Ideas - North on North: Stories from the Only Independent Publisher in the Canadian Arctic

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

Inhabit Media are the only independent publishing company in the Canadian Arctic. They are at the forefront of a new era of Inuit literature and film. From Iqaluit, IDEAS producer Pauline Holdsworth speaks with writers and illustrators about telling the stories of their home and finding creativity from the land. 

When a body is discovered 10 miles out to sea, it sparks a mind-blowing police investigation. There's a man living in this address in the name of a deceased. He's one of the most wanted men in the world. This isn't really happening. Officers are finding large sums of money. It's a tale of murder, skullduggery and international intrigue. So who really is he? I'm Sam Mullins and this is Sea of Lies from CBC's Uncovered, available now.

This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. Where are we sitting right now? We're currently sitting in the Sylvia Grinnell Park, or as we call it now, Kunga? Kunga. Yes, I'm still quite learning Inutiduk, but we've tried to change the name. Even though this park was named in her honor, Sylvia Grinnell never set foot here. It was 1861.

An American explorer trying to discover the fate of the Franklin expedition named the river that flows beside a Caluate after the daughter of a wealthy New York businessman who bankrolled his expedition. He wrote, I see not why this river should not have an American name. Its waters are an emblem of purity. I know of no fitter name to bestow upon it than that of the daughter of my generous, esteemed friend, Henry Grinnell. What does the kind of true name of this place mean? Well, it's the name of the river, a big river.

Inuitituk is very literal. Iqalui is place of many fish because there are a lot of fish here. Banik duq means place of the bull caribou. Banik. So I love that idea and just we see it, we name it as it is. Not so much after people, but more after its true self. Ashley Kilavik-Savart is one of a generation of Inuit writers rewriting the story of the North,

telling deeper, truer stories about their home. After decades of being bombarded by outsider names and outsider stories, we're simply never seeing this place reflected at all. I grew up in kindergarten and I remember drawing myself as a blonde, blue-eyed little girl standing next to an apple tree that I had never ever seen and wouldn't see for maybe about 13 years. But through our books, we are sharing who we are. Many of these new stories about the North have found a home at Inhabit Media.

Headquartered in Iqaluit, it's the only independent publishing company in the Canadian Arctic. They publish everything from children's books in Inuktitut and English, to stories from elders about living on the land, to poetry from a younger generation grappling with how to define their own relationship with this place. It's quite difficult to be in Inuk with a disrupted relationship with the land and trying to figure out what it means to reclaim that relationship. And the best answer I have is treating it like a person.

And I feel like I visit the river quite often as if I'm visiting my grandmother who is no longer around. So if we look at all these books around us and we think about them maybe as each chapters in one ongoing story, what is that story? Maybe survival. That would be the number one,

making sure that we're sharing our history to move forward. We're calling this episode North on North. Here's producer Pauline Holtzworth. I met Ashley Kilovek-Savard at a spot overlooking a Kalawik kunga on a gorgeous, sun-drenched day. Everywhere the sun touched the river, you could see the water shine. My colleague always says because we're in radio, we like lots of pictures. And so I'm wondering if I can just ask you to, like, as you look around us, what do you

see? Oh, that's so fun to do I usually do that when I'm trying to write a poem and I'm stuck on like a social issue I'll look at the land and see like examples I can pull from the land but since I've been learning in it to do all I've seen I'm practicing colors like oh is it dark oh that's kayuk you know brown white gray but right now we're sitting at the Sylvia-Cornel River. It's a beautiful sunny day. The light is hitting the rock, the Canadian shield just right.

The ground is changing colors. So it was once kind of vibrant, green, yellow, red, which are now kind of blending into brown. It's preparing for the winter winter for the snow to come. It's fun because the animals, which are also trying to prepare for the winter, are turning white, anticipating the snow, so you can really see them very well. Ashley is an Inuk writer, artist, and filmmaker

born and raised in Iqaluit. Her first poetry collection is called Where the Sea Kuniks the Land. Like so much of her work, the title was inspired by something she saw on the land, a moment of peace during the destabilizing first months of the pandemic. I went for a walk alone on the land because that was kind of the only place I felt safe and like anxiety free. And I sat on the shoreline one day and I sat there for a good hour like I brought a book I brought coffee and I saw the shoreline come in and out and a kunik is like a kiss on the cheek but with your nose and

it's like you're sniffing the other person like so it felt like the sea was kunicking the land and to me that felt so romantic and so loving and like we relate to nature but nature can relate to each other, to itself and they can also have that like love story or that battle or that big complicated history so for me I just saw that and I fell in love with that whole idea like oh this sea is goonicking the land because it loves it so much. That's so beautiful. There's a lot of love poetry in this collection and just listening to you I was reminded of an afghan writer and musician that we once interviewed who was talking about love songs and saying you know are we also not in love with our homelands and it seems that there's like a kind of a love a love affair between You and the land in this poetry collection yeah, it definitely is and it um

it was a relationship that I really had to Define myself and carve out myself. It's quite difficult to be in Inuk with a disrupted relationship with the land and Trying to figure out what it means to reclaim that relationship and the best answer I have is treating it like a person and I feel like I visit the river quite often as if I'm visiting my grandmother who is no longer around so for me this is like a comfort spot and a place that feels more like home, I think, than I think even the community. It's a different feeling I get when I'm at Sylvia Grinnell Park or at

