Inuit rights advocate issues call to action in Montreal
“Much healing must happen, public acknowledgement and apology, and a reorganization of power. Give back to Inuit what belongs to Inuit.”
Lisa Koperqualuk, who is vice-president of international affairs for Inuit Circumpolar Council–Canada, delivers a keynote address to a packed auditorium at Concordia University in Montreal, her alma mater, at the Inuit Studies Conference on Thursday, Oct. 3. (Photo by Lisa Gregoire)
MONTREAL—In a large, packed university auditorium, with throngs of students outside thumbing phones, scurrying to class and lamenting their workloads, a woman with a gentle voice from a small northern village challenged her audience to think about something they probably took for granted but which has always been controversial for Inuit: education.
As the first keynote speaker for this year’s Inuit Studies Conference, Lisa Koperqualuk’s challenge seemed particularly relevant considering a marked increase this year in the number of Inuit panelists, speakers and participants in a conference that has historically been dominated by non-Inuit academics.
“Education is key. It is the key that opens doors. It relates closely to well-being and health, contributing citizens, prosperous communities and the continuance of culture and language—therefore, pride,” Koperqualuk said on Oct. 3 to about 500 people inside a Concordia University theatre and several dozen more watching on a screen outside.
“But for much of our population, the key that should open doors locks them instead.”
Koperqualuk, a trilingual Inuk raised in Puvirnituq by her grandparents in a home steeped in Inuit culture and language, holds two university degrees—including a BA from Concordia—is a lifelong advocate for Inuit rights and is currently vice-president of international affairs for Inuit Circumpolar Council–Canada.
She was one of six Inuit keynote speakers at the four-day annual conference that brings together northern and southern experts to discuss issues unique to Arctic society—from housing and architecture to politics, gender, health and education.
Formal, southern-style education has always been problematic in Inuit Nunangat for many reasons, Koperqualuk said, including the traumatic history of residential schools, southern-controlled curricula and English-language instruction and textbooks that ignore Inuit history, culture and lifestyles.
Many Inuit students fail or drop out partly because they don’t see their lives reflected in the classroom, she said. But they also fail because their culture has been debased, their language is disappearing, and their traditional skills are being ignored and forgotten.
They fail because the people who have controlled Inuit education for years have not been Inuit.
And yet, said Koperqualuk, there are plenty of Inuit experts in weather, wayfaring, architecture, family law, hunting, sewing, food preparation and outdoor survival. Why, she asked, has their knowledge and expertise been omitted from Inuit classrooms?
“Our students are not broken. The system is broken and it’s time to fix it,” she said, to an eruption of applause—one of many during her speech.
When Inuit regain their cultural practices and language, when they finally understand the implications of their history, and when they overcome systemic racism that has made them feel unworthy or undeserving, then they can make gains toward self-determination, she said.
This, she added, is hardly news.
The 1996 report from the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action, the final report from the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls inquiry, which was released in June, and many reports from Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami and others have all concluded that the rapid, systemic destruction of culture and language has been instrumental in causing increased levels of poverty, illness, violence, incarceration and suicide among Canada’s Indigenous peoples.
She hastened to add that there are examples across Canada of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples addressing the discrimination and human rights abuses that have disempowered Inuit, First Nations and Métis peoples. But the road to self-determination is still long.
“Inuit successfully governed themselves through social structures, a culture of sharing and learning, and it’s time to give the decision-making back to the people who already proved to be so much more successful in their own ways than in the colonial ways that have oppressed Inuit for much too long,” she said.
“Much healing must happen, public acknowledgement and apology and a reorganization of power. Give back to Inuit what belongs to Inuit.”
She credited the love and support she received from her grandparents, along with her success in navigating a foreign education system, for enabling her to stand, as she did in Montreal last Thursday, before such a prestigious gathering of northerners and northern allies. But with success comes a responsibility to help the next generation, she said.
And so at the end of her address, she took the opportunity to propose a future in education “that is grounded in the knowledge and language of our people and which builds off these things to develop the strong, resilient and effective Inuit leaders of tomorrow.
“May we rise above a system that has worked to destroy an entire culture. We are here, united, and working towards a better future together and together we are so strong—strong enough to rebuild the Inuit ways of life, strong enough to make changes and definitely strong enough to give our kids a future filled with choice and meaning.”
