Ideas - How Inuk activist Aaju Peter learned to 'decolonize' her mind

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

Aaju Peter was 11 years old when she was taken from her Inuk community in Greenland and sent away to learn the ways of the West. She lost her language and culture. The activist, lawyer, designer, musician, filmmaker, and prolific teacher takes IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed on a tour of Iqaluit and into a journey to decolonization that continues still. *This episode originally aired on January 29, 2025.

Did you know that it was once illegal to shop on Sundays? That's true for when I was born. I remember this, and I'm not that old. I'm not, okay? Leave me alone. Anyway, I'm Phelan Johnson, and I host See You in Court, a new podcast about the cases that changed Canada and the ordinary people who drove that change. From the drugstore owner who defied the Lord's Day, to the migma man who defended his treaty right to fish, to the gay teacher who got fired and fought back. Find and follow, see you in court, wherever you get your. your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Oh, I'm in.

Okay. Oh, it looks like I is there now. Ah, it's a miracle. Technology isn't as bad as I was thinking. From her corner office overlooking the bay, Ayo Peter has just connected on her smartphone with her students, their teachers from around the Arctic. What communities are we here?

Cambridge Bay, Nowhurt, New York. Cambridge Bay, Now Yet, Al-Viat, Kugavu, and Rankin Inlet. Okay. At one point, she holds up to the camera a palm-sized windmill of five silver petals, the beginnings of an exquisite brooch made of shiny sealskin. They're so beautiful. Sealskin is so beautiful. It's so forgiving because you can have horrible stitches and it's still,

Turns out really nice. Passing on just one snippet of traditional knowledge from the vast Inuit homeland. One thing I want to ask you is which way is Greenland from here? Right there. You knew right away. Yeah. From here directly over is Nook, my home community. Greenland is where Ayu Peter was born,

but it was here in a Caliwite where she was reborn by reclaiming her Inuit culture. It's a community that welcomed me as one coming from the outside and totally made me feel so at home that I think that I'm part of this community. Where does it reside in your heart? in the center.

Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad, and welcome to Accaliate, where Ayo Peter's life has toggled between loss and healing and between learning and teaching and back again. Ayo Peter invited us to her home for what she called, proper welcome, lighting a coolic or a traditional oil lamp and making us a cup of tea. Nobody, none of them had ever lit a lamp, which is incredible. It is incredible.

It's such an essential. 30, 40-year-old people never lit a cullab. Her tiny office has incubated some big ideas, among them a seal-skin clothing line and a book. I inherited this place in 90s. seven and the guy was a builder so he had put in this big window here looking over the bay i see all the seasons i see the changing of nature every day and then he also put one upstairs in my bedroom i was so lucky to get this unit um my workstation as i call it this is my office is facing Froebyshe Bay, Tashu Yakshya.

Frobisha came and unfortunately the English name is Frobishi Bay. But that which looks like a great big lake is the Inuit name for the bay here. Can you repeat it? Tejou Yachtra. What does it mean to you to be able to look at this when you're working? It is incredibly calm It brings me calmness And I'm always amazed how

Amazing nature is Like I had to clean like hell Before you guys came for days and days But I look at nature It never needs It cleans itself And so that's amazing It's absolutely beautiful

It is really calming And you can see all pictures, all kayaks of my children's great-grandparents and grandparents. And they're all inferred. Their old pictures are from 1939 Canadian Geographic. We found them where my children's great-grandfather is just a little boy with the great-grandmother wearing the seal outfit so my daughter and I just made them from the pictures you can see what the great-grandmother is wearing we just made the outfits so that the great-grandchildren could have the same outfits so those is that seal skin those are all seal skin this is ring seal

because it has rings and this is harp seal called beater it's about a year old harp seal Before she became a vocal activist, a lawyer and a member of the Order of Canada for preserving and promoting Inuit culture, I.U. Peter made it calliolate her home. It was 1981. She had married into the community. Then she became a a voracious student of Inuit culture. She agreed to show us around. We started our tour by heading to the neighborhood where her education began. So I'm under your orders.