Haleakunga. I love what you said about, you know, treating the land like a person. Are there any particular kind of personality traits that you feel here in this place? I love it. I love treating it like a person because it makes the big weather events feel like, oh, it's just like big moods, you know? I started to see it that way once I had a daughter who had big moods that came and went and sometimes didn't make sense, you know, and sometimes were out of my control.

So I started to kind of like use that metaphor for the really erratic weather events we've been having lately and like, oh, it's just big moods. The only thing we can control is how we handle it and how we adapt to the changing seasons and to the changing environment. In October, a cali was teetering on the edge of winter. It hadn't snowed yet, but every morning we woke up to a landscape that felt new.

The next day, when I met Jameis Efornier behind the Inhabit Media office, the land was no longer dripping in syrupy golden light. Instead, the ocean and the sky were draped in calm, muted silvers and blues. It's a very, very beautiful, still day. There's the one iceberg that's floated in kind of in the distance. Well, I like that you mentioned the iceberg. He's been our little celebrity. He just kind of floated into town this week. So every morning getting up in the sea and check in and say,

hello, iceberg, and see how you're doing. Jameycy is building a new relationship with this place, the land where his mother grew up. He is an Inuk man who was born and raised in the Northwest Territories, surrounded by black spruce, dwarf birch, and trembling aspens, a landscape full of trees, far away from the ocean ice. And so I've always hearing about this far off place that, you know, there's a land in Nunavut and it's filled with all of our people and the culture and traditions, everything that I've been researching and trying to explore, you know, it's all here. Now he's meeting Akaluweet's changing seasons, forging his own relationship with their rhythms

for the first time. I'm meeting all this vegetation for the first time and it's just been so beautiful seeing their life cycle and like seeing it now in fall time when everything, you know, all the colors are subdued, right? It's very kind of dark tones, but it's so interesting. At the same time, there's a bunch of these flowers that have turned like really dark gray, almost to a black, and it has its own little beauty in it. So it's cool being able to be here, be a part of this

and explore my own, where I fit into all of that. One of the things my babysitters, growing up in Yelena, her name was Mally Curly, and she used to talk about going up in the morning and training your eyes and just looking out and seeing as far as you can see and taking in everything you can within the air and the sea and the land and just being able to kind of ground yourself a little bit and kind of plan out your day. And I never knew that that was as a kid what she was explained to me was this term called

the Aniyalnik and being able to kind of connect to yourself because when you're out here and seeing as far as you can your mind cannot help but think about like all the places you have been that have brought you here. I always loved to read. I was that kid in high school who brought my own books to class and got in trouble for reading my books instead of the school curriculum. I never thought I would be a writer. I always admired writers like Tahlik Partridge and L'Aquelic Williams and Bathory who just spoke so beautifully and were able to articulate our realities with honesty, with integrity,

and with respect towards each other, whereas otherwise a lot of our realities were captured by non-Ainui who didn't understand and assumed a lot of ways of being or a lot of our realities were captured by non-anyone who didn't understand and assumed a lot of ways of being or a lot of thinking. There are two moments that made Ashley think she could become one of the people articulating the realities of this place. One was when she entered a horror film competition called Arctic Chills, run by the International Sammy Film Institute. And I went through six competitive writing rounds

with like 20 other indigenous filmmakers from the circumpolar North, and I kept getting picked and selected. So to me that was like, oh, maybe there's something here, maybe I can do this. The other moment was when she was working as a production assistant at Takut Productions, the arm of Inhabit that makes film and TV.

A staff member, knowing she loved Inuit stories and legends, asked her to try writing a story of her own. I was like, oh wow, okay, okay. And I took it very seriously. I looked at story structures. I was like, how do I write a story for like three to five year olds? You know, what kind of guidelines do you need to follow? How complicated should the sentences be? So I had so much fun with it and that was the first story I ever published with Trip Magazine and it was all thanks to Inhabit Media and actually Tachuk Productions.

