In northern Quebéc’s Inuit region of Nunavik, Metis writer Debbie Olson learns how traditional knowledge thrives in the face of erasure. Every space Debbie visits—from sewing centers to repair shops—is part of a community-wide effort to preserve the skills, stories, and survival strategies that have sustained Inuit life for generations.
In this episode of Travel Tales by Afar, discover how the people of Nunavik are adapting to a warming planet while holding fast to their cultural roots.
Transcript
Aislyn Greene: I’m Aislyn Greene, and this is Travel Tales by Afar. Every week we hear stories of life-changing travel from comedians, astronauts, authors, adventurers, and so many more. This week we’re journeying to the remote northern reaches of Québec to witness the ancient tradition of Inuit throat singing, one of the world’s oldest forms of music and an art form at risk of extinction.
Debbie Olsen is our guide. She’s an award-winning travel writer based in Canada, and as someone who identifies as Métis, meaning she has both Indigenous and European ancestors, Debbie brings a unique perspective to her exploration of Indigenous cultures.
Today, she’ll take us to Kuujjuaq, the largest community in Nunavik. There she experiences the Inuit throat singing we mentioned, as well as traditional sewing and other practices that were once banned and are now being revitalized and passed down to a new generation, even as climate change threatens their way of life.
[Janice Parsons and Sandy Emudluk throat singing]
Debbie: That is the sound of two throat singers demonstrating an art form passed down from generation to generation over hundreds of years. I’m sitting in a community center in the remote Inuit community of Kuujjuaq, listening to a throat singing performance. A woman named Janice Parsons and a man named Sandy Emudluk are standing in front of me.
The pair are dressed in traditional clothing, fur-trimmed jackets and slippers with beaded accessories. They lock arms and face each other, and the song begins. The song is a series of guttural sounds, breaths, and grunts that mimic sounds in nature and form a rhythm that tells a story. I can’t understand the message in the song, but I’m mesmerized.
And while this isn’t my culture, I feel inexplicably moved by it. This glimpse into Inuit culture makes me feel more connected to my own Indigenous ancestors, and I want to learn more about this ancient art form that was at one time banned in Canada.
I love learning about Indigenous cultures. I was about 12 years old when I met my birth mother and learned that my mother’s family is Indigenous. Our ancestors are Huron-Wendat from Québec and I identify as Métis, a French word that means mixed. It describes people who have both Indigenous and European ancestry.
Growing up in Alberta, I didn’t have any contact with the Indigenous side of my family, and there were certainly no opportunities to learn about their culture and traditions. I suppose that’s where the fascination with Indigenous cultures began. It was a way to understand more about who I am. I began reading about different Indigenous nations and groups and getting to know their traditions and beliefs.
I soon realized that there are many different beliefs, languages, and traditions, each unique. More than 70 distinct Indigenous languages are currently spoken by First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples in Canada.
Throughout my adult life, I have continued this exploration. And along the way, I learned about residential schools and laws designed to suppress Indigenous culture. Residential schools in Canada and the United States took Indigenous children from their families and placed them in church-operated boarding schools where they were not allowed to speak their language or acknowledge their culture.
The Indian Act in Canada and the Code of Indian Offenses in the United States took things even further, making it illegal for Indigenous people to wear traditional clothing, participate in ceremonies, or perform cultural songs and dances, such as throat singing. It was a program of forced cultural assimilation—and it almost worked.
Cultural traditions, languages, and skills were lost, and many Indigenous communities today are working to get them back. This includes Inuit communities in the far northern regions of Canada.
So I wanted to come to this remote area of Nunavik, Québec, where after years of censure, the Inuit people, who have long been proud of their culture, traditions, and identity, are taking back what has been stolen, starting with reviving cultural traditions, like throat singing.
Janice: So throat singing is, um, two people singing the same lyrics, just one second apart, so it’s just synchronizing like a wave.
Debbie: That’s Janice, the throat singer you heard at the top of the episode. I’m sitting with her and Sandy in the community center after the performance. I asked Janice about the song they were singing. She says it’s called “The Poor Little Puppy Song.”
