Monica Ittusardjuat was taken from her parents and sent to residential school at the age of seven, at a time when Inuit lived a subsistence way of life in winter camps and roamed around in spring and summer, following animals when they were plentiful. She went to three residential schools: Chesterfield Inlet, NWT (now Nunavut), for primary school, Churchill, Manitoba, for junior high, and St. Norbert, Manitoba, for high school. Monica graduated from McGill University in 1987. While teaching Community NTEP (Nunavut Teacher Education Program) in Nunavut, she earned her M.Ed. through the University of Prince Edward Island. She was the honour student for Baffin Island. She taught for many years in elementary schools, high schools, and teacher education programs, as well as in the Interpreter/Translator Program at Nunavut Arctic College. Monica tried to retire at the age of 60, but the habit of going to work was hard to break. She was the National Inuit Language Coordinator at Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami from 2016 to 2018 and is now Senior Inuktitut Editor at Inhabit Education, which she describes as her dream job.
Kathy Knowles was born in Toronto, Canada and received a Bachelor of Nursing Science degree from Queen’s University. She practiced nursing in various paediatric hospital settings including a year in Moose Factory, a Cree community in northern Ontario. In 1989, Kathy and her husband, John, travelled to Accra, Ghana, West Africa with their four young children. Observing that Ghanaian children in their neighbourhood had no opportunities to read storybooks, Kathy started a weekly reading circle under a tree in their garden. This initiative led to the establishment of the Osu Children’s Library Fund, a non-profit Canadian organization, and the Osu Library Fund, a non-profit Ghanaian charity. Together, these organizations have built eight large community libraries in the Greater Accra region and have helped to create more than 200 libraries in Africa, mainly small-scale initiatives in schools and rural communities. The family returned to Canada in 1993. Since then Kathy has volunteered on a full-time basis from her Winnipeg home with the support of dedicated volunteers. She also works in close partnership with Ghanaian library staff, local government officials and board members, and travels to Ghana twice a year.