For writers across the North, Inhabit means many things. It's a launching pad, a place to come home to, and a marker on the landscape that shows you which way to go next. Jamestey first encountered Inhabit long before he moved to Iqaluit, back when he was a teacher in the Northwest Territories with a story in his pocket dreaming about finding a home for it out in the world. So I was talking with this other teacher and we're saying go like wouldn't it be cool if we were able to get this story published and at the time we're you know in Habit Media is very much on our map and have media you know publishes a lot of Inuit stories in the goal of preserving that like for posterity and we thought like wouldn't it

be cool if Inhabit Media published that and we laughed about it like wait a minute is that a possibility and so we looked online and we saw definitely there was a period of time where they accepted unsolicited manuscripts really. Oh! And so we polished it off and like sure enough about a year later, we got a response like, yes we would like to publish your story. I'm like, oh! And now here we are standing behind and have it where you work with the book in your hand. Yes, and it's it is really neat.

You know here I am working for and having Media when I was just such a huge fan and with my book in my hand and we're working on making the film of it too at the moment and it's just been such a complete beautiful experience there from beginning to end. What were the first stories that you wrote? The first story I wrote there that was published was about in Yellen I've growing up as a child during the wrote there that was published was about in Yellowknife growing up as a child during the Giant Mine strike which is a violent labor dispute in the in the 90s in Yellowknife and my father he was one of the strikers from Giant Mine and so being able to see that as a kid growing up on the Pickett mine.

In 1992 management at a gold mine in Yellowknife locked workers out the day before their strike was set to begin. They also brought in replacement workers, which hadn't happened at a Canadian mine in more than half a century. Sometimes, management would even fly them over the picket line in helicopters. After months of bitter, roiling tension, a bomb set by a striking miner went off underground, killing nine replacement workers instantly. Written from the perspective of a child, Jamestey's story brought this moment of crisis to life.

There's kind of creative nonfiction, but also like looking at this very serious terrible thing that happened to our town, to our city, to our people, but also looking at it through a child's point of view. So I submitted it to North Words and it got published alongside a bunch of really great authors all from the NWT. That part made me start to realize, like, hey, this is something like exploring writing, something definitely I would like to continue doing somehow. If I'm remembering correctly, there's a time when you thought about going into mining yourself.

I did, yeah. Eventually I started working in diamond mines. In the diamond industry in Yeland, I really kind of took off after the gold industry had ended. And so for a while there, I was working in the kitchens in different diamond mines. But then I was working in the diamond processing plants as a process plant operator. And I did that for a while. And it was nice, but it wasn't really for me because in a while and it was nice but it

wasn't really for me because in the end it was kind of just more very labor intensive you know I got into great shape I spent like 12 hours a day shoveling rocks and what was neat is that in order to get that job I had to go back to school and take a process plant operating course so something I never thought I would enjoy going back to school because after I graduated I say thank goodness that's done I don't want to do that again. But then I took this course and I was like that was really fun. I liked being in that kind of formal environment where someone's gonna you know ask you to write something and then they're gonna read it and give you tips

and grade it for you like this is amazing who wouldn't want to do that. I was like okay well what else you got there? Jalisie enrolled in the University of Saskatchewan's Indian teacher education program in Fort Smith, where he majored in literature and indigenous studies. During an on-the-land culture camp, he had a moment of encounter with his own reflection that crystallized the idea for his first book.

We were going around ice fishing. And so as we were chiseling, he hands us this beautiful chisel that he gets like, I made it myself the last two years. He went and cut down the tree, peeled away the bark, soaked it in water, and hung it from the rafters with weights to straighten it out. And so to make sure you don't lose the chisel, that's why you have the rope tied around your wrist.

I'm like, OK, got it. So it came my turn to chisel and sure enough I broke through the ice and that string I had around my wrist. It just went right off I guess I didn't wrap around enough and just And just went in the water and there was nothing we could do with this beautiful chisel This guy just spent the last half hour telling us how much it meant to him and it was just now floating to the bottom of the lake we're just standing there in shocked silence, like, oh!

And I remember looking down and thinking, like, I wish that there was someone underneath the ice who can get the chisel for us. And I looked down and I saw my own reflection kind of just like gloomily reflecting in the ripples. And I thought, like, the Kalupi look, he could. He could be underneath the ice and like, what would he be doing here

in a lake? This is a common theme in James C.'s work. He often writes stories where creatures show up in unexpected places and disparate northern landscapes blur together. It's his way to write a new story of belonging as an Inuk man who grew up far from the Arctic. Kalupiluk is a creature who lives out in the ocean ice. That's what you tell children, just stay away from the cracks in the ocean ice. Otherwise, the kalupiluk will come up and take you and put you in their mountian, their hood, and take you down, down, down underneath the ice. And I wanted to be able to interact with kalupilok, but in a lake environment.

