Tuning In The Global Village : Frontier: The Arctic : Network Tunes Into Tradition : Canada’s Inuit broadcasters channel their energy into promoting and protecting their own culture and identity.

Back in 1969, when the government of Canada put its first nationwide communications satellite into orbit, officials made a great pledge: By 1975, Ottawa would deliver Canadian network television to every Arctic village of 500 people or more.

The Canadian Arctic is a vast, forbidding place, where the Inuit--as the Eskimos prefer to be called--live in tiny villages isolated along the seacoasts. So remote are these hamlets that many inhabitants leaped at the chance to get such a link with the rest of the world.

But not the Inuit of Igloolik in the Northwest Territories.

Here, elders made the case that residents naturally spend a lot of time indoors during the winter, when it is dark 24 hours a day and temperatures routinely drop to minus 40 degrees. Under conditions like these, they warned, television would be virtually irresistible--and dangerous--threatening their language, Inuktitut, and their semi-nomadic hunting culture.

Igloolik, population 777, heeded the warning and became the largest community in Canada without television.

As the years rolled by, and television took hold elsewhere in the Arctic, the elders of Igloolik looked wise indeed. In other Inuit villages, such time-honored community pastimes as pool played in cooperative halls, conversation in coffeehouses and even the all-important “radio bingo”--a game in which villages tune in to hear the numbers--fell victim to the hypnotic power of the lighted box.

Worse yet, men stopped going hunting, and women stopped going out to visit their friends. People began to want products flogged on the airwaves. Children, exposed to a torrent of white police detectives, white athletes and white super-heroes, assimilated the unstated but overwhelming message that to be nonwhite in North America was to have no useful role in the affairs of the Earth.

The children also picked up English more easily than the adults, and a generation gap opened as youngsters lost the knack of casual, fluent conversation with their non-English-speaking elders.

Emblematic was the popularity of “The Edge of Night,” widely watched because its plot lines were so simple that non-English speakers could understand what was going on. Life ground to a halt whenever the show came on.

Igloolik, meanwhile, held regular plebiscites, giving residents the chance to reconsider their 1969 decision. They looked out at their neighbors already hooked up to the world that television offered and, for years, continued to vote against it.

But even as the people of Igloolik were rejecting TV outright, Inuit activists elsewhere decided to fight TV’s pernicious influence by taking control of it.

In 1978, after three years of lobbying, a political organization called the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada won access to a government communications satellite and was given money to establish an experimental Inuit network.

The Inuit dispatched a small group of trainees to New York to learn TV production techniques. Back home, the trainees used their experimental satellite time to broadcast such unconventional fare as traditional “throat-singing” concerts, firefighter training sessions and homemade hunting movies. They also exploited the two-way broadcasting system to let villagers chat with young relatives who had been sent away to school far in the south.

The Canadian government deemed the Inuit experiment such a success that it licensed a permanent Inuit network, called the Inuit Broadcasting Corp., in 1981.

Today, the IBC still tries to cater to Inuit wishes--which means a non-Inuit viewer would probably be appalled by the heavy volume of gory hunting shows.

There is a northern-style counterpart to “Sesame Street” called “Takuginai” (“Look Here”), which eschews anthropomorphism. Since the Inuit want to preserve their ancient hunting culture, they disapprove of southern-style children’s shows that make animals look too cute to kill. “Takuginai” has the usual assortment of puppets and animations, but the only talking animals are a lemming, a raven and a sea gull--creatures the Inuit never hunt.

As a role model for Inuit youngsters, IBC offers “Super Shamou,” a mild-mannered caribou hunter who slinks out of his tent, straps on his cape and flies off to rescue Inuit children in trouble.

There have been dramatizations of ancient Inuit legends, a show promoting midwifery and a compelling drama about the woes of alcoholism and wife-beating--too common in the Arctic.

IBC fare may look amateurish. But people in the Arctic swear by the network, saying that if it weren’t for its Inuktitut programming, their 4,000-year-old language would be doomed.

Three audience surveys to date have all shown that 95% of Inuit watch one to three hours of IBC programming per week--a better record than any single broadcaster in southern Canada can claim.

After the IBC was up and running, the people of Igloolik held yet another plebiscite. This time, they decided to allow television into their remote community.

Today, the village has its own small IBC production studio, and a locally produced show is one of the most popular on the network. It features true-life hunting stories and is noted for its cinematography.

But if Igloolik was to get the IBC, it had to take everything else that came in through the satellite dish as well. The village cable service now carries, among other things, the Detroit CBS and NBC affiliates, a home shopping channel and music videos.

On a recent evening, teen-agers were sitting around the TV set in the local guest house, watching the American film “Look Who’s Talking.”

“What is there to do in Igloolik?” a visitor asked.

Came the answer: “Watch TV.”