If you can just tell me which way to go. We can just go up that way and go to apex. Have you been to hip-hens? I have not. No. I left there for 14 years. What is over there? It's a small community where my in-laws were living. and that's where I was living.

That was the original community before. Yeah. What's it like here in the winter? Fantastic. It gets, some days it gets really cold. Like how cold? Probably minus 60. Oh God.

With the wind or higher. Yeah. Follow that good. It is fantastic. I was teaching. In Arbjad, where it was minus 60. And, you know, I have to walk. So you just dress properly.

And it's fantastic. You can really feel you're alive when it's like cold. Oh, because it's cold. Because it's cold, it makes you, oh, the air is so amazing. But if you are properly dressed, it's like being a hand in a beautiful glove. Do you remember those first few days you set foot here? Yeah. Just remind us of those.

What were they like? When I first came, I was comparing it to how Greenland looks. And now I realize that was unfair. Because Greenland has been colonized for 300 years. They have had a lot more time with. And Denmark, of course, is supposed to. importing the infrastructure and more European in appearance. And that's just appearance.

And I realized I was basing it on appearance. And now I realize you can't judge a community by its appearance. Now I realize that the people here are much more welcoming and so kind. They see you and people recognize you by looking at you when they're passing you and they always smile there it doesn't matter what day they're having they're not going to impose it on you but I also find that since I learned the language since I learned the skills here what I say when I do a ceremony welcoming ceremony is people welcome you then the onus is on you to take that welcome you're only you only feel as welcome if you reciprocate

Like, if you take that guacam and reciprocate and accept it, yeah. And you've done that, obviously. Yeah. The 43 years. Yeah. This way? Yeah, okay. So we're going, it feels like we're going higher right now. We are higher, yeah.

So what was it like living in Apex? I really, really loved it. I hardly ever came to the Kalwait because I was so used to that very small community. I followed my mother-in-law everywhere. We would be teaching Sunday school, and then we built a hut, called the Rammak, a big hut

for sewing. That's where we would all congregate all the elders, all the mothers, all the children. We would have, they would make a lot of food, country food. So I'm starting to get a sense

that your mother-in-law was a huge influence in terms of relearning some of these skills. Everything. I would be pestering her. Okay, how do you say yesterday? How do you say today?

How do you say it tomorrow? Like, every word, And all those songs that we teach now the students, poor lady had to deal with me because I didn't have a recorder. I didn't have a cell phone. You had to memorize. I had to have her sing over and over and over.

What was her name? Mary. Mary. So is it accurate to say she was a big influence in your relearning to be? Absolutely. She taught me everything. Yeah.

Am I going straight through? Yeah. Okay. All this was not here. So when I went to adult education, living in the Apex, I would just walk all the way where North money is. Oh, my God. Even in the winter?

Oh, yeah. Oh, God. Wow. That's why we love living here because if it was less harsh, there would be way too many southerners coming here. Good. Aside from your mother-in-law, who else would have had that kind of influence on who you are today? It's all the members of that community where I was helping my mother-in-law build the hut where we would all get together. It was a real sense of community.

We would sew, they would teach us how to sew, they were very, very gentle. like in the old way of being, very gentle to the human soul. And they actually, it takes a, they say it takes a community to raise a child, right? So it was that community that raised me on how to decolonize my mind was and my way of being was unfortunately really European.

When I was born in 1960, that year I was born, there was a policy that's called G60, where you're dynicizing, you're modernizing, you're teaching little Greenlandic children, the language of the Danes, and then the smart ones who, be taken and sent off to Denmark for three months. So I think there were five of us going to Denmark for three months. That was amazing because you read about trees, you read about apples, you read about pigs, and finally you get to see what all that is about. I was so fascinated.