So I started thinking about what would happen that this creature somehow has made its way in land. And now it's kind of here and ancient and crazy, but also like not in the ocean. So I started thinking about this ways of displacement, but also finding connection. And then the dream sequence. Oh, how fun. I, I haven't looked at this story in a while. I've just been looking at the script. The underwater screaming bubbles and the scary figure hanging in the doorway. There's my man. There's a mother and daughter going to their kind of family cabin to go out fishing.

And afterwards late at night, the daughter's playing with a piece of string in her hands and you know her mother tells her you know better not do like that because there are reasons why we don't do string figures at night. You wake them up the Nungitu. You remember those other ones you're in Anatsya club to go on about? She scoffed. The sleeping ones, inhuman. They come for you, drag you under, hide you forever. The mother sighed.

You know, never to be found again, all that crap. Boy, she loved to scare me with those damn stories of her. The mother rolled over. But what do I know? She added over her shoulder The mother rolled over. But what do I know? She added over shoulder before falling asleep. The girl sits up alone, lost in a memory of her grandmother and how they used to race each other to see who could make a string figure faster. And then she kind of snaps out of her reverie, looks at her

fingers and she realizes she has made the string finger just by accident. It is kind of like formed between her fingers. And so later on that night, she has a nightmare about something kind of stalking her, and she's trapped underneath the water. And she wakes up and she sees this terrible creature now who's in the small cabin with them. Her eyes widen in disbelief.

The creature spoke without speaking. It had growled in her mind and yet remained frozen. Its milky eyes studied her as its grin curdled into a horrid frown. Modeled black and white, its rancid feathers stank of the lake. Its arms hung low, string laced between its fingers. Suddenly the creature rushed toward her laced between its fingers.

Suddenly the creature rushed toward her, violently shaking its head. White eyes screened behind its frown. It stopped short before the daughter, sour breath heaving into her nostrils. Pick it up. Now, the girl is locked in a deadly string game contest. Best two out of three.

But as she's making a string figure, her grandmother taught her. She steps on an emotional landmine. This drags up a hard memory for the daughter and for the mother as well of what their grandmother had gone through when she had gone to residential school. And so this creature kind of takes that trauma and brings it back to life in front of the daughter. So you can imagine how something like that would, you know, the kind of effect that would have. And then this figure in the end of the story drags her under the ice.

Yeah, drags her under the ice and takes her down, down, down. And that's when the mother kind of comes into play and she can try to come and stop them, try to save it. So you have family kind of coming together to be able to fight this kind of encroaching evil that just doesn't want to go away. So finding strength in culture and strength in family. When The Other Ones was coming out, Jameisie learned about a program in Iqaluit for Inuit adults who wanted to learn

Inuktitut as a second language. He jumped at the chance, and habit gave him a place to stay and a job shepherding other people's stories out into the world. He continues to write Inuit stories with trees, reflecting the vast array of northern landscapes that have shaped him. That way, if I can find some identity in that, I know there are other Inuit out there who would kind of feel the same. You know, it's so confusing navigating identity when you have all these different people telling you you know you're not Inuk if you don't eat country food, you're not Inuk if you don't speak Inuktitut, you're not Inuk if you don't like to go boating.

For myself I'm a biracial Inuk, I'm half Inuk half French Canadian so my relationship with Inuk culture and how I identify as an Inuk has been something that's still in the works even to this day and for me getting Inuk tattoos and traditional markings meant something more than I think what people thought it meant. Also it meant very for very shallow reasons too like I am Inuk, I look Inuk, you look at my markings, I am Inuk, you can't look at me and say oh I thought you were white. So the first poem is titled, I am an Inuk woman. I am an Inuk woman. My markings say so. Don't look at me and ask, because I too come from the land of snow and ice. My heart belongs to the place where the sea qunicks the land.

An arctic islander on ancient tundra. These histories etched into my roots. These lines filled with familiarity. This identity traced along skin. Fighting flames and shining stars. From heart to hand, ink to being, chapters readily unfold. These lines are my markings, the story of my journey meant to be told. I walk these lands and know my way home. I washed my sorrows in the river and dried

my body in the breeze. I wished for the bitterness of assimilation to stop being so damn easy. I am an Inuk woman, working hard to practice, protect, and preserve the raw beauty of us, as my histories must pass through me in seeds. These lines welcome the next generation of Inuit. My markings are meant to help me grow skin and soul." You had mentioned that like is a process of defining your own relationship with the land and that kind of term defined the relationship I've encountered mostly like in a dating context and that kind of thing and I'm just curious like what has been the process of defining your relationship with the land and what

does that relationship look like to you today? It's been an interesting process to try to define that relationship and understand what it means. And I think when colonization happened, a lot was lost. And the bits that were there, people wanted to hold onto them very strongly, but may have forgotten about all the other ways that you can have relationships to the land. With any relationship, you need to invest time and effort and care but you know that's a luxury for a lot of people to be able to like go out on the land, to go hunting. It's so expensive to be able to go for a camping trip.

