Photo courtesy of HighBarFirstNations.com

Along the Fraser River in the B.C. Interior is the High Bar First Nation reserve, a vast, rocky piece of land 120 kilometres northwest of Kamloops, population one. The sole resident, an elderly woman, doesn’t live there year-round. “She’s too old to go down there and live permanently,” says Angie Kane, High Bar general manager. “Her daughter takes her down and they’ll stay for a weekend.”

The federal government allocated the land to the High Bar nation in 1881, but in the 1920s, Canada deemed the land unlivable due to its lack of water access. It has remained empty and unserviced by the government ever since, forcing High Bar’s 164 members to disperse elsewhere, from Washington to Kamloops, Kelowna, and Vancouver.

With almost every member of the community living off of their reserve land, it occupies a grey area in the Trans Mountain Pipeline project consultation process with First Nations whose land or territories will be directly impacted by the project, or lie within 50 kilometres of its path.

While the boundaries of the High Bar reserve technically lie outside of the 50-kilometre radius, Kane argues that the project infringes on many areas where High Bar members are living, specifically Kamloops, where the pipeline will pass directly through. Some nations in the Kamloops area, such as the Whispering Pines First Nation and Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓pemc have signed an agreement of some kind, which might include an amount of money that would help the community in the case of a spill.

In 2016, in the midst of the project’s consultation process, High Bar hired a lawyer and forced then-owners Kinder Morgan (the federal government has since purchased the project) to consult with them. According to Kane, her community spent nearly $20,000 in legal fees—most of which was eventually reimbursed—only, Kane says, to be brushed off.

“They just sat across the table and said, ‘Well, you’re not within our 50-kilometre radius, we really don’t need to talk to you, but we’re here because we’re supposed to be,’” Kane recalls. According to documents, High Bar’s concerns extended from access to hunting grounds and medicinal plants, to environmental impacts from spills or leaks. After two meetings, the Crown found the impacts of the project on High Bar to be “negligible.”

“They should have had more talks with us, but they cut us off,” says Larry Fletcher, High Bar’s Chief. “We have band members that will be affected [by the pipeline] because they never got us a piece of land that is suitable for housing.”

There might be new possibility for members of the nation who feel they have so far slipped through the cracks. On August 30, the Federal Court of Appeal rejected the Liberals’ planned expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline, citing a failure to engage in meaningful dialogue with B.C.’s Indigenous communities; they were ordered to conduct a second round of consultations.

Still, Kane isn’t hopeful. “It’s been so many years of not being recognized,” she says. “Until we actually have somebody sitting in front of us having a discussion, we don’t hold our hope out for it.”

Top: Lynn Gros Louis (Huron-Wendat). Bottom: Anita Lalo (Innu). Images courtesy Nadine St-Louis and Ashukan Cultural Space, Montreal

Think of the dreamcatcher and it evokes a familiar image. A hoop, a woven web, adorned with beads and feathers. The iconic talisman, said to have originated from the North American Ojibwe, is a common sight in most Canadian souvenir shops. But don’t believe its “Made in Canada” label. More likely, it’s been mass produced overseas and imported into Canada for pennies on the dollar. What may cost you $5 at the shop is costing Indigenous artists their livelihood.

Reclaim Indigenous Arts is an education campaign designed to inform the average consumer of just that. Many Indigenous people rely on arts to make a living, says Jay Soule, artist and co-founder of the initiative. The import and sale of mass-produced knock-offs of Indigenous art pieces is a problem for creators who have spent their lives learning the methods and cultural significance behind the goods. “It’s creating an atmosphere where consumers don’t understand the difference of real, handmade Indigenous arts and crafts,” says Soule.

Why would the average consumer spend $50 on a genuine dreamcatcher that uses real red willow and actual sinew for the web when they can buy an imported facsimile made of faux-feathers and plastic beads for just $10? That’s why the campaign is urging consumers to take action and spread the word as far as they can.

The initiative features a letter-writing campaign to local councillors, souvenir shops, and even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a template for which you can download from the website, sign, and send. The goal is to actually enforce a UN act that Canada has technically adopted, which gives Indigenous people the rights to protect their traditions, customs, and art, with the hope to eventually ban the import of cheaply made, inauthentic Indigenous art. Down the line, the initiative hopes to repatriate sacred objects and art that are either on display in museums and galleries or lay forgotten in archives—and were taken without permission from Indigenous communities in Canada. According to Soule, these ancient injustices set the stage for what’s happening today.

“This is why Canadians and businesses feel that it’s okay to do this,” says Soule, “because Canada itself has been the leader of cultural appropriation for the last 150 years. It sets a precedent for the devaluation of Indigenous arts and crafts.”

Today’s charged political climate and various high-profile incidents of cultural appropriation were the catalysts for Soule and Montreal-based entrepreneur and founder of the Ashukan Cultural Space, Nadine St-Louis, to launch the initiative.

The response has been positive, says Soule. In fact, the campaign has even garnered the attention of Hamilton city council, which is considering taking a closer look at ways to combat cultural appropriation.