But then my father, who is a teacher, wanted me to stay longer. So I ended up staying much longer because he wanted me to have a good future. That's what we all believe, that having a good education is a good future. Now we realize, okay, children need more than a good education. It came at a great cost. Yeah, I realized that, yeah. But it was an amazing experience. And then to move here and learning how the system is here,

I think at the end of the day I have learned so much by living in Denmark and by living here and by looking at different languages and cultures. But I think I look at it like that because I ended up with the Inuit who are amazing. amazing people, very accepting, very kind, and their approach to teaching or being. I call it the Inuit Way of Being is beautiful. Can you take us to the moment when you discovered that the Inuit homeland goes far

beyond what you knew it to be as a child? I was in Newk. I had just returned from Denmark. And in Denmark, I learned all about European history and the kings and everything about Europe. I never heard anything about my own history. I just thought that's the way world is. When I returned back to Greenland in 78, then there was a big comfort.

the biggest conference of Inuit from Alaska, Canada, and Greenland, all congregated in the community where my parents were. And I had no idea that there were other Inuit. I was super amazed. Oh, these are the same people, but they're in Canada. I saw the first guy and I grabbed him and he became my husband. Canadian. Canadian from here. I think I could have chosen anybody, but I was so fascinated. Because at the time, I couldn't speak my own language. I was looked down upon your Greenlandic. You should be able to speak Greenlandic. And I blamed myself. And it wasn't until recently that I realized, well, I was learning Danish, English, German, France, and Latin. But nobody thought to teach me my own language.

And I blamed myself for all those decades for not being able to speak my own language. It wasn't my fault. I was not taught. And there was no way I could have spoken with anybody because they placed us so far apart that our immersion into the Danish culture and language was instantaneous. Yeah. told her story in an acclaimed documentary about her life, her journey from a schoolgirl in Denmark to becoming an activist on the world stage.

In order for our hunters to provide for our communities and for our families, we are totally dependent on our hunters catching the seal. Even though it was not aimed at our economy and our way of life, it had a devastating effect on us. what would you like us to do? Do you want us to be sustainable and traditional or do you want us to be part of the modern economy? Guess what? It is our choice.

The film is titled Twice Colonized. The words twice colonized appear in much of your work. Can you explain what you mean by a twice colonized? It's just that I have to do everything on the extreme. Being colonized once was not good enough. So we do it all over again. Yeah. And that's where the term came.

As a child, you don't realize what world you're in. You just take it for granted. And then when I moved here, I realized, oh, this is also a colonized place. And the Inuit have to follow the Western decree of you have to think like this, you have to be like this, you have to act like this. So that's why I called it. I was colonized twice. However, it made me much stronger and much bigger. I have four lakes that I can walk on.

I have four languages that I can use. and four different cultures, backgrounds. Yeah. It's not meant to be the way that the film is being shown. Like, I was parasailing in Mexico. They should have put that in there. I was doing yoga outside in Mexico. We were doing so many great things that being twice colonized

is not. a penalty for me it is i have learned so much i had gained so much i can listen to or watch any shows in any of those languages and there's no division i gained so much from all those different cultures and languages you correct me if i'm wrong but you kind of talked about it being a superpower Yeah. I think it has given me what the lady Natsuk said to me once, as I told you yesterday, all the hardships and all the things that you're going to just blows your balloon. It's like a balloon being blown bigger, but the balloon never bursts. It just expands and makes you stronger.

Yeah, that's how I look at it. Is decolonizing a process that has an end, or is it something that just has to be ongoing? I think it's, for me, it's an ongoing. thing because when I started talking about it, we didn't even know what that was. I think it's individual. I was realizing that every cell of me was colonized. Yeah. It's a process. It can never end because I do love drinking wine and smoking and having coffee. I do like all the conveniences that it has brought, but I don't need to be overpowered mentally.