Janice: The song really came from two little girls living in an igloo, um, with their family. They had a bundle of dogs and one of their dogs had puppies and it was cold winter day, winter night. Um, the father figure found one of the puppies. I mean, all the puppies frozen except one. So he grabbed the puppy, brought it into the igloo over the qulliq, which is the oil lamp, traditional oil lamp.
And those girls started singing, um, imitating dogs, the puppies or dogs, and, in hopes of reviving it. And ever since then that puppy became strong and old, um, became the leader of the dogsled team.
Debbie: Janice has been throat singing since she was about seven years old, and “The Poor Little Puppy Song” was the first she learned.
She explains that every song tells a story. Some are more serious, others are more playful. Because throat singing originated as a playful contest between women, a way to pass time while men were away hunting. Today, women can hunt, and men like Sandy can do throat singing, but it’s still a competition.
How often do you win, Sandy?
Sandy: Surprisingly, there’s quite a bit. [Laughter]
Debbie: And I’ve got to ask, how do you know who wins?
Janice: The first one who laughs is the loser. [Laughter]
When we’re competing in a throat singing song, I don’t look at him in the eyes ’cause I tend to smile or laugh.
Debbie: Sandy has only been singing for a few years, but he’s gotten good at it fast. Since Janice likes to laugh, Sandy wins the competition more often than she does. Now they sing together and they work together to help Inuit youth learn the skills of throat singing in an effort to keep the art alive.
Janice: It was kind of disappearing more. Youth in my generation were starting to shy away from these traditional, um, songs, throat singing.
Debbie: Today Janice is the president of the Qarjuit Youth Council, a nonprofit organization that teaches young people how to play the drums, sing the traditional songs, and learn how to throat sing. She and Sandy also travel to perform.
Janice: It started off in, like, his community, hometown community in Kangiqsualujjuaq and then to Nunavut. And then beyond it, we went to Brussels. It’s our second time there. We went to Berlin, um Norway. We’ve been to many places.The next one is Paris in June.
Debbie: I asked Sandy if he thought throat singing would become a career.
Sandy: I never thought that it would, especially one of our first throat singing performances was for the ministers, Francois Legault, and there was multiple ministers in town too.
So it was a pretty big deal. So I, I practiced a lot for that one. [Laughter]
Debbie: There’s also cultural practice happening at a very different place in Kuujjuaq.
And how long has the sewing center been in this community?
Christina: For about 10 years now.
Debbie: OK.
Christina: Yeah, it’s been here for 10 years.
Debbie: What is, what does it do?
Christina: It helps, uh, women that don’t have proper equipment at home to come and sew, to use our sewing machines or our equipment on whichever project they are working on. So, and to help us create the younger generation to learn how to sew.
Debbie: Do you just sew with fabrics or do you use other skins and furs and things?
Christina: Pretty much everything, um, right down to seal skins, caribou hides, uh, rabbit fur, wolf, fox, materials, fabrics for jackets and parkas.
Debbie: That is Christina Kleist, the coordinator at the sewing center in the heart of town. It’s a place that helps both youth and adults learn to sew traditional clothing individually or in classes. Sewing traditional clothing and outerwear was crucial to survival in the past.
It was also an expression of identity and culture, and still is.
This is why it’s so important to the community. As Inuit people were forced to abandon their traditional nomadic lifestyle and move into communities, making their own clothing became less of a necessity. Maintaining traditions was challenging and skills were being lost.
The sewing center is a large wooden building filled with high-end industrial sewing machines and other equipment. There are also a couple of sofas and chairs that are used for sewing by hand and for relaxing during breaks.
In times past, everything would have been sewn by hand and would have taken much longer to finish. But the modern tools in the center are essential today. It’s a kind of equipment that most women could never afford to purchase, so the sewing center provides free access to equipment and expertise.
A few women are busy working. One woman is applying colorful trim to a coat that’s spread out on the tiled floor.
