Notes of a non-native son

JIM SHIRLEY

I’ve been having a recurring dream lately — something about being lost in shopping malls, at the centre of small cities which are both familiar and unfamiliar to me. The home I’m trying to find in my dreams is one that I knew growing up in New York.

Perhaps these dreams represent my concerns about leaving behind my heritage as a resident of the United States, and adapting and embracing the heritage I have acquired over the past 30 years of life in Canada. For 24 of those years, I have lived in the North.

Twenty-four years. It’s an amazing length of time. Every once in a while I run into a younger person who asks me how long I’ve lived in Rankin. Nowadays, I am embarrassed to mention how long I’ve been here. It makes me seem older, somehow, than I really am.

Nevertheless, I’m also proud to have been in one community for so long — and that I have had the chance to become a part of the society of friends and neighbours I have known for so many years. I’ve had a chance to see Rankin grow and evolve. It’s been a wonderful process in which my family has played a small but positive role.

It intrigues me when southerners, upon learning how long I’ve lived up here, comment that I must find it a kind of “paradise.” They’re perplexed when I tell them that I don’t live here because I find it a paradise.

After 24 years, this is my home. As is the case with any place a person might call home, it has its complexities. Often, it has become more of a matter of circumstances than it is choices that keeps me here. All of my “stuff” is here. Above all, this community is where I do my life’s work.

I am fortunate (maybe even lucky) to have found a sense of purpose in the work I do here in Rankin.

Paradise? An interesting concept, but it certainly doesn’t apply to the life I have found since I came north. Let me start on this subject by saying I have met the most wonderful and profound people here — Inuit and non-Inuit, many who have survived personal difficulties of all sorts.

As northerners, they carry within them the benefits of the learning process they have gone through in their lives – a grace, courage, confidence, and self-respect. Every day of my life in this community, I am honoured to be among them. We have “broken bread” together.

In fact, you might say that I have been around them long enough that I am becoming one of them. In the background, and surrounding us is this magnificent land – the greatest master and teacher of us all.

On the other side of things, I have gone through my own share of difficulties – some of them are a result of my own errors, others as a result of difficulties imposed by others.

Although the subject is rarely mentioned from a “people-of-colour” perspective, I’ve seen moments of the same garden variety racism here in the North, as the sort I was trying to get away from in the South. I have rarely run into this kind of attitude coming from Inuit.

When I first came here 24 years ago, it wasn’t often I saw other people of colour engaged in trying to make a life in the community. Now, our life as a community is rich with people from around the world.

As a person of colour, it is wonderful to share life experience with other people of colour, to acknowledge our similarities and differences, the cultures and ancestries that we represent. I’m sure we all have stories to tell about some of the hard times we have faced. But in the sum total of it all, our life here in the North is a celebration of our collective humanness.

The broad and emerging cross-section of cultures and backgrounds represented in the population needs to be recognized, encouraged and protected. Nunavut’s greatest asset, at the moment, is that it is an open society. Each person who lives in this open society benefits from it. My own view is that, down the road, the welcoming and inclusive nature of Nunavut will be a source of incredible creativity, and social and economic strength.

Regardless of the big picture, life has been mostly a personal, one-on-one affair for me over the past 24 years. My personal humanness has had its chances at expression, and I have lived to pick up the pieces.

I’ve gone through every kind of joy and pain you can name. I’ve come through the other side and learned lessons up here that are gifts to me as I live out my life. This place, and the diversity of individuals I’ve known here have made me who I am.