You need to buy gas, you need to buy food, you need to take time off of work or make sure that you have time off of work. So it's difficult for people in the modern day to have that relationship. So that's what I mean by defining your own relationship because there's a lot of guilt. We all want to succeed in the Western world. You kind of have to in this economy to work, but you just find your own ways to pay respects to the land. Ashley keeps coming back to the place where we're standing, sometimes with her young daughter, sometimes alone, to continue her own conversation with the land. And I also just like, I verbally work out my work. Like if I'm stuck on something or

a sentence, I'll say it until I get it right. And I feel like I'm work out my work. Like if I'm stuck on something or a sentence, I'll say it until I get it right. And I feel like I'm more comfortable doing that on the land for some reason versus doing it in my house where my husband can hear. There's something about like the solitude, even though it is a massive, massive piece of land. Yeah, I feel both comfortable and not alone

and alone at the same time. I don't know if that makes sense because I know there's animals out there. I know there's other people walking, but we all have space. I find that it's a relationship where I can just come here, be as I am, and the land can be as it is, and we're both okay. That's a beautiful way of putting it. On Ideas, you're listening to North on North. You can hear Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America, on Sirius XM,

on U.S. Public Radio, on World Radio Paris, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca.com. Find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayaed. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner and I'm back with season three of On Drugs.

And this time it's gonna get personal. I don't know who sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. From an office overlooking the Bay in Iqaluit, Inhabit Media, the only independent publishing company in the Canadian Arctic, is writing a new chapter in Northern and Inuit literature. Co-founder Louise Flaherty sits in an office surrounded by posters of Arctic animals and plants and books for readers of all ages. As a teacher, I always go back to as a teacher, I would go on my holidays, go to a scholastic bookstore and see the books and all the posters

and whatever things that we could use in our classrooms. And I would just think one day I'd like to be able to do that too. And looking at the shelf behind you with all of the books that we have now published, it's like, wow, I contributed to that. From Iqaluit, here's producer Pauline Holdsworth. What's the feeling that you have when you look at this bookshelf next to us? I mean, we've been doing this now for 18 years, so it's been a while, but very rewarding, because we're giving back what wasn't available. And if it can be used worldwide, wonderful. At least we're sharing this knowledge firsthand

from the people that live it, not based on what one can assume might be like based on one visit, right? 18 years ago, Louise Flaherty was working in the teacher education program at Nunavut Arctic College alongside two brothers, Danny and Neil Christopher. I kept mentioning to Neil, we have to do something. Like we have to create something for these teachers that are going into the classroom because we can't keep waiting for things to happen because Neil and I are both kind of, we don't wait.

We make things happen. We worked in a very, very good setting where we had access to students that could write, that could research, and also publish their ideas. The first book they published was a book of folklore by a student in the teacher education program. Mika from Hull Beach. And then another one was by Elijah Kilabak. Elijahelabak is a wonderful storyteller, a natural storyteller who would always come to our school to tell stories like how I grew up. When Louise was growing up in Clyde River, a community on the eastern shore of Baffin Island about 750 kilometers north of Iqaluit, these elder visits were a regular

and cherished part of her education. We would have cultural days where an elder would come in and share stories, legends with us. And sometimes when they couldn't come to our classrooms, we as a class would go to their house. So it was very intimate, but not as intimate as my grandfather's generation would have where it was just the family member, whether it was the mother or grandmother

that would share stories and put them to sleep. I'll share with you what an elder from back home in Clyde River told me. She said, we could retain the stories in our dwellings way back then. Now there's so much distraction with whatever technology that is being used that I don't think they can retain the stories anymore because of all the distraction. Louise wanted to make sure these stories survived, that they could be passed down to a new generation,

and all the generations still to come. When we started working with elders, we were recording them at first, and we were fortunate to be able to travel to various Nunavut communities working with teacher education programs. So that's where a lot of the elder interviews took place during those courses and we created books out of them. But also my late mom wrote without a lot of in the Eastern Arctic we use the syllabrium so the writing system that's not Roman based. What she learned was how the missionaries taught, I guess, our grandparents how to read and write.

