Iqaluit teens point cameras at southern ignorance

GREG YOUNGER-LEWIS AND SARA MINOGUE

What does your average southerner know about Canadian Inuit?

This summer, four teenage girls from Iqaluit answered that question when they asked random people in Toronto typical questions about the North and filmed the results.

Ulaaju Peter, a 17-year-old Inuksuk High School student, said the answers were the same clichés that Nunavummiut are used to hearing.

Asked whether Inuit still lived in igloos, random Toronto residents answered “yes.”

But then they got stumped. “If the North doesn’t have trees, how do we make houses?” Peter’s group asked.

The point was to get southerners thinking about an area and culture they knew little about.

“We thought of the questions because people down South don’t know much about Inuit,” Peter said during an interview before the video’s premiere at Iqaluit’s Astro Theatre, which sponsored the event.

The video was the first project by Peter, Sandi Vincent, Jessica Joamie and Diane Pfeifer, who make up the film troupe Sivunivut, meaning “Towards our future.”

It was part of an exhibition, called Tauqsijiit, or “people sharing,” hosted by the Art Gallery of Ontario. The program involved young Inuit and Aboriginal artists and mentors, faced with the questions: “Who am I and what does it mean to be young and from an indigenous group in today’s society?”

Janna Graham, the gallery’s manager of community programs, said the exhibit breaks from old habits where Inuit art is presented as though it comes from an old and dying culture.

“We know the ways we’ve been doing installations of work of Inuit artists has been inadequate,” Graham said. “We need to be looking at it as art work, and not artifacts.”

The results of the art project were shown at the Astro Theatre last Saturday, where about 50 kids, moms and onlookers gathered to watch five videos made by four different aboriginal youth groups.

It was not your typical theatre experience. Group members warmed up the audience with some singing that fused ayaya and Ojibway songs. Several Inuit girls did throatsinging — some traditional songs and some original.

Members of the De-Ba-Jeh-Mu-Jig Theatre Group of Manitoulin Island in Ontario then did a series of improv comedy sketches.

In addition to Sivunivut, a group of Inuit girls who live in Ottawa showed their video. That group goes by the name YUMI, for “young, urban, modern Inuit.”

The video contrasts calm, quiet images from the North with pictures of harried urban life. At the end of the video, Cynthia Pitseolak delivers the group’s message: “We all share the same past, but today’s our own choice.”

Another video, produced by De-Ba-Jeh-Mu-Jig, shows three aboriginal characters — who represent the past, present and future — watching television.

As the three flip through the channels, they get a taste of “what TV would look like if the dominant population of Canada was native,” a group member explained.

That includes a show about trapping raccoons in the city, a sexy commercial for “bear grease hair gel,” a weather segment warning viewers about a rain dance being performed later that day, and a version of Canadian Idol that features Ojibway singing.

Members of the four youth groups said they chose video as a main medium for the exhibition because it’s important to increase the amount of representation that young Inuit and aboriginals get on television and in movies.

Besides growing up with TV and movies, the members said they were also inspired by the international success of Atanarjuat.

The youth found a common bond in their work and cultures, mostly in their love of humour, which one member said was “the cornerstone of communication” in indigenous cultures.

The project also boosted the confidence of many participants, according to the program’s curator, Sarah Laakkuluk Williamson of Greenland and Alberta.

She said youth enjoy video because it puts “power in their hands,” and helps them counter the negative feelings of coming from a culture that’s been colonized.

Williamson said that without creative outlets, youth often get depressed trying to deal with how Inuit culture has been changed in the last 50 years.

“They feel rotten and then they feel angry,” Williamson said.

“But then you have to get beyond that point of being angry so you’re not dwelling in the past, and you’re looking towards the future.”

Besides Iqaluit’s Sivunivut group, Tauqsiijiit was produced by Ottawa’s Tungasuvvingat Inuit Youth Drop in Centre, Toronto’s 7th Generation Image Makers, and The Best Medicine Troupe, who are members of De-Ba-Jeh-Mu-Jig Theatre Group, from Manitoulin Island (Wikwemikong), Ontario.