I can start learning. When I was teaching the students today, and when I went for a small break, it reminded me that the Inuit gave me so much that I have the pleasure, opportunity, to give back what I had learned, and that's so cool. Is it a given all that you lost as a child, can you really reclaim it all, do you think? No. No. I think if I had just stayed in Greenland and not gone to school, I wouldn't have known what a treasure the inner culture is, what a treasure the language is, because I would just have been living there.

I think the loss of language and community and my culture really made me so hungry. I was starving for all that knowledge. And here we are in Apex. Yeah. It's pretty. I love it here. Is this a river or?

There was a bridge here but now it looks like they're putting a new bridge. Yeah. Yeah, that was the women's shelter. I don't know if that's still the women's shelter. So what's your involvement with the women's shelter? I only helped my mother-in-law. I helped her through that whole process of starting it. So you were co-founder?

I was just interpreting. Okay. Okay, so this red one here? After we moved from that little house, I'll show you. This became our house. These people have added to it. This addition was not there, but that's where we lived

and we had a fireplace where I would just bake our bread every day. That was amazing. So you had all these different influences in your life, which, as you say, you've drawn on to make you who you are. Can you talk about what happened when you also acquired the language of your ancestors? That was incredible.

Having forgotten my own language and then we're learning, it's a different dialect, but as I was learning the dialect from the Inuit of Canada, it's the same language, just different variations. And over time, I was sitting, with my daughter in 1986, so this was like five years after. I was sitting with my mother-in-law when I realized that I was helping her, I was interpreting for her in English because she was setting up the shelter for battered women and then the

food bank as well. And I thought, oh, I'm interpreting for my mother-in-law. That's when I realized that I had learned her language and the English language enough that I could help her. So what did it add to A.U. Peter, your body of knowledge. Like, what door did it unlock beyond that? I was starving when I came. I was starving for the language and for the culture that I was deprived of. So I started interviewing elders all about everything, traditional songs, traditional knowledge,

and I went on for years, even when we were taking the law program. After one year, we were going nuts because it was all the Western concepts that we were learning. So we demanded we need an Inuit elder who knows law, traditional Inuit law. So we got that. and then I would be interpreting for him. And I learned so much. But I have learned so much from the innate elders because I had to have it.

It was like I would die if I didn't get it. Yeah. You're listening to. to my conversation with Inook activist, lawyer, teacher, designer, musician and filmmaker, I.U. Peter, In A Callowate. We're a podcast and a broadcast. Heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on U.S. Public Radio, across North America, on SiriusXM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, on World Radio Paris, and around the world at cbc.ca.ca.com. ideas. You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyed.

What kind of person takes on the law? Can they ever really know what they're getting into? A really tough-looking guy came up to us and said, are you part of this gay case? My family started getting death threats. I wasn't able to go outside alone anymore. I'm Phelan Johnson, host of See You in Court, a new podcast about the cases that changed Canada and the ordinary people who made history. This is David and Goliath we have here. Find and follow. See you in court wherever you get your podcasts. When I.U. Peter moved to E. Caliwit, she had a lot to gain.

A new family. Inuit language and Inuit traditions she still practices every day, things like sewing with sealskin and catching her own char just a few meters away from her house. She went to law school, became an activist, and a mother. Calewitt, however, was for IU also a place of unbearable loss. It was where she lost her son to suicide. A dark episode she explored in her documentary twice. colonized.

Tragically, it's not a unique experience in the Arctic. How much conversation is going on right now about trauma? Nothing. Yeah. Yeah. We don't even know. I didn't even know what trauma was when I was asked. I had to look it up.

And then I concluded, well, I am trauma. I'm the working example of what trauma is. Yeah. Ayur, this is a hard question, but there's, just in the short time we've talked to you, loss is a big factor in making you who you are. It comes up a lot. First, your culture, and then, as you mentioned, miscarriage and your son. Yeah, it was when also when my other boyfriend, my white boyfriend, I became pregnant and he didn't want me to have that child. And I remember

them injecting me with something so that I would fall asleep still begging not to. And when I woke up, that was heartbreaking. That was a big loss. I didn't get all that. I'm so sorry. I put all the

anchor to him. Yeah. You talked about how the sum total of these loss also helped you be who you are today. Yeah. Yeah. How do you get past? Because you cannot have empathy.

