Nunavut youth uncover their past… outside of the North

As part of a trip to Vancouver last week, Nanivara youth discuss what they need to live better lives. (PHOTO COURTESY OF NANIVARA)

Ten youth researchers from Naujaat and Gjoa Haven-based group Nanivara spent the week in Vancouver poring through archived Inuit history kept at the University of British Columbia’s school of social work. The group also found some time to enjoy the great outdoors. (PHOTO COURTESY OF NANIVARA)

Lean on me: Nanivara researchers, from left, Benoit Sateana, Renée Angotialuk, and Jenny Nuluk, all from Naujaat, use each other for support as they jot down ideas from a brainstorming session in Vancouver last week. (PHOTO COURTESY OF NANIVARA)

A summer trip south, spent in a room full of filing cabinets — it doesn’t sound so inspiring.

But ask a group of Nunavummiut youth, and they’ll tell you that a recent visit to archives stored at the University of British Columbia was an eye-opening experience which has sparked plenty of interest.

Ten youth from both Naujaat and Gjoa Haven spent the last week of June in Vancouver as part of a history project run through UBC’s school of social work.

Nanivara, which translates as “I found it,” is in its second of three-year plan to help youth to document their local history as a way to preserve and share Inuit culture.

“I’m here because I want to learn more about Naujaat history,” said Simon Alaralak, a 21-year-old Nanivara researcher from Naujaat, “about what elders went through and what they had to do to survive. There is a lot of interesting history.”

Stored in a room of filing cabinets are thousands of archived documents detailing Inuit adoption practices, stories from students at residential schools, files of Inuit treated for tuberculosis at southern sanitoriums and photos of European whalers in the Canadian Arctic.

“I saw some letters from the sanitorium in Hamilton,” said Jennifer Ullulaq, 25, of Gjoa Haven.

She’s referring to the southern Ontario hospital where about 1,300 Inuit were sent to be treated for tuberculosis in the 1950s and 1960s.

Most of the letters were addressed to an interpreter based in Pond Inlet, Ullulaq said; some of them were written by patients directly to their family members.

“Most of them were saying that there homesick and missing their land… that they were getting old from being there too long,” she said.

Some patients died while in treatment, never to return north, Ullulaq found. Others spent years recovering, thousands of kilometres away from their families.

Another Nanivara researcher made a much more personal discovery.

“I found out that I was related to one of the youth here from a different community,” said Jenny Nuluk, 16, from Naujaat.

Nuluk discovered that she shares a great-grandfather — a whaler named George Cleveland — with another youth in Gjoa Haven. The two had never met before Nanivara.

The discovery has inspired Nuluk to build and document her own family tree, a project she’ll work on independently at home with some of the new information she’s found.

And that is a perfect example of how Nanivara is designed to work, said one of the project facilitators, Tessa Terbasket.

“What’s cool about this project is that it’s very self-directed by the youth,” Terbasket said. “If they find things that are of interest, they create research questions that they can dive back into when they get back home to their communities, by asking local elders.”

Here’s a list of research topics some of the other Nanivara youth have identified since they began going through the archives at UBC:

• the year nurses came to Nunavut;

• northern health issues in the 1950s;

• Inuit legends, taboos and shamanism;

• Inuit tattoos;

• drum dancing; and

• traditional hunting methods.

Like Nanivara’s predecessor, Nanisiniq in Arviat, the project aims to see Inuit history uncovered and shared, by and for Inuit.

And responding to all those research questions could help answer a more pressing question: what do youth need to live well in their communities?

Nanivara youth seem to agree on that: it’s about building knowledge.

“I think youth need more interaction with their elders… so they can learn more how they came to be who they are,” Alaralak said, noting he is still at the beginning of that process.

“For me, I think it’s sharing the knowledge from this project, with everyone,” Ullulaq said.

This summer, the UBC-based Nanivara team will be in Naujaat and Gjoa Haven to work with youth to develop their interviewing skills and to facilitate youth-elder workshops on the land.

The group is also looking at how to use social media to share their projects and reach even more Nunavummiut youth.

Check out the group’s Facebook page here.