‘I cannot keep quiet or hold back’: Manitok Thompson retires – for now

After a decade at the Inuit Broadcasting Corp., nearly two decades in territorial and federal politics and many years working as a teacher, church pastor and outspoken advocate for Inuit, Manitok Thompson is ready to retire.

For now, at least.

“I just need a breather. Give me two months, and I’ll probably show up again,” Thompson said Thursday in an interview in her nearly cleaned-out IBC office in Ottawa.

It was her second-last day as executive director of the corporation she has led since 2020, after nearly five years of being its archivist.

Thompson, 69, was born in a house about five kilometres from Coral Harbour, in a little place known as Snafu. She said the name came from a small ship grounded on the shore that someone had scrawled “snafu” on.

She worked as a teacher in Coral Harbour, Rankin Inlet and Naujaat.

In 1995, she was elected to the Northwest Territories legislative assembly as MLA for the region until the creation of Nunavut in 1999, when she was elected as the first MLA for the newly created constituency of Rankin Inlet South/Whale Cove.

Thompson was the first and only woman to be elected to the first Nunavut legislative assembly, and says she had to stand up for herself when some of her male colleagues in the assembly doubted her competence.

“Mr. Speaker, I want him and me outside right now,” she recalls saying after one of the members said that as a woman, she shouldn’t have been trusted with a ministerial portfolio.

The speaker, Levi Barnabas, had to declare a health break, Thompson said with a laugh.

In 2004, she left territorial politics and ran in a federal election, finishing second to incumbent Liberal MP Nancy Karetak-Lindell (now Nunavut’s senator), and then retired from elected politics altogether.

Shortly after, she moved to Canmore, Alta., when her adopted granddaughter was diagnosed with leukemia. She said she “quit everything and concentrated on her health.”

Thompson joined the Inuit Broadcasting Corp. in 2015 and moved to Ottawa to work as an archivist, viewing and describing thousands of hours of footage for a “student wage,” she said.

Five years later, she became the corporation’s first Inuk executive director. She made her mark by changing its programming, often making it more politically minded, and touching on the most pressing issues Inuit face like food security, housing and mental health.

Inuit Broadcasting Corp.’s director of communications and content Karen Prentice is stepping into the role of the executive director. (Photo courtesy of Karen Prentice)

Under her tenure, the corporation started several new shows, and in the past year she helped shepherd a new broadcasting training program for Inuit that will likely launch next summer, she said.

But Friday is Thompson’s final day at IBC, with the corporation’s director of communications and content, Karen Prentice, named as her replacement.

Though Thompson might not have the energy to run for office again, she still has the passion and said she is prepared to be labelled “negative” if it means she can speak her mind about the happenings in Nunavut politics.

“I’m a volunteer politician — I am not elected, but still very much involved with the issues across the territory,” she said.

And that’s the job she is never retiring from.

“I cannot keep quiet or hold back. I speak out and I really don’t care what anybody thinks,” she said, adding that if you can’t take criticism, “you’re not a leader.”

“So I’m not going to sit down in a rocking chair and knit. There is still so much to do.”