I'm sure you could, but you can't have the empathy if you haven't gone through all that pain. What I wanted to show in the movie was also you have to be authentic. I demanded that it has to show everything. me being angry, me being disappointed me, being happy. I mean, if you, like with the other films, only portray the good sides, it's nobody lives like that. Yeah. In the six months, I've had to try to take my little heart

and try to mend it again, and then try to take my soul back. And what it did, this process, what it was, it focused me. It is in my awakening, now that I'm awakening to be with the living, All the shit that blurred my whole vision, just cleared. All this shit is, I'm devoting 24-7, so many years into nothing. I mean, nothing. I'm just breathing and eating and shedding. Breathing, eating, and shedding, and then sleeping.

That was not the role of being born into this world. You're born to this world to make a difference. I was super struck in the film about where you suddenly make a turn after the loss that you had with your son, that you're on a mission. And you take that anger and that sadness, and it propels you. Yeah.

Well, I always had that. I think it was the loss when I was 18. when I realized, oh my God, there's other Inuit, and how come I don't speak my own language? I think, and also because we had a very harsh childhood, that already, I think the first five years of your life, they say are the most important in forming who you are. We learn to be self-sustaining and,

depend on ourselves and that was an unfortunate early upbringing but would I change it? No. You wouldn't? No. Because I can't imagine a life without all the hardship. Yeah. And the knowledge? Yeah.

Yeah. We'll keep moving. Yeah. So this looks a bit more, like, busier and newer. This is the college. Yeah. This is where you teach. Yeah.

What's a call? Arctic College. That's the courthouse. Okay. That's where I was articling. That's the swimming pool and running around on treadmill place. Firefighters. It's a bowling exercise club here too.

I mean, there was only 3,000, let's say, 500 when I moved here. It has grown so big since Nunavut. And not just physically it's grown. With people, yeah, grown in numbers and physically. But has it grown as a society or as a community? No. No. No?

In Kaluid, in particular, we have so many outsiders that do not make themselves. part of the community, all they do is go to work, go back home. Traditionally, we are social, very social people. We need to hang out together, eat together and make a community together. But here, if I had the numbers, I would guess there's probably 50-50, outsiders 50%, not so in the smaller communities. smaller communities are much more, Inuit communities. Here it's the administration.

All the jobs filled by none, most of the jobs filled by non-inuit and it's unfortunate. There's so much construction. I know it's incredible. That place is so built up now. So is this, is it a good thing? It happened really fast. Yeah, too fast maybe.

It happened too fast. We went from the stone dates to the internet, basically, and we lost, we have lost so much. But I'm hoping that once we become a northern country, we'll take back our own traditions more, we will speak our own language, we'll come up with our own. with our own, how we used to function in a modern setting, but not being ruled and dictated by outside. Does it feel like that sometimes, though, like that there's too much influence from the outside? Absolutely, yeah.

The fact that we don't communicate, that we don't talk about it, is also a big disappointment, not disappointment. It's a big loss, because we have to talk about these influences, the buildings, the laws, the suicide, everything, trauma in particular. It has to become a language that we speak with each other. Well, and for anyone who comes to this community, I would presume, too, right? The law that I want to pass is you have to have a culture. central sensitization before you get here.

And the other requirement is that you have to smile at people and see them. Not just pretend you're in Toronto and not seeing anybody. That's very unkind. Yeah. Because it's a form of welcoming is a form of recognizing that you're another human being and I see you. Yeah. At what point did you realize that kind of the traditional idea of borders is not the reality? I was taking part in a John Walker documentary about Arctic sovereignty.