The Inuit Studies Conference wrapped up on Sunday, Oct. 6. Read more coverage of panels and workshops this week on nunatsiaq.com.
The days of traditional Inuit governmental and educational styles are going quickly, and will never return. They are predicated on social-control in small, close-knit communities through family relationships, community opinion, etc. These methods don’t work well in cities, such as Iqaluit, and are particularly ineffective when nearly 45% % of the Inuit population has left Nunavut.
The effectiveness of these traditional methods will be even less in cities like Iqaluit when Inuit drop from a majority to plurality in the next few years.
These speakers highlight very important points, but the fact is that Inuit have been in charge of education for a generation. The educational leaders have a damn difficult task; how do they prepare the youth for a future in the interconnected world, which isn’t going away, and is moving into northern Canada at a fast pace? Formal education, competent spoken and written English (or to a lesser degree, French) is absolutely required in Canada, end of conversation, but how do you get the balance right with tradition?
Equally, accepting that Inuit-Canadians are part of the greater Canadian multi-cultural society and that they need to operate within that milieu as well as honouring their traditions is a damn hard balancing act.
I have no answers, but I’m hesitant to criticize the educational leaders too much, it is an intractable problem that will spread over generations.
The only thing that I know for sure is that speakers, or community Elders, or educational leaders in Iqaluit won’t be the decision makers. The choices will be made by today’s 12 and 13 year olds.
You have to admit this is good rhetoric; “Give back to Inuit what belongs to Inuit.” Or the idea that regaining culture will act as a sort of panacea for lost control of a collective destiny. I suppose there is something to this inasmuch as it is recognized that what Inuit culture means going forward is not the same as what it meant looking back. That culture is gone because that way of life is gone, and those adaptations, which we call culture, are gone with it. What Inuit culture will look like in the future is an unknown. It will always involve some form of looking back longingly into a deep past, as most cultures do.
As for education, I don’t understand the notion that it needs to be given back to Inuit. Inuit need to take that on their own; it’s not anyone’s to give you. If you don’t want to learn English, math or science, or imagine doing those things in Inuktitut then go for it, why pretend someone is keeping it from you? Will it invoke a rousing and charged applause from an audience all too receptive and eager for such manipulations? Emotive rhetoric has a long history of changeling for well-formed points and clear direction.
imagine your children being given limited choice, of the only way & no other way of education system.
Imagine if every human has to learn every languages, culture of the whole world and this is exactly what is being given to indigenous people of Canada, we have and still learn others way of living which is not even relevant to our way of living, oh imagine, how it would be easier for us to deal with our own world (being).
There’s a long tradition of anthropologists having an agenda that has very little to do with making a living in the real world of the high-tech economy. Ironically it dates from the studies made by Franz Boas, the German father of modern anthropology. He studied Inuit on Baffin Island in the 1880s, a century and a half ago. Anthropologists have always sought to preserve an obsolescent lifestyle in amber, like Disneyland, or the movie Nanook of the North. It needs to be said that Allakariallak, the man who played the lead role, died of starvation in the barren lands of Nunavik two years after the movie was made, along with his wife and children.
As commentators here point out, in effect, the tradition lifestyle is one hundred percent dead as an economic base. It follows that only two reasonable objectives are available. The first is to set a high goal for educational achievement, and one obvious target is to get students aiming for the International Baccalaureate.–in English, of course.
In addition, Inuit should aim to preserve those aspects of their culture that are relevant for the modern world, and discard the rest. People of other cultures do that, by having unpaid by volunteers running classes outside school time. They include Chinese, Ukrainian and Jewish Canadians. I know, for example, that the Ukrainian Canadians in Ottawa have an intensive program in their own language, of teaching their literature, geography, history and culture. The program runs year-round except for a few weeks in summer and for holidays.
I respect what Lisa Koperqualuk says and it should be that way,
if the people want it.
We as honest Inuit people , in the ways of God and Jesus, also
have to give back all the houses, medical attention, money
and all the infrastructure which the Canadian Govt. has given
to the Inuit people of Canada over the past 50 years or so.
We all have to be fair and honest.
Give to the Inuit the things that are Inuit.
Give to Qablunaqs the things that are Qablunaqs.
Have Faith in each other, Amen.