In the meantime, he suggests being careful when purchasing so-called “Made in Canada” Indigenous crafts. Ask the shopkeeper who the artist is or which community the piece is from. “Most likely if they don’t know the answers to those questions, they’re not handmade,” says Soule.

After being taken away from their culture, many Indigenous people are connecting to their traditions through art—and are trying to make a living. It’s a task difficult enough without cheap rip-offs made in an overseas factory flooding the market. Soule brings to mind a powerful comparison, citing the recent police raids in Markham, Ont.’s Pacific Mall for selling counterfeit designer fashion brands.

“Why would the police raid a store on behalf of Louis Vuitton and Coach…but not give us the same respect and protect our arts?”

Eleanor Sinclair at her daughter Windy’s vigil. Photo courtesy of Ryan Thorpe

It was freezing in Winnipeg, cold enough that frostbite threatened to set in minutes; the kind of cold that sets deep in the bones, down to the marrow. Unforgiving wind ripped through flat, icy streets, and snowdrifts piled along sidewalks. A frigid, stainless steel sky descended on the prairie capital.

By the time Windy Sinclair, a young Indigenous mother, went missing Christmas night in 2017, an unrelenting cold snap was stretching into its second week. In the days after she disappeared, her family phoned police, hospitals, remand centres, and downtown hotels and bars, asking whoever picked up if she was there. They monitored her social media accounts for signs of life. They loaded into an old van, maneuvering through the city’s sleet-covered streets, in search of her. Her children wondered when she was coming home. Her mother prayed.

Then, four days after the disappearance, came the knock at the door. Windy’s crumpled body had been found in a dirty, inner-city back alley, so frozen it took police two days and two space heaters to unthaw it enough to move.

Six weeks later, Eleanor Sinclair stood and stared at the spot her daughter was found frozen and dead. Her shoulders slumped forward and shook as she sobbed. Her head hung low as if in prayer. As tears crested her cheekbones, she whispered something to herself—or maybe to her daughter’s spirit. On that day, Windy would have turned 30. In her memory, Eleanor organized a vigil. Nine people showed up. One of them, a small child held in her mother’s arms, wanted to leave as soon as they’d arrived; it was still incredibly cold out. The group huddled in the back lane, bracing themselves against the elements.

It wasn’t as cold that day for the mourners as it had been when Windy arrived. The last week of her life was one long severe weather warning. It remains unclear how Windy ended up at the spot she was found. What is known, however, is that the chain of events leading to the discovery of her body was remarkably tragic, yet entirely commonplace.

Windy’s death marked one more soul snatched away from the streets of Winnipeg, a city with a long history of Indigenous murders and deaths that sits like an open scar on the community’s heart. Had Windy’s body not been found, it’s likely her death would have passed like those of so many Indigenous women: unreported and ignored.

***

On December 25, 2017, as the Sinclair family prepared to sit down to a traditional Christmas supper of turkey, mashed potatoes, biscuits, and gravy, paramedics were dispatched to their North End home. The area has long been Winnipeg’s most socially disadvantaged and deprived, pocked by high levels of addiction, crime, and gang membership, and low levels of employment and median income. Bordered on the south by a rail yard, the North End is cleaved off from the rest of the city. Community activists say the yard serves as both a physical and psychological barrier between the haves and have-nots; one local playwright described it as Winnipeg’s Berlin Wall.

That night, Windy was intoxicated, hallucinating, and paranoid, convinced a man was coming to kidnap her and her daughter. Eleanor had been concerned with her behaviour all afternoon after she’d caught her mumbling to inanimate objects in their home. “I knew right away she wasn’t herself,” she remembers.

At 11:15 p.m., a nurse went to check on Windy and tell her she was expecting a child. But she was nowhere to be found

The erratic behaviour kept escalating. Eventually, Windy picked up the phone and dialled 911, telling the operator someone was coming to steal her children. Eleanor grabbed the phone and explained what was really going on: Her daughter was high and confused, and while she worried for her well-being, she thought the safest place for her was at home. After hanging up, Eleanor tried to calm her daughter down. It didn’t work. Windy dialled 911 again. Once more Eleanor took the phone from her. In doing so, she accidentally hung up. Two calls in one night with a disconnection meant the operator had no choice; someone had to be dispatched.

Minutes later, an ambulance pulled up to the home. Paramedics checked Windy’s vitals and asked her some questions. In an incident report, one wrote that during the conversation Windy stood up abruptly, walked to the kitchen sink, and turned on the tap. Then she walked back and sat down, leaving the water running. The paramedics asked what drugs she did and Windy told them she injected methamphetamine, explaining sometimes she mixed it with opioids like fentanyl or morphine. Under the portion of the incident report labeled “Primary Impression,” a paramedic wrote: Poisoning/OD.