Christina learned how to sew from her mother and her grandmother. Now she is sharing this knowledge with women who didn’t have a family member or an elder to teach them. She also hires others to teach particular skills, such as how to make a tupik, a traditional Inuit tent.
She tells me that anyone in the community is welcome to take part in a class or work on any sewing project. The center also offers classes in how to turn fabrics and animal skins into clothing, parkas, mitts, and traditional Inuit boots called kamik.
Christina: We had a kamik making workshop last January. It lasted about three weeks. We prepared, softened the seal skins and the feet part, and cut out the patterns of the kamik.
Debbie: Christina says there were 30 participants and 28 of them finished their projects.
Christina: Some come in with absolutely no knowledge of how to use a sewing machine, I mean, or how to sew. So, when we teach them, and they’re able to finish their project and put it on, that’s rewarding, I feel like, yeah, you did it, you’re finished, see, you can do it.
Debbie: As I leave, I hear the sounds of women talking to each other as they work on projects, small children playing, and the humming sound of sewing machines at work. I can’t help thinking that in this place, sewing is part of healing. It allows Inuit people to nurture social relationships and maintain cultural traditions.
Later that day, I enter another community building to sounds of a very different sort.
[Machinery sounds]
Allen: There’s two people working on their sleds called qamutiiks. They’re an essential part of us going out on the land.
Debbie: Allen Gordon is a guide with NunaWild, a company that offers tours in Nunavik, wildlife photo safaris, trekking, northern lights viewing, and cultural experiences.
He’s walking me through the carpentry center where seven men work on various projects.
There are saws buzzing, and other heavy equipment that people in the community can use to make qamutiiks, a traditional Inuit sled that has been adapted to pull behind a snowmobile across snow.
The sleds are long and narrow, designed to be lightweight and sturdy. They are built without nails or pins to hold the runners and crosspieces in place.
Each piece is drilled and lashed with ropes to the necks to increase flexibility of movement and ensure the sled can survive the pounding it will receive when traveling across the rugged terrain of the far north. Allen says that back in the day, people used dogs to tow their sleds.
Allen: It was the only way of, the way of life in the past where people are getting firewood, going out hunting, going out for a month to get caribou and so on with the dog teams.
Debbie: Now they’ve all switched to snowmobiles, but when Inuit people go out on the land to hunt or for recreation, they still pull a qamutiik behind their snowmobile to carry meat home or other supplies. And it’s older men in the community who teach people how to make them.
Allen: And there’s two elders here. One is actually working on his runners for the snowmobile. He’s putting some Polyplastic runners to it, because we have a lot of rocks out there on the trails. So it’s pretty rugged.
Debbie: We walk through a door into another section of the building where I see a shiny silver piece of machinery that Allen tells me is designed to clean eider down.
Allen: It’s from the eider duck, which is a marine bird. So we go get the down from the, um, from the islands, the offshore islands every early summer where they’re nesting. So it’s a natural resource, a natural fiber that is known to be one of the most, um, insulating natural fibers in the world.
Debbie: Female eider ducks pluck soft, down feathers off their breasts and put them into their nest to keep their eggs and young warm. Inuit people in this part of Canada and other northern places like Iceland have been harvesting eider down for centuries to make outerwear.
In Nunavik, men and women harvest the eiderdown by boat on offshore islands after the young birds have left the nest. The down is very dirty, and in ancient times, women cleaned the down by hand. As you can imagine, it was very labor intensive.
Allen: It could even take a few days for, let’s say a large garbage bag. And within hours we could have it completely cleaned up before. Like I showed you here, the manual without a machine, it takes a long time for the dirt to fall down.
And this one, especially the old, the twine, and you have a stick, and you just go [sounds of machinery]. You would have like a clump of down. And all the heavy, heavier parts that are stuck to the down, like moss, twigs, lichen, and all that stuff just falls down and that’s how we clean down.
Debbie: Now each community in Nunavik has a machine that cleans the down in a few hours, just like the one we’re seeing.
Women are still mostly responsible for cleaning the eider down, but sometimes men do it too.
