- Notes from the North -

This place has gotten into my blood. Back in Pangnirtung, Baffin Island, one of my favourite corners of the world, I’ve been couch surfing and living in a tent for the past 6weeks (my nickname here is ‘Tuupilik’ meaning ‘one that lives in (or has) a tent’). If you have a chance to take a peek at the growing image gallery on the website (www.nobarriersphotography.com) you’ll get a sense of this magnificent landscape: the frozen sea ice of Cumberland Sound, the dramatic rock faces of Auyuittuq Park, the rugged terrain surrounding Avatatu lake. More significantly though, and unlike my Antarctic pictures, this landscape is soaked in human history and culture that is in a rapid and dramatic state of change.

As of this week, my days out on the land have come to an end. Spring has definitely arrived: the sea ice is opening up and travel by skidoo is very close to being at an end for the season. It has been amazing to watch the physical dismantling of the winter landscape. Out on the sea ice hunting seal we had a seemingly endless expanse of space to travel. Then one day we had just a 50cm gap in the ice to jump by skidoo and kamatik. Then day-by-day the gap widened until it became a small sea littered with broken pack ice. We found new, though more challenging, routes through the rugged and chaotic ice along shore to get out to Spring Camp. For a week, I shared in the experience of the children while elders taught us traditional skills. We hunted, fished through the ice, cleaned and dried the skins, enjoyed freshly dried tuktu and pitsi, and learned lessons of the early years on the land.


This camp is important to the community as the traditional ways are quickly being lost by the young generation. Kids would rather eat chips and pop than seal and caribou or stay at home playing x-box or watching satellite tv than go hunting with their fathers or learn the skills of the women. The generations are polarized it feels. The elders grew up in small camps out on the land, living almost as they have been for millennia until suddenly and forcibly relocated to present-day communities. Their grandchildren have been born into a modern technological world, craving the materialism of the south. In between, a generation was taken from their families and sent away to residential school; many were abused and the rest culturally dissociated.

Last week I experienced what this has all amounted to. I took part in a Trauma Conference here in Pang, discussing issues of abuse, addiction, suicide, depression, violence, residential schools and other related issues that plague the North (and the rest of the world in varying intensities). I have been unexpectedly drawn deeper into the emotional roller coaster of this shared tragedy through a series of first hand experiences and their relation to my own past.

The first phase though in moving forward is opening the closet to the past. Previous to this conference, I had the privilege of being involved in the Truth Commission and listening to first-hand accounts as elders recounted that infamous day when RCMP planes landed in their camps and cleared out the occupants (except often the hunters who were out on the land only to come back to an empty camp, all their loved-ones gone)….. Mine is not the voice through which to tell this story though. The more I try to understand the North today, the more deeply I become embroiled in its complexity.

xx tuupilik