The paramedics told Eleanor that Windy needed to be transferred to Seven Oaks General Hospital for observation and testing. That forced Eleanor to make a decision. Two of Windy’s children—Travis, then 11, and Samarrah, then five, both of whom Eleanor has custody of—were at her home. The children had been in Eleanor’s care throughout the entirety of Windy’s battle with addiction, which began after her father died in 2015. (Windy also had two other children—Aaron, eight, and Harvey, five—who were not at the home that night. Aaron lives with his father, while Harvey is in foster care.) Eleanor knew she couldn’t leave the children at home. She also didn’t want to take them to the emergency room on Christmas. She decided she and the children would stay home and check on Windy the next day. She explained to the paramedics that should anything come up, hospital staff would have to call her at their family home, not the out-of-date number listed on Windy’s medical file. The paramedics wrote down the correct emergency contact number and promised to pass it along to staff when they arrived at Seven Oaks. As her daughter was led out the door, Eleanor pushed a winter coat into her arms. The temperature outside was nearing -30 C; she hoped it would keep her warm.

Hospital records show Windy was signed into the care of Seven Oaks emergency room staff at 8:06 p.m. Ten minutes later she was seen by a triage nurse, who noted in Windy’s file she was an intravenous meth user behaving erratically. Staff then led Windy to a nearby room, located close to a nursing station where she could be observed, to wait for a doctor. Once again it was noted in her file that she was behaving strange: Her speech was slurred and she told staff she wanted to leave. For still-unknown reasons, the decision was made to move her to a different room, tucked away at the back of the hospital wing, far from the watchful eyes of the nursing station.

At 8:48 p.m. Windy was seen by a doctor, who ordered an IV sedative and a pregnancy test, the latter standard procedure for women of child-bearing age when they come to an emergency room. The results would later show Windy was two months pregnant; there’s no evidence to suggest she knew. At 11:15 p.m. a nurse went to check on her and tell her she was expecting a child. But Windy was nowhere to be seen. Windy had pulled out her IV, gathered her belongings, wandered down the hall, and walked out the hospital’s east exit. Security footage shows her stumbling out the door, her jacket undone as she ventured outside.

When hospital staff realized she was missing, they pulled up Windy’s medical file and called the out-of-date emergency contact number listed. No one picked up. Either the paramedics did not pass along the correct phone number, or staff didn’t bother to call it. Windy’s family was not told she was missing, and no further efforts were made to contact them.

Three days later, on the morning of December 28, a woman looked out her apartment window in the city’s West Broadway neighbourhood, roughly 10 kilometres south of Seven Oaks. She saw something in her back lane, but convinced herself it was a pile of clothes. Minutes later, second guessing her eyes, she walked out back to check. It was Windy’s body, tucked away out of sight in a back alley by a heating vent.

***

There are many holes in the story of Windy’s disappearance. It’s unclear why she was moved from a room where she could be closely observed to one at the back of the hospital wing. It’s unclear why no one checked on her for so long after she was given a sedative. It’s unclear why she was left alone while exhibiting signs consistent with drug-induced psychosis and expressing a desire to leave. It’s unclear why she wasn’t held under the Mental Health Act, which allows people to be detained for their own safety. It remains unclear whether or not a “Code Yellow”—a hospital procedure used, among other reasons, to search for patients who leave against medical advice—was called after staff realized she was missing. It’s unclear why Windy’s family wasn’t notified she had disappeared. It’s unclear why Eleanor was told, when calling the next morning to ask about her daughter, that she’d completed treatment and was discharged. So much about what happened, and did not happen, remains unclear. And that, Eleanor says, is because her daughter was Indigenous in a hospital in Winnipeg.

Winnipeg: The city once dubbed Canada’s most racist by Maclean’s magazine. The city of J.J. Harper, Brian Sinclair, Claudette Osborne, Matthew Dumas, Errol Greene, Tina Fontaine, and countless others whose deaths and disappearances went unreported and whose names no one will ever know. Eleanor recognizes her daughter made poor choices that helped lead her to the alley where her body was found. She also believes her daughter was failed by Seven Oaks. That she still had time to turn her life around. That her death was preventable. Eleanor says the fact her daughter’s skin was brown altered what did and did not happen the night she went missing.

The details of Windy’s death kicked off a minor media stir, with the city’s major news outlets all chasing the story, and Canadian Press copy picked up by national publications. (The writer of this piece was among reporters covering the story.) But news cycles are quick and collective memory short. Six weeks after her body was found, only one publication sent a reporter to Windy’s vigil. The city’s meth epidemic had already offered up new casualties. In August 2017, a police spokesman told reporters Winnipeg was in the grips of a serious meth problem. Months later, the chief of police said at a press conference that the situation was so bad it was starting to keep him up at night. By all accounts meth is easily available and readily consumed on the streets of Winnipeg, which has corresponded with an uptick in violent and property crimes carried out by those desperate to fund their next hit. A local harm-reduction program estimated it gave out 1.5 million clean syringes over the past year. During a six month period that year, the Bear Clan Patrol, an Indigenous-led crime prevention group based out of the North End, said it picked up 3,000 used needles off the street.

At the vigil, Eleanor lit a candle and whispered a prayer for her daughter. Meanwhile, a few kilometres away, hundreds came together in the city’s downtown at The Forks, the historic meeting place of the region’s Indigenous peoples. They gathered in opposition to the verdict in the Gerald Stanley second-degree murder trial. Colten Boushie, a 22-year-old Cree man, was shot in the back of the head at point blank range in August 2016. After deliberation, an all-white jury acquitted Stanley, the Saskatchewan farmer who pulled the trigger, sparking nationwide protests and outrage.

