Kevin Kablutsiak promises Inuktut-first leadership in ITK bid
Inuit delegates to choose new president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami on Sept. 18
Kevin Kablutsiak is challenging incumbent Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami president Natan Obed to head the national organization that represents Inuit in Canada. (Photo courtesy of Kevin Kablutsiak)
Second in a three-part series on the Sept. 18 Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami presidential election
Kevin Kablutsiak wants to make sure people feel heard if he’s selected as Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami’s next president.
“My leadership style is community-focused,” he said.
The 47-year-old is challenging incumbent president Natan Obed to head the organization that represents Inuit on the national stage.
Two delegates each from four regional Inuit organizations — Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., Makivvik Corp., Inuvialuit Regional Corp., and Nunatsiavut government — along with ITK’s vice-president are scheduled to convene in Cambridge Bay on Sept. 18 to choose the next president, who will serve a four-year term.
Kablutsiak, who was born in Churchill, Man., and raised in Arviat, describes his childhood as traditional, with summers spent on the land at his grandmother Irene Anngajaaq Kablutsiak’s camp.
His grandmother was a “true storyteller,” he said, and would often go on the local radio, sharing Inuktitut stories and songs.
“I would credit her for my love of storytelling and language,” said Kablutsiak, who hosted CBC Nunavut’s Inuktitut-English morning show Qulliq from 2014 until 2016.
He began exploring the art of radio at age 14. It was 1991 and Arviat was suffering a severe E. coli outbreak. Kablutsiak started a 30-minute radio quiz show where children affected by the illness could call in to answer questions and be entertained.
“This is who I am — I am purpose-driven. I do what I can to find solutions to issues that we’re dealing with,” he said, recalling that experience.
Kablutsiak’s focus on Inuktitut also guided his early career in 2006, when he became an English and Inuktitut reporter-editor for CBC North.
“Language has to be first in our lives, and even if we don’t speak it fluently we have to support it,” he said. “In my work, wherever I am, I have always tried to advance Inuktut in the workplace.”
Kablutsiak first joined ITK in 2010 as a communications officer and later served as its first national Inuktitut language co-ordinator.
He led the Atausiq Inuktut Titirausiq Task Group that created Inuktut Qaliujaaqpait, a unified writing system that was formally adopted in 2019.
He then went on to manage communications at First Air and serve as executive director of the Arctic Inspiration Prize.
“That job allowed me to travel across the Arctic and meet with people who have the power to decide how and where money is spent,” Kablutsiak said, adding that he learned how to negotiate and build partnerships in the role.
He went on to senior communications roles at Canadian North and Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., and most recently returned to CBC North as a managing editor and associate with Sivummut Solutions, a communications consultancy.
He says his greatest strength as a leader is communication and listening.
“[If elected,] I will regularly communicate our progress back to Inuit — what is stuck within the federal government and next steps. It is important that Inuit understand the work of an organization that is representing them,” said Kablutsiak.
“And I will be relentless in those followups and the follow-through from Ottawa commitments, because Inuit need to benefit from them. It’s not enough to make those announcements.”
How many leaders always put language as their top priority and nothing gets done? Maybe time to focus on other things like education
Why even post this here? Not like the people even have a say who the ITK president is going to be.
Everyone does have a voice. There are 13 voters. Tell them who your voting preference is and ask them to vote for your choice.
I’m confused about the actual role of ITK role plays in the implementation of the various Inuit land claims organizations: is it a political, legal, or technical role?
I don’t know what it’s like in other Inuit regions, but Nunavut has no self-government but rather a public government that is very jealous of its jurisdiction with respect to Inuit language and education which NTI has had to try and navigate without much success and has had to take litigious action to try and remain relevant in what has become a one-sided discourse, much to the detriment of social justice.
We live under a passive-aggressive regime (a bureaucracy that does not take kindly to Inuit): I suspect that Nunavut is the only land claims region caught in this double-bind.
How does Natan or Kevin plan to address this socio-politico limbo?
Will the two “Inuit” candidates hold a Inuktitut debate on CBC North on their campaign?
Verbal. Not closed captioning.
Got my gift card to vote?
Language seems to be a key issue that candidates love to bring up, as it is a sore point for many and an easy way to get support from elders. Hopefully these candidates can think a bit more creatively to try and tackle some of Nunavut’s real problems
What good is support from people who can’t vote?
The focus on language is almost always performative. All you have to do is consider whether the children of leaders or would-be leaders speak Inuktitut to know if they’re actually serious about it or not. They almost never can. Which makes it hard to take them seriously. It’s a skill they didn’t cultivate but were born into and had no hand in developing, and that in most cases they don’t bother passing on to their kids.
Ironically, language is the one key issue that ITK can actually lead positive and very meaningful change.
Several years ago, ITK committed to develop standardized Inuktun that would be endorsed for use in all Inuit regions of Canada.
This is something that Greenland did generations ago, and doing this has proven enormously useful in maintaining the relevance and usefulness of their language.
Think of every Inuktun specialist from the Mackenzie Delta to the Atlantic Ocean all using the same words, and the results of their work being understandable and useful to another Inuit on the other end of the country.
Suddenly, the resources available to keep our language going would be multiplied.
The price for this is that we would have to ditch our dialects, which makes this issue contentious.
It seems this initiative is stalled out. Whether this is ITKs fault or foot dragging from the regional Inuit Orgs, who knows? However, the failure of ITK to deliver on this should factor prominently in their discussions and the results of their election this week.
It would require two things: a standardized writing system, and a specific dialect selection.
Eastern Nunavut and Nunavik use syllabics. Everyone else uses the alphabet. Both were inventions that came from Europeans, so you wouldn’t think would make a difference, but it does, and some people feel very strongly about it. The second issue is that you need to choose a standardized dialect, as Greenland did. But no politician want to tell their voters “Sorry, but we’re going to teach and use the dialect from (wherever), not yours.”