So some of the elders that approached us also wrote in that way. They were kind of hesitant because they couldn't write in the modern inuktitut standard system. So I said, we can help you with that. They come to us with their story idea. They'll write it handwritten, give us their manuscript. We go through it, type it up, polish it for them,

and we translate it because we want to make sure that the non-inuktuq speakers in the current school system here will have access to the same content. So once we're putting them on paper, they're there to be kept, right? When the stories survive, so do the lessons they hold. And often the lessons themselves are about survival, how to survive on the land and how to survive as a people. For Jameis Euphorne, Inuit legends about creatures lurking under the ice or stalking the tundra

are fundamentally about keeping each other safe. Traditionally, you know, there's a lot of dangers all around the place, right? And so the storytelling kind of reflected that. Maybe it's used to scare children, but ultimately like keep them safe. When you're scared, you're safe, you're aware of your surroundings, you're paying attention, you're being careful. So storytelling

served as a vehicle of being able to do that. The ones that really touch me, I think is we have young hunters like Brian Kunu from Pond Inlet who shared about his survival story. Those kind of stories are not only touching, but they also share from their experience what hunters will be able to do once they're out there, and if their machines broke down, if they got stranded, how they could survive. So those kind of stories, I find, have real purpose

because we live in the cold Arctic. Is that book on the shelf here? Yeah. Can we look at it? Here. Yeah. I just held it earlier today, actually. Oh, here it is, this one. He has shared with us pictures of him growing up in pond with his father.

Like you don't see kids with rifles, right? In the South. But to us, that's life here. So he talks about his journey from Pond Inlet all the way to Repulse Bay just to go caribou hunting because we do have caribou moratorium. So on Baffin there has been, I think the moratorium's been in place for eight years now I believe due to the decline. And so hunters from Baffin Island, North Baffin, traveled to Repulse Bay, the mainland, where the caribou are healthy, the numbers are healthy, and so it's a great distance.

It says approximately 500 kilometers. Yeah. So traditionally, once you go onto the sea ice, when there's no fresh snow, how do you make traditionally, how did hunters make sure they were hydrated. And so from an elevated position, they would chisel three holes and start a fire in the first hole, and then it would drain down to the last hole. It would have soot, but once you get rid of that soot,

that water can save you. So those are the kinds of ideas that these stories have. I left the cave and emerged into the freezing cold and drifting snow. I took my backpack and started walking, but I was still exhausted and could only walk about a hundred meters at a time before I would collapse in the deep snow. I could see in the distance a herd of caribou. Every time I fell, the herd stopped and looked at me. I thought about shooting one, but I still had some food and didn't want to waste a whole animal.

The herd came closer and closer as I walked. So close that I started to talk to them I asked, do you know where Naoyat is? Can I hop on to Naoyat? They came back to me three times and it was the closest I have ever been to Caribou. This one is titled Tukdu. I like the way windy snow dances like a thousand caribou running freely on the man-made paved road. Such a strange sight, nature so fierce and delicate, natural on top of unnatural, light matter on heavy-hearted broken land. Maybe it's a beacon of hope for the undeniable force of nature that surrounds us. Or maybe it's a token of the past, showing our generation what great herds of dukdu once looked like. I saw a herd once, large, strong strong and healthy caribou, peacefully eating lichen and resting on the other side of the Sylvia Grinnell River.

The roaring river was no match for my hungry stomach, growling with greed, crying for caribou. I turned to my mother and said, tell policy to get his gun. There was no asking, only telling. And she just laughed because my bossy six-year-old behavior was less common and more comedic than the moment before us. I could not fathom such mundane mentality towards such succulent creatures. In time, I learned that it was not for the lack of love of Duduminek, but the love and

respect of Dukdu. It took me many years to comprehend the connection that comes from respecting all forms of life and their contributions to your life. The Nuna and all of its seemingly bountiless bounty,ons are meant to be learned on the land and from the land. When I was starting out writing, the way I could tell I needed to write a poem is if I could not stop thinking about it. And that happens with tukduk. I was driving in my community. Oh look at that tukduk. I was driving in my community and it was a windy day and the way the snow was forming on the road, it did look like a million caribou just running across

the road and I was like oh. And then I thought they have to bomb the road in order to pave it. That kind of sat with me differently and all these different images started coming up of like what we do to the land in order to make a community, make a settlement and also that there were animals here before that and that they're still here. That I actually did when I was younger see caribou across the river and told my mom to tell my grandfather to get his gun and she laughed because it's a Territorial park you can't shoot animals here. Oh

But that was our reality growing up is that we saw caribou everywhere all the time and our population You know in the last few decades have gone down the caribou population So we put a self-imposed ban on it, even though we have but there's a whole generation that don't have that same relationship with the caribou. It's changing, it's coming back, now the population has gone up, now there's caribou hunts. Reading it now, it's like, oh yeah, it's okay, it's okay, but at the time I really didn't know my daughter would ever be able to hunt a caribou. And now that is something that is potentially in her future. Yeah, well let's just keep it up, keep being nice to our Nuna.

And yeah, and have more conversations about climate change because it really does affect our land and then our animals and ourselves as well. It's full circle. What kind of relationship is your daughter developing with this place and this land? She is such a Nuna baby, a land baby. She always wants to be outside and is so curious. And as a parent, to hear her tell me about the land as if she's like teaching me, I love it.