With so much death and pain it can be hard to keep track of all the vigils. In front of flashing cameras and reporters scribbling in notebooks, demonstrators expressed frustration and anger at what many call the systemic racism of the Canadian justice system. Addressing the crowd, then-Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak Grand Chief Sheila North declared that 150 years of Canadian history weighed on Stanley’s finger as he pulled the trigger. “It wasn’t just an accident. There were years of history that went behind that gunshot that took that life,” North said.

As the words fell from North’s lips, Eleanor wept, standing over the spot her daughter’s body had been found, lamenting what she believes is the institutional racism of the Canadian health care system. The sense Windy’s death had already been forgotten was palpable. It was exactly what Eleanor feared most: Her daughter had become a statistic. “She’s just one more dead Native woman,” Eleanor says.

Twelve days later, the jury in another high-profile murder trial ended deliberations. Raymond Cormier stood accused of murdering 15-year-old Tina Fontaine, whose body was pulled from Winnipeg’s Red River in 2014, wrapped in a duvet and weighed down with rocks. Her death was a catalyst for the creation of Canada’s National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. The hope of “Justice for Tina,” the rallying cry shouted at protests in her honour, was in many ways the stand-in for the overdue justice that had eluded too many for too long. The verdict: not guilty.

***

After her daughter’s death, Eleanor had a series of meetings with staff and administration from Seven Oaks General Hospital and the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, the city’s governing body for health care regulation. She was looking for answers, but says she came out with more questions. (The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority declined comment for this story, saying it couldn’t speak publicly about the case due to patient privacy concerns.) When interviewed in June, Eleanor said she still had not learned whether or not hospital staff called a “Code Yellow” when Windy disappeared, which could have protected her that night. She also says a doctor who attended one of the meetings told her Windy had been “lucid” enough to leave on her own the night she went missing.

“She was hallucinating. She was clearly under the influence. They had given her a [sedative]. But she’s lucid enough to leave?” Eleanor says. “They didn’t even look for her. Her life didn’t matter to them. I even told them, ‘If it was that cold outside, you would bring in your pet. You’d have that compassion for your pet. Why didn’t you show my daughter that compassion?’”

Shortly after a local news outlet reported the discovery of Windy’s body, the Winnipeg Police Service, in one of its only public statements on the case, said it did not consider her death suspicious and would have no further updates for media. How and when she got to that back alley is still a mystery. Manitoba’s chief medical examiner has not yet provided an official cause of death.

A 2015 report says anti-Indigenous racism is so common in the nation’s health care system that “people strategize around anticipated racism before visiting the emergency department or, in some cases, avoid care altogether”

Eleanor will likely never get the answers she’s after. On one point, however, she has no doubt: Had the hospital done what it was supposed to, Windy wouldn’t have ended up in that alley. In her view, the hospital failed in its duty of care. And that, she says, is symptomatic of the systemic racism simmering below the surface in Winnipeg hospitals.

A few months after her daughter’s death, while the meetings with hospital representatives were still ongoing, Eleanor sat at her kitchen table reminiscing about her late husband, and Windy’s father, Brian. He had been chronically ill prior to his death, so the two of them often went to Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre, the closest hospital to their home. “The first thing the nurse would say to him when we walked in was, ‘Okay Brian, what kind of drugs do you want now?’” she says. “It’s not, ‘Hey Brian, why did you come to the hospital? What symptoms do you have?’ That’s the attitude. That’s the kind of treatment he would get.” The racism her husband experienced at Winnipeg hospitals made him increasingly unlikely to seek out medical treatment late in life to avoid the humiliation he felt being stereotyped as the drug-seeking “drunk Indian.”

Research on anti-Indigenous bias in Canadian health care shows Eleanor’s husband wasn’t alone in feeling this way. Citing a string of academic studies, a 2015 report published by the Wellesley Institute, a Toronto-based non-profit think tank, says anti-Indigenous racism is so common in the nation’s health care system that “people strategize around anticipated racism before visiting the emergency department or, in some cases, avoid care altogether.”

A 2011 study cited in the report took a closer look at the experiences of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people accessing care at an inner-city emergency department. The researchers found Indigenous participants believed being identified as “Aboriginal and poor” may negatively affect their credibility in the eyes of health care professionals and hinder their ability to get help.

Refusing to go to the hospital, Eleanor’s husband died of pneumonia at home in December 2015. His death served as the spark for his daughter’s struggle with addiction, which would later lead her into the emergency room of Seven Oaks. Two years to the day of Brian’s death, police arrived at Eleanor’s home, telling her Windy was dead.

