Inuit kids enjoy free summer camp in Canada’s capital

Participants in an August Tungasuvvingat Inuit summer camp goof around at the Children’s Museum in Ottawa, located within the Canadian Museum of History, during a field trip Aug. 18. (PHOTO BY COURTNEY EDGAR)

SPECIAL TO NUNATSIAQ NEWS

OTTAWA—Nine children run around the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa, playing hide and seek in a large pyramid, make-believe market stands and a colorfully decorated bus.

The last day of Tungasuvvingat Inuit’s second week of youth camps means the kids, ranging from three years old to 14, are blowing off steam and having fun in a less structured manner than the previous days.

From Aug. 14 until Aug. 18, four TI employees chaperoned up to 20 children daily at different activities around Ottawa, from arcades to swimming pools, farms and museums.

It was the second week this summer that TI ran their youth day camp, which is an opportunity for children to attend summer camp activities for free, with some cultural elements added in.

“We all sat down and planned what would be fun to do with the kids,” said Nicole Etitiq, the Community Action Programming for Children worker at TI. “Things the kids might not have the chance to do outside of camp.”

They choose the activities based on two elements: promoting a healthy and active lifestyle, and preserving Inuit culture.

On Monday, Aug. 14, the camp held their cultural day at the TI location on Savard Ave. Etitiq taught the children how to throat sing and the others helped to teach participants to carve inuksuit and polar bears out of soap.

“But really, every day was a ‘cultural day’,” Etitiq said. “Every day we talked about different things about being Inuit, like how we respect all the animals after we kill them and stuff like that.”

According to Etitiq, they also taught the children some First Nations creation stories and the myth of Sedna while they were at the museum on Friday.

“I took some of the older kids and taught them some Inuit history,” Etitiq said.

“They had never heard of it before so it was nice to teach them that kind of stuff. I really tried to instill in them that Inuit are resilient people as a whole and that the more we learn about our culture and race, the better we will be as a community.”

She even taught some of the children about residential schools and the historical dog slaughters while they visited the history museum’s new wing which includes many Inuit-specific replicas of ancient artifacts such as the Thule Man and hundred-year-old antique ulus.

“They were just so confused about why the settlers came and did that,” Etitiq said.

“They were like, ‘All cultures are important and they should all be embraced.’ They didn’t quite understand, because they are still a bit young, but they understand a bit more now than they did before.”

The day camps are part of the Inuit community organization’s regular programming for youth in the summer and also over March break. Money to run the camps comes from TI’s regular Health Canada funding, according to Rhonda Huneault, TI’s family well-being manager.

Etitiq said she would like to include more cultural elements in the activity planning for the next round of camps— and she said she also hopes to invite an elder to attend each day in future to help teach Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit principles.

“It’s not the kind of thing you can just read and learn,” Etitiq said. “You need to live it.”

As a young person who has lived in both Ottawa and Iqaluit, Etitiq’s traditional knowledge has its limits so having a community elder tell stories about what it was like growing up in the Arctic many years ago—or to recount stories told to them by their parents—would be a great service to the young campers.

“The youth and elder interaction is important in our culture,” Etitiq said.

For Leila Kigyugalik Iksiraq, an 11-year-old who attended the TI camps this summer, the experience was not only fun for the children but helped adults out as well.

“It’s nice to give your parents a break sometimes,” Kigyugalik Iksiraq said.