Nunavut History Is the largest and newest of the territories of Canada; it was separated officially from the vast Northwest Territories on April 1, 1999 via the Nunavut Act[1] and the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement Act[2], though the actual boundaries were established in 1993. The creation of Nunavut resulted in the first major change to Canada's map since the incorporation of the new province of Newfoundland (including Labrador) in 1949. The capital, Iqaluit (formerly Frobisher Bay) on Baffin Island, in the east, was chosen by the 1995 Nunavut Capital Plebiscite. Other major communities include Rankin Inlet and Cambridge Bay. Nunavut also includes Ellesmere Island in the north and the eastern and southern portions of Victoria Island in the west. Nunavut is both the least populated and the largest of the provinces and territorities of Canada. It has a population of only 30,782 spread over an area the size of Western Europe. If Nunavut were a sovereign nation, it would be the least densely populated in the world: Nearby Greenland, for example, has almost the same area and twice the population. Nunavut means 'our land' in Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit. Its inhabitants are called Nunavummiut, singular Nunavummiuq. Along with Inuktitut, Inuinnaqtun, English, and French are also official languages. Geography The territory covers about 1.9 million square kilometres of land and water in Northern Canada including part of the mainland, most of the Arctic Archipelago, and all of the islands in Hudson Bay, James Bay, and Ungava Bay (including the Belcher Islands) which belonged to the Northwest Territories. This makes it the fourth largest subnational entity (statoid) in the world. If Nunavut were a country, it would rank 13th in area, after the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nunavut has land borders with the Northwest Territories on several islands as well as the mainland, a border with Manitoba to the south of the Nunavut mainland, and a tiny land border with Newfoundland and Labrador on Killiniq Island. It also shares an aquatic border with the provinces of Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba. The creation of Nunavut created Canada's only "four corners", at the intersection of the boundaries of Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan, at 60