Dr. Shannon McDonald, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer for British Columbia’s First Nations Health Authority, who called Winnipeg home most of her life, says it’s nearly impossible to say for certain whether anti-Indigenous racism was at play in how Windy was treated at Seven Oaks. “I suppose we can say it’s possible [racism was a factor]. Knowing some of the previous circumstances in Winnipeg that have been well reported, it may even be probable,” McDonald says. These previous incidents include, among others, the death of Brian Sinclair (who shares the same name as Eleanor’s deceased husband, but is not related). Sinclair, a 45-year-old double amputee confined to a wheelchair, came to Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre seeking help for a blocked catheter in September 2008. A subsequent inquest into his death determined he was ignored for 34 hours while waiting in the emergency room, with staff later admitting they assumed he was drunk, homeless, or both. He died of a treatable bladder infection in Manitoba’s largest hospital. By the time anyone noticed he was dead, rigor mortis had set in and an official time of death couldn’t be determined.

The Brian Sinclair Working Group, a collection of doctors and academics who conducted an investigation into Sinclair’s death, released a report with a series of recommendations in September 2017. That month, in response to the report, the interim president of the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority said it was time to “come to terms” with the way “systemic racism” can affect health care services. Three months later Windy walked into the emergency room at Seven Oaks.

“This young woman coming in, intoxicated, incoherent, she would have been considered troublesome,” McDonald says. “This young woman would have confirmed for some people their image of a drug-using Indigenous person, who may not have been considered as valuable as other patients. I’ve worked in situations where that’s the case, where people that I’ve worked with professionally sometimes see some patients as more worthy of their efforts than others.”

***

Eleanor has still been fighting to learn more about what happened that night. She’s also trying to get Seven Oaks to acknowledge the ways she says hospital staff let her daughter down. Both of those battles, Eleanor says, have so far been in vain. “Her life should matter to them. Her life did matter,” Eleanor says. “But I am going to make sure that changes are made. And if I have to go protest outside the Seven Oaks then I will do that. I can’t let them get away with this one. She mattered. She mattered to a lot of people.”

At the same time, Eleanor has been raising two of Windy’s children, Travis and Samarrah. She dreads the day Samarrah starts asking hard questions about what happened to her mother. She doesn’t yet understand it, and can’t wrap her head around the fact her mom is really gone. “She’s going to ask me what I did about it,” Eleanor says. “So I need to be able to say I made them accountable. That I did anything that I could to try and make her life meaningful. To make sure that nobody else goes through this.”

Sitting in her home, the last place she saw her daughter alive, Eleanor broke down and cried, recounting the time, not long after Windy died, when she took her granddaughter on a trip outside the city.

“I had to drop my Mom and Dad off out of town. I took her with me. On the way back she said, ‘I can see the stars.’ Because she hasn’t been out of the city in the longest time. I said, ‘Yeah baby, there’s a lot of stars out there.’ So we stopped and got out and looked, and she said, ‘I miss my Mommy.’ And I said, ‘Yeah baby, I miss her, too.’”

Eleanor’s voice began to quiver and shake. She tried to compose herself, holding it all in to finish the story. But the dam had cracked behind the weight of the pain. Then, it burst open. She lost control, the words barely audible through her sobs.

“I said, ‘Look for the biggest star baby, that’s probably your Mom.’ So she’s walking around the van trying to find the biggest star. Then she finally finds it and she goes, ‘That’s my Mommy. That’s my Mommy shining brightly.’ And I said, ‘Yeah baby, that’s her.’”

That night, Eleanor made up imaginary errands the two of them needed to run. Her granddaughter didn’t want to lose sight of the star, and Eleanor didn’t have the heart to spoil it for her. They just kept driving, staying out until the clock on the van’s dashboard read 3 a.m. Eventually, she pulled back into the city, winding through the residential streets of the North End, before parking outside their home. Then she carried her granddaughter inside and tucked her into bed, as her mother had once, long ago, in better times.

“Now once in a while she goes out into the backyard and tries to find that star,” Eleanor says, with tears in her eyes. “But here in the city, you can barely see the stars.”

Photo by Eagleclaw Bunnie Thom

At Wascana Park in Regina sits a group of protesters, their teepees erected around them. They are waiting. Camped out just across from the Saskatchewan Legislature, the group wants justice after the deaths of Tina Fontaine and Colten Boushie, two Indigenous youth whose accused killers were acquitted of murder charges. The camp set up in February, and in July met with five cabinet ministers to discuss actions the government can take to improve Saskatchewan’s larger issues of systemic racism. But with no changes in sight, they remain, six months on.

In this excerpt, Colleen Cardinal tells her story of being a child of the Sixties Scoop when she and 20,000 Indigenous children in Canada were taken from their homes to be placed in foster care or were adopted.

There was a huge disparity between how us girls and our adoptive brother were treated. As a child I could not speak out or even identify that my sisters and I were treated differently than our adoptive brother. It’s a hurtful feeling to know you are not valued as much as your light-skinned brother, I thought he must have been pretty special. Scott never knew the sting on his ass after a harsh spanking, nor did he have to change his pants after pissing himself from fear. Scott never went to bed terrified, crying and lonely. Scott never knew the cold outhouse on a late school night or pissing in the rabbit shed because he was locked out of the house. Scott has always known comfort, convenience and the privilege of being born “white,” to “white” parents. A thin wall separated our rooms but a massive wall of privilege separated our experiences in that household.