And when I would be sailing on cruise ships, I remember going into small communities where the elder or the person with authority, would welcome us, all of us, by cutting up a seal and by sharing. And I realized that the inuit way of showing sovereignty is welcoming. You welcome people. And the more you can welcome people and the more you can share what the land gives you, that's your autonomy, that's your authority as opposed to borders. as opposed to trying to keep people out, it is the land demands, respect, the animals demand, joy. And by sharing and by showing how much we can welcome people is the biggest authority autonomy.

That's not an answer I expected. I thought you were going to say something like, you know, their Inuit in Greenland and here, and that the borders that have been drawn by the modern world are irrelevant. Do those borders mean anything? Interesting because I have been thinking that if I plant the seed enough, that the Arctic will become its own country once again. Like the Russian, Alaska, Canadian and Greenlanders will become the top of the world, that we are, because we are descended from the same people.

We speak the same language. We come from the same heritage. And I do believe that I'm sure my granddaughter could push for that. How far do you think reality is from that? I don't think it is far. We have so many small people. It's not far. They're taking on their own identity.

their own heritage, and I don't think it's far from becoming a reality. We are our territory. It's unfair that we are our territory. There's 10 provinces and three territories, and we are treated differently under the Constitution. And I think Lunawood is the last one in the development part of becoming a province. but that is just so arbitrary. Like, who made up that story?

That is really treating us as second-class citizens. In any event, once at the end of the day, my wish is that Inuit once again get rid of all their colonizers and then become one country recognized as the Inuit homeland. Kulupaiyu si, Kulupapaiyu si, Ayya yohyunni,

Ayy, ya yuoyunna, kamyotah, amic, alummik, daktalativok, d'allat tivok, ala, Sivu aliyu aliyunah. Ayu is reciting the words of a juggling song. For the teachers,

in her sewing class to use with their own youngest students. telling a story. It's a collection of many different words. In part of it, who are your uncles? And then the names of the different uncles are set there. But it's a fun, it's a fun sentence structure that you just learn and you learn to say it. But you're right, Ellen, and some different communities have different versions of it. But it's the same recipe. It's so cool to see all the Aphiard students busy away, making things. I know it's so relaxing, isn't it?

It's peaceful and you're not rust. You're concentrating. And what happened yesterday and what will happen tomorrow or later is out of the mind because you're concentrating right now. And it's a great skill to pass on to children or young people away from phones and away from computers. You're just concentrating here and now. And people say that being here and now is the best, how you best can spend your time, is here and now. After more than four decades here, IU the student, has also become IU the teacher.

teacher. She teaches both traditional skills as well as Inuktitut, a language she herself had to learn from scratch. So you gain the language you were interpreting. I wonder what it's like for you to be now passing it on to new generations, the language. It is so amazing. It gives me so much joy. And I think the students know it because we have so much fun. It's so empowering. I was, when one student or another would take me, drive me home, I would ask, so how come you're taking? How come you're learning the language?

How come you're taking this program? And they say it's, they feel like they're missing something. They're not whole. It's part of a heritage that they have, they have a right to have, but they didn't get. And I felt exactly the same. And it's so empowering. Like when you're lighting the lamp, when you're taking something that was taken away from you

and you're taking it back, it just makes the puzzle greater, yeah. Even though we don't have the puzzle greater. the ancient knowledge, we've had to be like a train track. One leg in one culture, one leg in the other culture. And it has been an amazing juggling exercise because there's so much demand on us to know everything, right? And I think it's an unfair demand. However, we are so fortunate to have learned from our elders.

We are so fortunate to learn the English language and learn so much from the outside world. So we are in that world. Fortunately, unfortunately, I don't know. I think I'm blessed to have those experiences. And you're so resistant to the idea of being an elder, But that's what you just described. I, maybe in another 20 years, if smoking doesn't kill me,

I have so much more to learn. Learning never stops, really, though. That's right. That's why I'm going back to school in February. You're going back to school. You're teaching and you're learning. Yeah. What are you going to learn that you don't know already?

