Tusarnaarniaq Sivumut brings fiddle tunes, and more to Nunavut

In this photo from 2014 from Pond Inlet, you can see a group of fiddlers playing out on the sea ice. (PHOTO COURTESY OF THE SELTZER-CHAN FOUNDATION)

On a brief stopover in Iqaluit, Greg Simm and Kim de Laforest play one of the tunes they have taught to students in Pond Inlet, Qikiqtarjuaq and Hall Beach. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

Sometimes tragedy can lead to music, as in the case of a couple drowning on a kayaking and camping trip near Pond Inlet in 1998.

Today, the foundation that bears the couple’s names helps to fund a music program, called Tusarnaarniaq Sivumut Association-Music for the Future, which brings music to students in Pond Inlet, Qikiqtarjuaq, Pangnirtung and Hall Beach.

In July 1998 Mark Seltzer and Marilyn Chan drowned after sudden high winds sent waves of up to six feet high crashing into their kayaks.

Since 1999, the foundation set up in their memory—the Selzer-Chan Pond Inlet Foundation—has distributed more than 225 grants to individuals and organizations in Pond Inlet. Among those beneficiaries you can find the Tusarnaarniaq Sivumut Association which, since 2010, has sent fiddlers to Pond Inlet and other Baffin communities for one month, two times a year, to teach students how to play.

Yet these workshops are more than just about music.

“It brings those kids together in an environment that’s positive where they are succeeding in,” said Kim de Laforest, a fiddle, violin, and viola performer and teacher based in Saskatoon, who recently passed through Iqaluit at the end of April after a four-week fiddle workshop tour in the Baffin region.

“Sometimes there are kids that come in and succeed and they’re the troublemakers [in regular classes]. But I know that some of these kids who really struggle in school are doing so well in our program.”

The vision for the music association goes back to Pond Inlet’s Nasivvik music club, started in 2004 by former Pond Inlet teacher Julie Lohnes—who remains involved with Tusarnaarniaq Sivumut.

After 2009, when Tusarnaarniaq Sivumut was officially incorporated as a charity, guitarist and fiddler Greg Simm from Nova Scotia—and, more recently, de Laforest—started to travel twice a year to Nunavut to conduct fiddle workshops.

Last month again, Simm and Laforest visited Pond Inlet where they worked with students at the high school.

They hadn’t seen the students since October so sometimes there is a little bit of start-up time, but “they remember an amazing amount,” Simm said.

And it’s becoming a widely-accepted concept that music enhances learning in other subjects like math and language, he said, “so providing even the essential tools for learning music can make a difference in how youth approach learning.”

Simm, who grew up in a rural Nova Scotia community that had little or no access to arts programs and experienced teen suicides and motor vehicle deaths on a regular basis, said his participation in a school band program changed his life.

With the students they now meet on their visits, Simm and de Laforest mostly play folk and fiddle music, tunes like “Cabbages,” “Twinkle Twinkle,” “Mussels in the Corner,” and “Cumberland Sound,” which the students may also have heard on the accordion.

And you may wonder whether students who may not have played a fiddle for five months can just pick up the instrument and join in.

But students do remember how to play—and the fact that Simm and de LaForest go to the communities twice a year makes a difference.

“Consistency: that’s the secret to the program, that we’ve been able to deliver this program for so many years,” said Simm, who first visited Pond Inlet in 2007. “The students know us and we taught their cousins and their older brothers and sisters.”

And now Simm and de Laforest find the older students also help the younger ones in classes.

Among Tusarnaarniaq Sivumut’s long-term plans: fiddle clubs run by older students or even graduates so the fiddles won’t just be stored in closets when no workshops are underway.

The workshops, which started with 20 students in 2007, now involve 250.

“In 2007, on the first day, we had 18 students at the workshops and we were told by some folks that we shouldn’t expect that many students the following day because the youth would lose interest after the first day. On the second day, there were 20 students who attended the workshop,” Simm said.

“This has become a bit of a recurring theme with the program from visit to visit. Often we have been told that there is little interest in a community only to have as many as 50 students sign up for fiddle and guitar and attend classes more than once during a visit.”

Despite that interest and growth, and the support offered to Tusarnaarniaq Sivumut by the schools and students’ enthusiasm, Simm said he worries about funding every day.

Each one-month trip north costs $35,000 so Simm said he worries “how we’ll make our next visit in next six months.” Tusarnaarniaq Sivumut gets help from foundations, like the Selzer-Chan Pond Inlet Foundation, and from individual donors who can, for example, “fund a fiddle” with a $250 donation.

“There hasn’t been a time when leaving a community or leaving the North when I think to myself, or sometimes share with other people, that ‘there’s still so much to be done with music.’ I leave the North and immediately start thinking of returning as soon as possible,” Simm said.

You can learn more about Tusarnaarniaq Sivumut on its website here.