I watched my parents support and encourage Scott to excel. He flourished while my sisters and I ran from Ronald’s abusive, wandering hands. My brother had a job, lived at home, had his own car and attended college. Was I jealous? No, I was deeply hurt that we were not valued in the same way and not afforded the same opportunities. Instead my sisters and I lived in fear of a father who molested us. I felt angry and helpless. I could not speak out against the atrocities that I witnessed for fear that I would hurt my mother or put her in danger. But it was a torn loyalty I had, and still have, for my mother because she never showed that she cared for me or loved me as a child or even as an adult.

Excerpted from Ohpikiihaakan-ohpimeh (Raised Somewhere Else) by Colleen Cardinal. Excerpted with permission from Roseway Publishing

Simeonie Tuckatuck, 58, who has been living homeless in Montreal for three years, panhandles indoors at the Promenades Cathédrale near the McGill metro station in Montreal. Photo by Dario Ayala / Material republished with the express permission of: Montreal Gazette, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.

At any given time there are 150 to 200 Nunavik Inuit in Montreal accompanying a loved one receiving medical care. The lack of basic services in their northern communities forces a vast number of Inuit to fly south to receive treatment in the city. Once they arrive, many Inuit opt to stay in Montreal in an effort to avoid negative social situations at home.

After decades of horrific government programs targeted at altering the Inuit’s way of life, social and economic issues have inevitably arisen in formerly prosperous communities. Devastating repercussions stemming from residential schools, widespread sled dog slaughter, forced sedentism, and seal bans have shaken communities. For many, mental health has been severely affected; addiction, domestic violence, and alcohol abuse are symptomatic of the hardships experienced by many. Already difficult social situations are exacerbated by lack of adequate modern housing—almost half of families live in overcrowded or deteriorating homes.

Both positive and negative forces have led many Nunavik Inuit to seek new lifestyles in Montreal, be it for opportunities in education and employment, or to escape overcrowded or abusive homes. However, many find themselves in vulnerable situations in a new city vastly different from home, which has led to a disproportionate number of Inuit represented in the Montreal homeless community.

49% of Nunavik Inuit live in crowded homes. The housing crisis in Nunavik exacerbates health concerns and creates tension in families where abuse and addiction may already be a problem.

55% have a food insecure household. Fly-in only communities pay an exorbitant amount for imported food, and it is becoming harder to rely on traditional food sources.

39% have a regular family doctor. Most communities only have access to an outpost nurse, and hospitals and doctors’ offices often care for multiple communities at once.

446 sexual assaults were reported in 2017, almost 4% of the population. Many women report situations of domestic violence and sexual abuse to be the main reason they decide to migrate south.

60% of Nunavik residents flew to Montreal for health care-related reasons. About 8,000 people travelled south for things like cancer treatments, CAT scans, or surgeries that are simply not available in Nunavik.

10% of the Indigenous people in Montreal are Inuit. But Inuit people make up 45 percent of the Indigenous homeless population in the city. A disproportionate number of Inuit slip into homelessness after landing in Montreal.

71% of homeless Inuit said they would return home if housing conditions improved.

The Ogimaa Mikana Project aims to disrupt non-Indigenous Ontarians’ view of the land they occupy. As part of the project, billboards were erected across the Anishinaabeg territory—including Barrie, Toronto, Thunder Bay, and North Bay—to note Indigenous place names where settlers have taken over. “We are trying to promote the language, to centre and privilege it,” says project founder Susan Blight. (Photo courtesy of the Ogimaa Mikana Project.)

Every Canada Day long weekend, thousands of us leave smoggy cities and flood hurriedly north to summer homes. We can’t wait to escape to our little slice of paradise, our piece of the natural Canadian landscape we’ve dedicated to pleasure, relaxation, and tranquility. We spend the long weekend unplugged or revelling in one too many beers dockside pristine waterfront lakes, bounded only by bountiful forests and nature’s silence. Among the Great Canadian Outdoors, we celebrate Canada and the many wonderful things this country has to offer us. We launch fireworks, crush beer cans, or stare peacefully out into infinite skies with unabated pride. Cottaging has come to symbolize what the “good life” looks like to us, and celebrating Canada Day in the Great Canadian Outdoors is our patriotic practice.

But as we unwind in our Muskoka chairs this July 1 weekend, let’s take a moment to pause and consider the irony that is celebrating Canada Day on land that is so intimately connected to Indigenous communities and their land rights and losses. Let us consider that although Indigenous peoples played vital roles in early Canadian tourism as guides for hunters and other early travellers, they were systematically erased and relocated from land the government wanted to associate with parks and wilderness creation.