Allen: The down cleaning side is for the ladies, generally ladies. But I’ve, but I’ve personally come here with dirty down ’cause my wife was busy sewing and I got to go clean more down for her.
Debbie: All of these facilities are making it possible for cultural traditions to carry on to future generations. As the week goes on, I also see the snowmobile repair shop, where people can learn how to keep their machines in good repair. And I visit the community freezer that supplies Inuit community members with free caribou meat, the staple of the traditional diet, as well as fish and some other kinds of meat.
The Inuit refer to these traditional foods as country food.
One thing that becomes apparent as I meet people is how much they rely on each other to survive and thrive in this remote place. I see how much respect they show to elders and how important the passing of knowledge is to preserving culture.
Another thing that becomes increasingly apparent is how concerned the entire community is about climate change. They are living at the edge of it. On our first day in Kuujjuaq, our guide, Allen, took us to a spot called “the breakwater” that sits across from the old Hudson’s Bay trading post. It’s also the place on the Koksoak River, where the ice turns to water.
Today, the open water area lies near the old trading post, but that wasn’t always the case.
Allen: Every winter during the 1980s, 1970s, and ‘80s, um, we were always able to cross here from February. And there was never a dangerous spot. It was always a good be as much as four four feet thick in the center of the river but today, starting from the 1994, ’95 is when I really noticed, uh, it changing in terms of, more mild winters and the ice not getting thick—this open water, we never used to have that.
It’d be all frozen solid down to Whales Head, which is a point down there about a mile and a half, two. And we’d be crossing everywhere, but it’s impossible now. We’ve lost about, a month of early freeze up and about a month of, uh, winter is gone. It’s, it’s changed our, our ways. And [it’s] really worrisome for the future.
Debbie: I started to walk towards some interesting ice formations near the shoreline; Allen called me back and said it isn’t safe. Apparently, you never know where a polar bear might be hiding. Then he told me about the polar bear that came right into town a few weeks earlier. A rare event, especially during winter.
Allen: It was the first week of February we had a polar bear come into town.
It’s very unusual for us to have one in town, because we’re quite far inland from Ungava Bay. But with mild winters and less sea ice freezing, they’re going ashore. They’re going on the land more and more. It was a young bear, and it was in really bad shape, actually. It was, uh, starved. Luckily, it never found small children or an elder that was on the street that, that evening.
Debbie: Life is changing in Nunavik. Everyone I met is concerned about climate change and how it is already affecting their land and their way of life. But these people work together to survive and thrive in good times and in bad, and they will continue to do so. It’s how they have lived in this place since time immemorial.
Over the final days of the trip, I manage to have all the experiences on my Nunavik bucket list. I ride a dogsled across the windy treeless tundra. I drive a snowmobile to a hilltop where I watch wild muskoxen on the frozen landscape. And on an exceptionally clear night, I stand under the inky black sky and watch it begin to light up. Ribbons of greenish blue light move from one end of the sky to the other. As I stand on the sparkling snow, I feel as if the colorful aurora borealis is swirling and twirling all around me. The northern lights are spectacular and what many travelers come here to see. But it’s the people of Nunavik who will stick with me.
Meeting local people who are deeply connected to the land, the sea, and the ice and learning from them is the real highlight of my journey. Watching them share and preserve age-old cultural traditions is inspiring, because as I’ve learned, Inuit culture is a story of resilience and hope.
Aislyn: That was Debbie Olsen. If you were inspired by her journey to Nunavik, you can experience some of what she described from throat singing performances to the spectacular northern lights, by following the links in our show notes. You can travel along with Debbie and read her dispatches at wonderwoman.ca. I’ve linked to that as well as to her social media accounts and recent articles in the show notes.
Join us next week for our conversation about travel, horses, and the enduring power of a Cracker Barrel with comedian Katherine Blandford.
Katherine: It feels like one of those institutions that’s gonna stand the test of time. Like, like if there’s ever like an apocalypse and the only people left are like a few Doomsday preppers, cockroaches, and there will be a, a, a Cracker Barrel still standing . . .
Aislyn: Amazing.
Katherine: . . . with staff in it.
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