Rhythm of the Tides: my arctic experience

Infusing Inuit Culture at the Qammaq

We're at the elders' community centre (qammaq) at the end of our last working day to taste Inuit culture and to celebrate our contribution to Caroline's and Tiivi's house. They and their three children are also here. The qammaq is the red-roof house in front of Iqaluit Square. The Iqaluit Elders Centre, a retirement home for Inuit seniors, is strategically located beside it so that the elders can walk here for a two-dollar lunch that's served every weekday.

The qammaq is a drop-in centre offering elders an opportunity to socialize and it's open from Monday to Friday, between one and 4:30 pm. In addition to lunch, there are numerous activities and events, such as arts and crafts, cooking and workshops. We're here for a special event organized by HfH in our honour, but paid by the team well in advance. It's a farewell dinner and an evening of entertainment. Several HfH board members are also here, as well as other invited guests, but the special guest of honour is Elder Alicee Joamie.

Our first taste of Inuit culture is a presentation by her. She shows us how to light the qulliq the modern way. Gone is the seal oil, replaced by kerosene, and gone are the flint stones, replaced by matches, but the wick is still made from arctic cotton. As she does what comes to her so naturally she talks through an interpreter describing the process, while continuously nursing the flames, and telling us how important it was to make sure that they didn't go out.

Alicee then tells us about her labour of love: a collection of Inuit natural remedies. She has written a book recording what she learned as a child about herbal and other medications that came straight from nature, not from a pharmacy. She did it to make sure that they wouldn't be lost to posterity. But, ironically, she herself has become dependent on remedies that come from half a world away. We're a nation of pill poppers and the arctic hasn't been spared.

Although some elders speak English, Alicee and many others don't and that has some rather unexpected consequences. They can't read the instructions for medications prescribed to them. So, the outspoken person that she is, she's been leading a campaign to have pharmacies print the instructions in the Inuktitut language. I was surprised about her plight and that of many others. Knowing which medications to take, when and how is of critical importance to the health and well being of seniors everywhere, but what we take for granted in the south is still only a dream here.

The buffet meal, which features caribou stew and freshly baked bannock prepared for us by the staff of the soup kitchen, is our second taste. It's not something to write home about. The stew is rather bland and if we hadn't been told that it was caribou meat, we wouldn't have known by the taste. I'm still salivating for a caribou steak done rare over hot charcoals, but I'm beginning to think that it might not happen.

The third taste of Inuit culture comes after dinner and it's by far the best. Two wonderfully talented young Inuit women, both still in school, treat us to the traditional throat singing (katajjaq) and some folkloric songs. The older one explains that katajjaq was more a form of entertainment than music. It was actually a game played by the women when the men were out hunting. Two women would compete to see who could outlast the other, while standing and facing each other inhaling, exhaling and making throat sounds. The first woman who ran out of breath, or started laughing, was the loser and another would replace her.

When the missionaries arrived to convert the Inuit to Christianity, they actively discouraged katajjaq and it almost became extinct. It's now being revived as a significant element of their culture. Many throat songs were created to mimic the sounds of daily life or surrounding natural elements and wildlife. Nowadays, even young men are getting into the act.

Interestingly, Buddhist monks and Mongol tribes in southern Siberia also have a tradition of throat singing, and this art form may have originated there. But how did it get to the arctic?

Don and I had heard throat singing at an Inuit culture presentation in Toronto earlier in the year and we were both fascinated by it. These performers, two Iqaluit women, were older and masters of the art.

But the two girls here tonight steal everyone's heart. They stand facing each other, holding each other's arms, and, as they sing, their arms and bodies move rhythmically while standing in the same spot. The older girl leads with a short rhythm, which she repeats leaving brief silent intervals between each repetition. The other fills in the gap with another rhythmic pattern. The patterns and sounds change from song to song, but the basic rhythm remains the same. Near the end they do some short ones to see if we can detect the sounds that they imitate.

Following the entertaining throat-singing games, the older girl goes through her repertoire of Inuit songs with such melody and passion that nobody in the room dares to stir. She awes us all and leaves us wanting more. Behind her humility and gentle voice is a star-in-the-making.

When the singers take their leave, my friend Don asks the family for whom the house is being built to come forward because he has some gifts for the boys. Being an ardent Toronto Argonauts fan, he has managed to get the organization to donate a jersey and towel for each of the boys and a mini football. Their eyes almost popped out of their skulls when they saw the gifts. I don't think there could be anyone happier than these boys in the whole of Nunavut tonight.

I look at these boys and think, "They are the future of Nunavut. Are they going to become football players, or throat singers? Are they steeped in Inuit culture, or are they more Canadian than Inuit?" The future of these people rests in their hands. Their generation has been growing up in the era of the Internet and smart phones. My guess is that their lives are already shaped more by social media giants, such as Facebook, than elders such Alicee. Judging by their happy faces, my bets are on football.

It's game time, and suddenly I'm aware of a few more Inuit women in our midst. We are asked to form two lines facing each other and then we sit down. One of the women rolls out a set of dice and keeps rolling until she throws a pair, then picks a card from a poker deck and contorts her upper body trying to communicate the card to her partner. She basically uses her head to trace the number of the card in the air. The other woman easily guesses: they're pros. Now it's somebody else's turn and the fun starts because us team members are new at the game, so we laugh at each other's abilities to contort our bodies and communicate numbers to our partners, some with less skill than others, as in my case, but it's fun.

Philip and Loraine will be staying for two more nights and Don and I for another week, but for the rest of the team, this is the last night and the last taste of Inuit culture. We're hit by the sad realization that all good things must come to an end, and tomorrow we must say goodbye to most of our team.