories and outstanding photographs of the traditional life of the central Arctic Inuit from the 1950s and 1960s while he served as a missionary.
This is a first-hand perspective of someone intimately involved in the transition of Inuit lifestyles from nomadic to community life. John Sperry became so proficient in the local language that he translated the New Testament, the Book of Common Prayer, and more than 200 hymns into...