The North

Dene multidisciplinary artist Melaw Nakehk'o joins Sarah Erasmus to talk about her Sobey Art Award longlist nomination and the work that got her there – her path through art school and back home to the Dehcho, her role in the urban moose hide tanning revival, and her contribution to a new exhibition heading to the National Gallery of Canada this June.

Ollie spends time backstage as a group of Yellowknifers prepares a Gershwin musical for the NWT stage, and hears from Kathryn Patel about the online second-hand bookstore she's opening on May 1.

The military held a public meeting in Yellowknife to talk about billions of dollars in coming investment. These are the best questions residents asked.

Ollie is joined by a teachers' association leader and the NWT's education minister to look at what we're expecting when Jordan's Principle cuts fully bite this fall – and what solutions exist, if any.

Plus former MLA Rylund Johnson takes a moment to celebrate the scrapping of seasonal time changes, announced this week.

Yellowknife's draft community plan is out. It calls for 2,000 new homes in the next 25 years, including 1,000 in a new neighbourhood built on green space north of Frame Lake.

City planning director Charlsey White explains what City Hall is trying to do with this plan, Mayor Ben Hendriksen gives us his first take as council starts scrutinizing it, and Becca Denley examines the draft through the lens of healthy urban planning.

Canada says it's spending $35 billion on Arctic defence. Yellowknife and Inuvik expect billions in investment over the next decade. We know that.

But why?

P Whitney Lackenbauer, one of Canada's leading experts in northern defence policy, thinks we're sometimes quite vague about the actual threats underpinning that spending. Here's how he thinks about it.

Emily Blake explores a Yellowknife choir concert that features an original song about the last person imprisoned in Canada for homosexuality, while Ollie Williams hears about a new Northwestel initiative that uses the same satellite internet technology Starlink has popularized – but with a twist.

The spring carnival in Behchokǫ̀ is being postponed because the community's water supply has been in chaos for weeks through so many frozen pipes. That's just the tip of the iceberg, Chief Bertha Rabesca Zoe says. She's at the Liberal Party's convention in Montreal to bug the prime minister for money to fix the issue.

Also on the show: Premier RJ Simpson just said sorry for the hurt caused when wildlife officers searched a Łútsël K'é Dene First Nation cultural camp in 2022. Chief James Marlowe joins us to respond to that apology.

Is there a way to bring Yellowknife's only movie theatre back from the dead? Join us at the theatre's last night, then hear from a documentary producer who's studying the broader phenomenon of small theatres closing – and the society that rescued a theatre in Whitehorse.

Google flew influencers to Yellowknife this month to promote its Pixel phones and Gemini AI. The result – AI videos that manipulate the city's snow sculptures – have the sculptors raising some questions.

Yellowknife snow sculptor Cat McGurk talks through some of the implications as the rapid rise of AI meets a niche northern art form. Plus NWT Tourism's Donna Lee Demarcke looks at the Google trip – and AI's advances – through the lens of northern tourism.