A Nunavut elder who passed away last week was remembered as a respected northern Inuktitut educator and editor.

Mary Panigusiq Cousins died peacefully on April 22 after a seven-year battle with cancer. At her funeral in Apex on Thursday, businessman and family member Kenn Harper described Cousins as quiet, humble and a very private person, who was also a pioneer in several ways.

"What strikes me the most is that the changes she saw during her lifetime and the uniqueness of her experiences are just about unimaginable to many of us," Harper said in an interview with CBC Radio.

"It must be very unimaginable to the young students that she loved teaching so much. She's remembered today primarily, I think, as a teacher. I think her memory is cherished by the hundreds of students that she taught in Iqaluit over the years."

Born near Pond Inlet in 1938, Cousins was only six years old when she accompanied her grandmother and uncle on a famous east-to-west voyage of the Northwest Passage aboard the RCMP schooner St. Roch with Capt. Henry Larson, Harper said.

When the ship continued on to British Columbia, Cousins and her relatives travelled back to Pond Inlet from Herschel Island — a trip that took two years by dogsled team, he said.

As a teenager, Cousins received an education in Hamilton, Ont., and served six summers as an interpreter aboard the government supply and medical ship C.D. Howe, Harper said.

She was the first editor of Inuktitut magazine around 1959, at a time when it was printed only in Inuktitut syllabic characters.

"It was really the first secular publication that Inuit who read only syllabics had access to," Harper said.

"Mary contributed to it, she was an editor of it, she translated articles for it, she illustrated it. She, in fact, was the personification of Inuktitut magazine for many, many years."

'She loved teaching little kids'

Harper said Cousins helped create the Inuktitut Roman Orthography system in the 1960s, and she spent five months in Ghana in 1963 on an exchange with the federal government. She was also one of the founding members of what is now Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, Canada's national Inuit organization.

In Iqaluit, Cousins earned a Bachelor of Education degree through the northern teacher education program. She taught Inuktitut at the local high school and elementary schools for 30 years, until she retired in 2005, Harper said.

"She loved teaching little kids. That was what she really lived for and excelled at," he said.

Cousins is survived by her six children, three grandchildren, two brothers, four sisters and her mother.