I love it. She's so engaged out here. I want her to have the relationship with the land where she knows where she's from and she doesn't have to question that or question like her identity as an Inuk and going really good so far. You mentioned you're a mother and a grandmother. What's the world that your grandchildren are growing up in in terms of their relationship to stories, the schools that they go to? Unfortunately, my three grandchildren don't have that same

Definitely my three grandchildren don't have that same language, Inuktit, as I grew up with. They're growing up here in Iqaluit, where English is so dominant, but the content is available to them. And if they keep hearing it, I make sure that once they're at my place, they hear it. It's to educate them and have access to the books that I did not have access to. Yeah. Are there any of the Inhabit books that you particularly like to read to them, Inuktitut? I like all of them. I think they like all of them anyway. They'll read to you from memory in Inuktitut. All of our books, most of them are bilingual, so in Inuktitut and English, but also we have some books, not all of them, a few that are in French because we're part of Canada up here. And actually

some of our authors have been receiving some of their books in Japanese and whatever language. So it's very interesting and fun. So I mean, I think we're educating not just Nunavut, but the world now. Publishing these books in multiple languages means revealing new layers of meaning in their words, even to the person who first wrote them. It's also translated in Inuktitut by J.P.T. Almakak. And so that's been really neat to being able to rediscover my poetry in the language that I've been learning in Inuktitut.

J.M.C. shows me the second book he published, a poetry collection called Elements. Like, for example, there's a word in here where I say henhouse, like a chicken henhouse. In Inuktitutut there's no term for that. However, we do have ptarmigans. So the word we use here is akigil wakalvik, which is ptarmigan house, the place where the ptarmigans are. And so seeing how language, you know, is based upon locality at the same time, I think hopefully I'd be able to find one that's radio friendly.

So a lot of these could be dark broody poems. I know which one I can show. So it's called Landfast which is Landfast kind of is describing the type of ice that is connected to the shoreline because we can have you know free-floating ice but ice that's connected to the shoreline because we can have, you know, free floating ice. But ice that's connected to the shore is also kind of safe. Like it's not going to drift away on you. So we trudge through evening drifts, downtrodden paths knee deep, windblown and teary cheeked, scarfless, not a one off, but a trail stomped into the night

by lonely men in shirt sleeves, Clearing a path for those who brave those cold dark places with their small coming. For those few who dare hold the midnight breaths between lips that would stone a patch of wilderness with the evening kiss. The thrumming of your thoughts, thunder rumbles beneath, your arguments terse and direct. A hummingbird couldn't catch you breathe. My cadre of ne'er-do-wells demand their pound of flesh. Defecting to my ossuary, leave something to be desired." And I think flesh, this was when I first started incorporating Inuktitut terminology into my poetry.

And so I said the word kamit in there with their small kamit, and kamit in Inuktitut, those are like seal skin boots. So the elements in here, blood, blood, sorry, the elements in here, blood, sinew, flesh, bone, faith, stone and fire. Each one of those kind of take you on a different journey as kind of in different spheres of influence, you know, how I was feeling at the time. So flesh, uvinik, which means skin. That's time of rediscovering love, right?

So the kind of love poems as well and relationships and also the kind of, you know, hard moments that you have in that within communication. Wanting to be able to have that connection and it being difficult at times. I find this book to be very much like a love letter to the land and my next one called Mayokai it's kind of like a little bit of the opposite you know it's more like a grieving having to reclaim instead of having just been in

traditional Inuit lifestyle or to have culture available you can kind of tell the levels or that the growth's happening, I feel like. Because the first book really dives into like, this is why I love this. And the second book is like, I'm mad that you took it away from me. Yeah. Can you tell me about the title of the second book and what drew you to that? Yeah. So Mayok'k'ait means steep inclines on a hill. These are all the topics you brush

under the rug and they've collected and they're now so massive that it's a mountain of problems with a steep incline. These are the topics people don't want to talk about. All the difficult parts of being, you know, because everyone wants the shiny success stories no one wants to hear about the struggle as we're struggling they only want to hear about it afterwards so I have a poem that I think does not get enough attention and I think it doesn't get enough attention because it might make a few people uncomfortable let me just try to find it. It's called crushing. So I am someone who struggles with mental health on and off and it's hard being an Inukui struggles with mental health in a community where almost everyone, not almost everyone

but a large majority of people struggle with mental health. And why do we have mental health? For a lot of people having a disrupted relationship with the land and with culture and not knowing who they are. And there's a lot of youth who don't know who they are and don't have the privilege of discovering who they are. And I've had times where I felt like one of those youths who was insignificant because I was struggling. But as soon as I'm out of that struggle and able to articulate that struggle, I'm a hero. So this one's called Crushing.