Take for example Algonquin Provincial Park and its surrounding “cottage country,” which today includes Barry’s Bay and Bancroft—home to thousands of Ontario cottages. This was land that the Golden Lake Algonquin never surrendered their rights to under treaty yet still were systematically displaced and removed from in the mid19th century, and consequently forced to live on unsustainable, overcrowded reserves. Since then, and until present day, the Algonquin continue to petition the government, insisting that they had neither surrendered this land nor been compensated for its loss. The land claim is still under negotiation 30 years after the process officially began in 1988 and remains a long way from settlement. There are countless examples of provincial parks and cottage country municipalities on which our cottages sit that is land Indigenous people never ceded territory to or were manipulated and shortchanged in the exchange.

We should all feel uneasy and troubled that land we’ve purchased for relaxation is the only land Indigenous communities have sovereignty over

Our cozy summer homes become even more problematic if we consider that some cottages actually sit directly on land leased by Indigenous groups to non-natives. In Ontario, for example, First Nations leased thousands of vacation homes to non-natives during the post-war period and built services that catered to these summer homes. In places like Sauble, Southampton, Hope Bay, or Crooked Lake, the docks we jump and swim from and the decks we barbecue and gather at are located directly on reservation land leased to us by Indigenous groups. You can call that an economic “opportunity” for Indigenous people to “make a buck,” or you can take the more historically informed opinion of Peter A. Stevens, who terms it a form of double colonialism. “After having lost their territories to European settlers and being forced onto reservations, First Nations [are] now leasing those reserve lands to the white descendants of their original colonizers,” he writes in an op-ed for ActiveHistory.ca in 2018. There comes a sense of great discomfort in such a realization, especially from the vantage point of a cottage home dedicated to all things comfort. We should all feel uneasy and troubled, or at the very least a little bit uncomfortable, that land we’ve purchased for the sole purpose of relaxation (for most of us, these are our second homes in addition to the homes and land we own in the city!), is the only land Indigenous communities have sovereignty over and yet are leasing to us, in most cases, out of economic necessity. Instead, around 2010, when many of the leases that were created post-war expired, and Indigenous groups failed to renew them, we settlers became outraged, upset, and emotionally fraught that our cottages—our slices of paradise—would cease and we’d be forced off the land.

You don’t even have to be outdoors overlooking the land from your Muskoka chair to reflect on the erasure of Indigeneity that takes place in Canadian cottage country. Those distinct Group of Seven paintings or prints many of us have adorning our cottage home walls—in bedrooms and in bathrooms—are another reminder of the intentional elimination of Indigenous peoples that has taken place across cottage country over hundreds of years. Have a look at any Group of Seven painting, and the Canadian landscape is depicted as pristine, untouched, and empty of all human and animal presence, explains Stevens in his oped. Yes, these paintings are iconic and beautiful, but viewed more critically, as some scholars argue, they also represent the erasure of Indigenous people who have lived for thousands of years in Canada’s wilderness landscape.

Some even argue, rightly so, that the Group of Seven’s fame produced a national art tradition that helped the Canadian government push an ethos that justified the removal of Indigenous communities in the name of wilderness creation and a “cottage country” vacant of human beings.

In a just world, Canada Day would represent a day dedicated to truth and reconciliation—a day devoted to the meaningful reflection on what we can do year-round as Canadians, personally, to contribute to the restoration of friendly relations between Canada and Indigenous peoples. It would cease to be a celebration of the Canadian government eliminating the jurisdiction and governance Indigenous people once had over their traditional territory, as it is today. For cottagers, this renewed celebration of truth and reconciliation might involve deepening our historical understanding of the land we love in all its complexity: researching and acknowledging whose land our summer homes occupy, learning about nearby reservations, and maybe even replacing Group of Seven paintings with local, contemporary, and historically accurate Indigenous art. Most significantly, this Canada Day long weekend, perhaps we cottagers can put down the beer and our smug sense of pride and begin to acknowledge (as Indigenous knowledge teaches) land as the sacred, living entity that it is, with its own rhythms and cycles, and us as mere stewards of the land, never owners. Perhaps this can be a first step in our search for truth and reconciliation from cottage country this Canada Day long weekend.

Photo by Rogue Collective.

Since the Trans Mountain Pipeline extension project was approved by the Trudeau government in 2016, the west coast’s Indigenous communities have fought to cease potential damages on their land. The project, which would extend the pipeline from Edmonton to the Vancouver area, runs through several First Nations communities in B.C. and Alberta—and protests have been abundant. In March, a group of students and youth blockaded the front gates of the construction site of U.S.-based Kinder Morgan on Burnaby Mountain, spending days showing their solidarity against the project’s movement onto sacred land. Even still, the feds seem unmoved: In May, the Liberals purchased the pipeline for $4.5 billion from Kinder Morgan to ensure it will be built.

THE SUBJUGATION OF TRUTH, KENT MONKMAN · 2016 · 72″ X 51″ · ACRYLIC ON CANVAS

The unpunished killing of 22-year-old Cree man Colten Boushie in Saskatchewan has raised serious questions about the legacy of colonialism in shaping settlerIndigenous relations. Gerald Stanley, the white farmer who faced murder charges after shooting Boushie on his land, was ultimately acquitted by an all-white jury in February. Stanley’s acquittal fits into a long pattern of Indigenous life being treated as less valuable than settler safety in the Canadian justice system. Although Stanley’s lawyers did not argue that he killed Boushie in self-defence, the notion that Stanley was acting to defend his rural property from raiding Indians has taken deep root among his apologists.

