Dates set for Iqaluit’s Toonik Tyme festival next year
60th anniversary edition of popular celebration opens April 11, runs 10 days
Two snowmobilers race neck-and-neck around a corner on Frobisher Bay during the 2023 Toonik Tyme festival. (File photo by David Venn)
Iqaluit residents can look forward to a municipal holiday in the new year, on Friday, April 11.
That day marks the official kick-off for the 10-day annual Toonik Tyme festival, which runs until April 20. Organizers announced the 2025 dates on the festival’s social media pages on Sunday.
Next year will be the 60th anniversary for the festival, which started in 1965.
“A civic holiday will be held to coincide with the festival again in 2025,” said Geoff Byrne, spokesperson for the City of Iqaluit, citing a local bylaw that declares a full-day civic holiday “to enable the employed to participate in Toonik Tyme festivities.”
The festival typically features events such as igloo-building contests, snowmobile races, and Inuit games.
“In 2025, Toonik Tyme will incorporate a noticeable increase in youth [ages 14 to 17] participation in the planning, organizing, and hosting of events,” said Stephen Johnson, volunteer administrator with 123Go!, the organizing committee behind the festival.
“Expanded live music events are planned featuring Inuktitut music from Nunavut and popular headliners from other parts of Canada.”
The snowmobile race from Iqaluit to Kimmirut and back and the bannock-making competition are among the events that will return, hosted independently by other participating organizations, he said.
The festival is named after the singular term for an individual of the Tuniit, known to archeologists as the Dorsets.
The Tuniit inhabited what’s now Greenland and the eastern Canadian Arctic before the region came to be occupied by ancestors of today’s Inuit, known as the Thule, who migrated from what is now Alaska approximately 1,000 years ago.
I remember it was canceled in 2021. So, it’s 3 years old. Born again? Bahahahahaha.
Cool that it is named after the Tuniit I guess… didn’t the Thule expropriate their lands though?
Yes, yes we did. We also expropriated their games.
Yes, the Tuniit knew all the best hunting and fishing spots and the incoming Thule moved into those spaces, effectively pushing the Tuniit out which lead to their extinction. Some call this genocide, others say ethnic cleansing. Some deny any of this and pretend the disappearance of the Tuniit, which coincided with the arrival of the Thule remains a mystery.
Uqalurait: An oral history of Nunavut delves into this history quite well and is worth a read.