It is easier to detach from self than to feel the world collapse around you. It's a catch-22. Why do I only matter once I overcome adversity? Every soul shattering event cannot sneak up on you if you run fast enough. My spirit is tired of feeling broken. Why am I only wanted when I'm whole and turned away when I'm not?

If I struggle, I become inconvenient, easily forgotten, as do all of our struggling Indigenous youth. Why do we turn a blind eye to those who need it the most? Life seems manageable when you cannot feel the grief of losing our stolen sisters, fearing erasure of identity and culture, all on top of deep-seated colonial trauma. We are stuck in a system not built for us. It is no wonder we walk around snow-blinded in our ever-changing world that we have little say in. Yet we are expected to navigate with grace, civility and a stiff upper lip against violated

treaties and colonial control. As a young Indigenous woman, I carry two worlds on my shoulders. Without support systems in place to help carry the immense weight and heavy hurt, it is no wonder I turn to de-abilitating habits. I am pulling myself out of grief, out of pain, out of hopelessness, and that takes bravery and courage I never knew I held, because it's bravery and courage that does not belong to me originally, but what is gifted to all of us through our ancestors, histories and lineage." I wish I had someone who was younger telling me that like having bad mental health or mental health issues, especially as a

Indigenous person, is like pretty, you know, it's normal. It's not an awful thing. You're not an awful person. Like you're just struggling. You just need a bit of help and guidance. And to remember that the way we would guide each other, that way of being was stolen from us. And we're trying to reclaim it, but we're reclaiming what's left. Today, Ashley is trying to reclaim all the knowledge she can. Knowledge about how people guide and care for each other in a community. And knowledge about how to build a caring relationship with the land. Building the respect for the land and that knowledge base, that's huge.

That's one thing that, like, for me, I've been really grasping at ever since my grandparents passed because they had that knowledge base. I just didn't grasp it when they were alive. I didn't ask those questions. I'm paying for that mistake now, but I'm very thankful to have a community of people who answer those questions. Like, oh how do I skin a seal? You know, if I ask that on Facebook, I'll get answers and I'll have people messaging me, offering to come and show me. You know, it's very beautiful.

There's different ways to reconnect with culture and a lot of it is through community. And it's neat when people have their kind of CB radios and they listen because all the hunters would be out there in their boats and messaging each other back and forth and all of a sudden you hear that someone says there's a whale nearby or a beluga or a narwhal. And I was like, what? And you can see like they're going just like a train and they're going zing zing zing and they're all going around here towards where that iceberg is and there's a lot of joy and celebration in that like say if people get a seal, you know, they cut it up in butcher You know, it's very much for sharing as well And that's what's cool thing with technology is that you can just go into a Facebook right in the color itself swap You're like, hey free seal meat at such-and-such address, you know, just come by and bring a bag and next thing, you know, like

10 15 people like zing zing zing all just like beelining towards this house because people want to be able to share you know what they what they have so it's cool I thought that was a really neat development I did not see coming right I was just out with my co-worker Mary we're out getting coffee one day and she's just looking at her phone like oh we gotta go just turn the car on. Like what's happening? Like we gotta go get SealMe. That's such address. And like, how do you know that?

Cause it was on Facebook. I'm like, oh, how cool. And now there's another place people can turn to when they want to learn from the generations that have come before them and from the communities that surround them now. In Habits Books. We have books on animals up here. have come before them and from the communities that surround them now, in Habit's books. We have books on animals up here. And so when we're sharing about the size of a seal, how

they breed and how often they come up for breath, how they are eaten, like you won't see in a book down south where you're talking about cows, maybe you can share the cow jumped over the moon, but how do people eat the cow, right? But here in the seals book, we have traditionally the skin would be used for making parkas, making comics, making snow pans, and how the meat is eaten. So those kinds of knowledge are shared in these educational resources. So that they're not wasted. It's how we sustained ourselves through millennia, I guess.

That knowledge is now there, stored, for them to pick up when they want to learn more about how to survive. On Ideas, you've been listening to North on North. This episode was produced by Pauline Holdsworth. Thank you to Jameis Yffornier, Ashley Kilavik-Savard, and Louise Flaherty. Jameis Yffornier was also our consulting producer in Icaluate, working with ideas to hold the first Massey Lecture in Nunavut and on a series of programs and creative writing workshops. You can head to your podcast feed to hear the Iqaluit Mastery Lecture, a special panel discussion on Inuit and Northern approaches to conversation, and my conversation with renowned Inuit rights defender Ayu Peter. Thank you to the CBC Library Partnerships Program and the Nunavut Public Library Services

for making our week in Iqaluit possible. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our senior producer is Nicola Lukcic. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.