In an Inuit region of the Canadian subarctic, former NHL player (and trained rocket scientist) Joé Juneau is changing the world... one slap shot at a time

Juneau, who went to the finals with the Capitals in 1998, believes his youth program in Nunavik is his greatest accomplishment. Lou Capozzola/SI

If the goal of the modern executive is a corner office with a view of the water, Joé Juneau is first-team all-Fortune. His office in the Kuujjuaq Forum, with its panorama of the village and the broad Koksoak River, offers a glimpse of the timeless and the temporary. Hunkered against the uncompromising elements of the stark and stunning Canadian subarctic, prefab Kuujjuaq, a town of 2,100 and the metropolis of the 14 villages dotted onto northern Quebec's vast Nunavik region, looks as though it could be packed up and carted off in half a day's work.

Juneau, who played 12 seasons in the NHL, has brought grassroots hockey to a place where there are no grass roots. His embryonic Nunavik Youth Hockey Development Program gets 180 boys and girls between the ages of five and 16 -- most of them Inuit, some white -- skating, passing, stickhandling and shooting at the Forum, a rink that seats 200 and doubles as a community center. Juneau is not merely teaching hockey to these children, some of whom recently learned to skate by pushing chairs on ice. He is also proselytizing, selling the therapeutic power of pucks as a way to education, nutrition and a healthy lifestyle. You don't have to be a rocket scientist

To discern the possibilities of such a program in an area where alcoholism rates are critically high, temperatures are frostbite low and the social safety net often sags under the weight of communities in crisis. Yet the man who designed the program is precisely that. Before beginning a career in which he won an Olympic silver medal in 1992, scored 102 points as a Boston Bruins rookie in 1992-93 and went to Stanley Cup finals with the Washington Capitals and the Buffalo Sabres, Juneau, from Pont-Rouge, Que., earned a degree in aeronautical engineering in just three years from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He did it despite studying in a language that he could not speak when he started at the university.

"I always put my RPI degree ahead of what I did in the NHL," says Juneau, who scored 156 goals before retiring in 2004. "But I think this program here in Nunavik is the biggest accomplishment of my life."

Juneau hardly has the social conscience or do-good market cornered among athletes, but his story might be the most moving: He has moved 800 miles north from his opulent home outside Quebec City to Kuujjuaq (pronounced KOO-joo-ack), where he has settled into a modest four-bedroom house with his companion, Elsa Moreau, and their two young daughters. The first-generation rink rats who gambol in the Kuujjuaq Forum are not simply his pupils, not merely statistics in a Band-Aid social experiment. They are also his neighbors. In other words this isn't exactly a charity golf tournament Juneau is staging.

Looking out from his office window on a shimmering October morning last year, as the tamarack trees burned orange and a dusting of snow from the previous night slowly melted, Juneau was asked whether he viewed the village laid out before him as beautiful or ugly. "Beautiful but dirty and disorganized," he replied. A week later, dissatisfied with that response, Juneau sent this e-mail.

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