So, a couple people have been writing about this lately and I’ve been thinking about it myself… What does it actually mean to be traditional Inuit?
In Canada, it’s been a good couple decades since Inuit lived any kind of life that one could call traditional. Inuit people were, after all nomadic, they were hunters-gatherers, the relied on dogs for transport and fed their families with seal meat and caribou… now we live in communities. Now, we go to the store. We buy shoes from San Francisco online with our credit cards and we pay off loans for Suzuki Sidekicks. BUT we DO speak our language, amid the intense colonial efforts of our Canadian government, we managed to maintain our ability to speak Inuttitut. We still go hunting, albeit with guns and ski-doo’s instead of sleds and harpoons… but a major part of our diet still consists of foods that sustained our great grandparents. Ok, So my great grandma never had Soy sauce with her frozen char, but the ugly beauty of globalisation has allowed me that pleasure. As a young Inuk, I gotta say, I deeply love traditional food. I will eat anything frozen, I’ll eat it dried, I’ll eat it raw or fermented. I love it. It’s a deep and significant part of who I am. But just because I eat those things, does that make me a traditional Inuk? What if I sprinkle garlic salt on my dried caribou? Is that sacrilege? Is that contemporary? I don’t know, anyway.. this is getting too technical.
The point is, how DO we find a balance between traditional and modern? Without losing too much of our heritage… I was saying to a friend, I think the generation I am in (I’m in my early 20’s) is that bridge generation. I think anyone between 20-30 right now is there. We were educated, not in residential schools, but in our communities. We were not taken from our parents to waste away developmental years in institutions teaching us shame and abuse. We have parents who were born on the land and grandparents who lived mostly nomadic lives. But we are now living in the information age… we have access to the internet, to urban centers, access to higher education. We have the world at our fingertips and it feels like we’re diving into the deep end of this whole new universe. I feel like my senses are overloaded, too much stimulation. I have my iPod in my ears cranked up some Kid Cudi, my Suede Aldo knee-high boots and my hundred dollar Chinese laundry purse, uploading pictures of this weekend’s bender on facebook waiting for my plane to take me halfway across the world and to me, I’M SO DAMN COOL… I cant Imagine, not even in my wildest dreams how it must have felt to walk from Kuujjuaq to Kangirsuk, I cant imagine how it felt to go hungry because the caribou changed the migration paths… it’s not cool to think about being hungry or walking hundreds of miles. It’s not cool to smell like seal skins when you can buy Gucci eau de toilette… most of us don’t realize how much we’re actually leaving behind. The experiences and stories of our ancestors are disappearing as easily as deleting pictures off a digital camera. We’re taking SO much for granted. We’re the generation to blame if Inuit traditional knowledge (whether we practice it or not) is lost.
But I walk around and say “I’m Inuk”… I walk around with my seal skin bag and my fox fur coat… “Yea, I’m Inuk”. Have I ever gone hunting? No. Do I know my language in and out? No. Do I know how to relate to my great aunt and does she know how to relate to me? Hell, no. But yea… I’m Inuk.
