Excellence rewarded again

The little group of video geniuses at Igloolik Isuma Productions have demonstrated once again that with a lot of persistence and patience, excellence will be rewarded in the end.

In the mid-1990s, long before they achieved international praise for Atanarjuat, Igloolik Isuma produced a 13-part television drama called, in English, Nunavut Our Land.

Like Atanarjuat, the Nunavut series was produced entirely in Inuktitut with Inuit actors, and it displays many of the same qualities: stunning videography, a loving attention to historic detail, and an all-consuming reverence for Inuit cultural values.

It follows the lives of five fictional families from the spring of 1945 to Christmas Day, 1946, the period at the end of the Second World War when the lives of most Inuit living within Canada were about to change forever. Soon after that time, the old independent, nomadic life, based on subsistence hunting and the fur trade, would pass away, as Inuit were persuaded, cajoled, and often forced into permanent communities.

Based on the real-life recollections of today’s elders, Igloolik Isuma’s Nunavut series gives us a recreated vision of a way of life that was gone before most of us were born. Many Nunavut residents watched the series when it was broadcast over Television Northern Canada, and loved it.

Now, thanks to the Bravo arts channel, cable and satellite television viewers across Canada will be able to watch it too. It’s the first time that Nunavut Our Land has been shown in its entirety, across Canada, on a national channel.

Appropriately, Bravo will broadcast the first episode of the series at 7:30 p.m. eastern time on July 9, a day when many Nunavut residents will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the proclamation of the Nunavut land claims agreement.

July 9 is an important day, to be sure. It’s important also, to recognize the ideals of individual excellence that Igloolik Isuma personifies, and the idea the greatest rewards ought to go to those who refuse to do anything less than the best that they’re capable of. That’s a message we need to hear much more often in Nunavut. JB