It's a higher level of, you know, to do it that we never learned. It is amazing. What do you hope to do with that? I wanted to go and do my master's of law at Juvick. I was supposed to start this spring. But then I thought, well, my knowledge is not enough. So I'm thinking with all that knowledge that I'll gather, I'll be able to write the book that I want to write

which the title is No Resentment Judd Sissons who was the traveling judge in the Northwest Territories before Nunavut became Wood was traveling and he wrote in his book about Inuit

that these are the first people he has ever met who hold no resentment Oh, my God. That's so needed in the world. Oh, my God. So I wanted to, if I could, write about that. It's extraordinary.

No reason. What can we learn from that, do you think, given this world that we live in today? People who are bombing each other, people who are killing innocent children, and women and I mean that is so unjust

holding something from generations ago and you go fighting for what? You don't even know for a religion or for something holding no resentment and forgiveness, empathy would be amazing.

I think that the earth is also suffering from all that anger and resentment and a war fighting. I think Mother Earth would breathe easier, take a deep breath, and be able to recover if the people living off it would grow up and smarten up. What does Ikariwa mean to you? It's a community that welcomed me as one coming from the outside and totally made me feel so at home that I think that I'm part of this community.

Yeah. where does it reside in your heart in the center you came here as a young woman how would you describe what Akaliwa made you what are you because of this experience of 43 years in Akaliwa?

I wasn't humble when I came. I didn't know what being humble was and being kind was and being non-judgmental. That's what I have learned from the Inuit. I came and then I wanted to learn how to sew. And I told my mother-in-law, I would like to learn how to sew. And she asked, what would you like to learn how to sew? So, and I said, I would like to sew a pair of camille, the footwear,

not knowing that I had chosen the hardest. Like if I had chosen anything else, it would have been fine. But she never said, no, you can do that. It's too hard. She said, yes, sure. Here, let me teach you. And we did this teachers so many times because that was the hardest thing to make water-proof stitching like this,

so the water doesn't get in. And my biggest lesson from that experience was always guiding. Yes, of course you can. Not saying, no, you can, that's too hard. That would have immediately made me feel, no, I can't do that. I can't. So that was the approach of the Inuit that I learned. beautiful approach.

You were listening to Becoming Ayo Peter, my conversation with the Inuk activist, lawyer, and teacher in Akaliwit. Thank you to Ayu Peter for her warm welcome and for all her help in making this episode and a few others happen. Excerpts were from the film twice colonized, available to watch on CBC Gem. This episode was produced by me, Nala Ayyed, and Pauline Holsworth. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for Ideas. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval.

Senior producer Nicola Luxchich. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayat. I'm going to leave you now with Iyup Peter playing guitar. and leading a sing-along after our first ever Massey lecture in Akaliwit, which she co-hosted with me. By the way, if you haven't heard that lecture, you can find it on our Massey's website, cbc.ca.ca slash massies. Stay with the song until the end for an explanation of the lyrics.

who bea sup comea I'm I'm you know my that's who

um I'm who my who bea so ma'am So

that's you that bang that's you obea shulunga nama a sonya

kuhama obea suprunga ullummii i'ma tsunami kishima ma That song is by Charlie Adam, Charlie Adam. And Kulvea Supunga Ullumi Inogama, it starts with,

I'm so happy that I'm alive today. It could also mean Inok is a person that I'm so happy that I'm in it. Both ways will work. And tsunami is human. I'm not thinking about anything. I'm just so happy. And even, and if I meet anybody or if I come across anything,

I'll just smile because I'm so happy. Why did you think we needed to hear that last night? Because from recent what I had either heard or seen was you have to leave the audience with something uplifting, something they can take away because you can't just, if we had just left yesterday, it would have just fizzled out, right? It's like this big big thing and the air

goes out of the balloon. No, we had to just go out with a bang and people were happy. You have to leave people happy and wonderful. Thank you for doing that. You're welcome. I love it. Thank you so much. You can drop me at North Park Thank you. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.ca slash podcasts.