Nunavik, my icy homeland

I write this from my home in Kuujjuaq, an Inuit community in Nunavik, northern Quebec, Canada. We’re located about 1,500 kilometres north of Montreal, at a point where the northern treeline meets the Arctic tundra.

It is now early June – the beginning of springtime in the Arctic, that brief period between winter and summer when life is miraculously renewed. The snow, apart from patches here and there, will soon vanish. Our delicate plants, such as the purple saxifrage, fireweed and poppies, suddenly freed from their covering of snow, are greening again. The snow buntings – qupannuaq – always the first to arrive, are being followed by flocks of other migratory birds, among them geese, ducks, loons and terns.

People, meanwhile, are happy to escape for a short time. They leave their settlements and return to the old spring camps at the mouth of the Kuujjuaq or in Ungava Bay where the same Inuit families have often been gathering for generations. This is a time of storytelling where we remember who we are.

Here, our language, Inuktitut reclaims its rightful place and our children participate fully in traditional daily activities: learning and absorbing all the essential skills required to survive and thrive on the land.

There is no word for "nature" in our language. The separation that the Western world makes between humans and nature is alien to the traditional Inuit view, and even seems dangerous to us. According to Western thinking, nature is to be conquered, tamed, exploited or, in the most harmless case, used for "recreation".

“According to Western thinking, nature is to be conquered, tamed, exploited or, in the most harmless case, used for ‘recreation’”

In contrast, the Inuit see themselves fundamentally part of nature it and not as living outside of it. This unity with nature is symbolised by our traditional accommodation: In winter we live in “Illuvigait”, snow houses, in summer in “Tupiit”, tents made from animal skins.

Our special relationship with nature is reflected in our relationship with the animals that feed us: on the one hand, the “Puijiit”, marine mammals such as seals, whales and walruses; on the other, the “Pisuktiit”, land animals, such as caribou and polar bears.

No other people are as reliant on animals as the Inuit. In one of the most inhospitable regions on earth, meat has always provided all the necessary nutrients. Hides from the animals have long been used to make shelters and clothing. The blubber, the fat layer of the marine mammals, was used as fuel for soapstone lamps, the "Qulliiq". Apart from berries and roots, which were collected at the end of the short Arctic summer, there were no plants to fall back on if the hunt was unsuccessful.

My ancestors first came into contact with Europeans around 200 years ago in Ungava Bay. From that moment on, our union with the natural environment was called into question. At the beginning their impact was barely noticeable: At first, the Arctic offered nothing worth exploiting in the European imagination.

Our land was dismissed as a barren wilderness, inexplicably inhabited by a few nomadic "heathens". With its icy seas, even in summer, the Arctic seemed like an enemy that had to be heroically conquered, for example in the search for a north-west passage to the "riches of the Orient”.

In the end, however, the inevitable happened: in the Artic, as everywhere else where Europeans "discovered" indigenous peoples, trade and Christianity followed. We called the new arrivals “Qallunaat" or "white people". The first to arrive were employees of the Hudson's Bay Company, who established a trading post on the eastern shore of Kuujjuaq in 1830. At the beginning of the 20th century, an Anglican mission station was founded, followed by a Catholic one in 1948.

Gradually, we began to accept these foreigners in our country, and over time we also learnt about their way of life. The newcomers in turn forbade us to practise our own form of spirituality, shamanism, drum dancing and throat singing, and eventually a large proportion of our people converted to Christianity. During this first phase, which lasted from the mid-1930s to the end of the 1950s, we came to terms with the constant presence of traders and missionaries in our country.

“Nobody could have known it at the time, but the European traders planted the first seeds of consumer behaviour”

We continued to live in large family groups scattered along the coast of Ungava Bay. But in the 1950s and early 1960s, the Canadian government suddenly began to take an interest in "their territories" in the far north.

More attention was paid to the area when the Canadian and US military set up the "Distant Early Warning Line", a chain of radar stations that stretched north of the Arctic Circle from Alaska to Baffin Island in Canada, intended as a warning system for possible missile attacks by the USSR. As more and more mineral resources were discovered and exploited, Inuit were relocated from these areas, some of them to the Canadian wasteland, the tundra.

In the early 1950s, several people starved to death there. It took some time before the Canadian government took action and began to move Inuit to settlements founded by the Hudson's Bay Company or the missionaries. This facilitated the administration of the Canadian "Eskimos", as we were known as at the time. We were seen as a problem.

The European traders brought many useful goods with them, especially metal objects, such as sewing needles, knives, cauldrons, traps and firearms. Later, woven fabrics and foodstuffs such as flour, lard, sugar, tea and, of course, tobacco were added. Nobody could have known it at the time, but this sewed the first seeds of consumer behaviour - a development which gave rise to new eating habits and new diseases.