Defenders repeatedly invoked the motif of the isolated farmstead. Writing to the St. John’s publication the Telegram, local resident Robert K. Noseworthy defended Stanley as “a good man, who was in his home, minding his own business, when his farm was invaded by strangers.” Branden Crowe, meanwhile, wrote an op-ed for Manitoba’s Westman Journal expressing confusion about the accusations of racism surrounding the trial, asserting that it “isn’t about race, it never was. It was about a man protecting his family.” Even some law enforcement officials have pushed the self-defence narrative. In a private Facebook group, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer allegedly mused that Boushie “got what he deserved” for breaking onto Stanley’s sacrosanct property.

That Stanley is seen by some as the victim is a product of Canada’s historical and contemporary culture of white supremacy, a culture that is continually replicated and reshaped by our political and cultural institutions. I do not use white supremacy to describe pockets of skinheads and Klansmen, but to describe the dominant, normative culture in colonial settler societies. In The Wretched of the Earth, Martinican psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon observed that “the settler owes the fact of his very existence… to the colonial system.” Canadian white supremacy is a colonial system informed and reinforced by a constellation of narratives, symbols, beliefs, and behaviours that exist to justify and normalize the erasure of Indigenous peoples, the sanctity of private property, and the inevitability of European settlement.

One of the brighter stars in the colonial night sky is that of the pioneer past.

The pioneer stands tall and the frontier stretches wide in the Canadian imagination. The Anglo-Celtic settler, having undergone the trial of the Atlantic passage, enters the vaguely defined wilderness, where, through gumption and initiative, he claws a living from the earth. He sacrifices. He suffers. He builds a log cabin. His wife has 18 or so kids and churns a lot of butter. Through his toil the pioneer civilizes the bush, cleansing his soul and securing a covenant with the land. From the soil springs mills and general stores, taverns and churches. Naturally, he takes his rightful place at the head of table and community, a father-like role that he fills admirably. Under the banners of monarchy, Christianity, and empire, he has built something out of nothing—something to defend.

The pioneer is not bound by time or place, but by project. It is this adaptability that allows for the descendants of early 19th-century Irish immigrants in Ontario and 20th-century Ukrainian immigrants in Saskatchewan to imagine a shared past

All enduring mythic heroes need a foil, to test their resolve and provide an “Other” to define an identity against. In the case of the pioneer, his prime concern is his vulnerability to attacks from the wilderness’ natural ally: the Indian. The Indian is not a historical representation of any Indigenous Nation or individual but a part of the landscape to be civilized, Christianized. He is not only a prisoner of time, but imagination. Genocide and forced removal are shrouded by the advancing frontier, while Indigenous contributions to and maneuverings of Canadian society are downplayed. By compartmentalizing Indigenous history, the pioneer is able to usurp Indigenous land rights and justify his title. The land becomes his when tamed and worked; when it becomes his property. This line between civilized and uncivilized, white and “Other,” is what defines the process of pioneering.

***

The secret to the pioneer myth’s longevity is its elasticity. Shaped by the biblical United Empire Loyalist narrative of sacrifice, trial, and redemption, the myth of the pioneer is remarkably adaptable. As fresh waves of immigrants arrived in Canada in the 19th and 20th century, “Canadian” by necessity had to become a more inclusive concept.

No longer able to rely on the memories of a common national heritage, the idea of the frontier as a project collectively tamed by waves of pioneers shaped an accessible assimilation narrative. The pioneer is not bound by time or place, but by project. It is this adaptability that allows for the descendants of early 19th-century Irish immigrants in Ontario and 20th-century Ukrainian immigrants in Saskatchewan to imagine a shared past.

The rise of bilingualism, multiculturalism, the welfare state, urbanization, and increased Indigenous and Quebecois activism in the post-World War II era gave heartburn to Canadians who viewed themselves as inherently white and British. According to historian Daniel Francis, “until at least World War II the worship of the monarchy and the British Empire enjoyed almost cult status in Canadian society.” Massive cultural and demographic shifts were weathering British cultural pillars, causing a sense of existential crisis among traditionalists. Writing to the Globe and Mail in 1959, Ottawa resident Majorie Le Lacheur decried the “shocking mutilation” of Canadian history occurring in “the schools.” Five years later, columnist J. Bascom St. John wrote an article for the Globe and Mail titled “Teaching the History of Freedom,” arguing that “it is the British forms of law and liberty which underlie the whole Canadian political and legal structure, and without them we would be an enslaved people. It is the heritage and birthright of every child to know these things.” In a time of social and political fragmentation, many Canadians demanded that their history entrench their identity.

What emerged was a mythical golden age intended to motivate contemporary Canadians. Pioneer and living history museums in Canada are among the most effective purveyors of a mythical past, a vision of Canada defined by stability, compromise, and consent. In the 1950s and ’60s, many Canadian community museums began to establish themselves as pioneer history museums. Common among these museums were nostalgic and anti-modern interpretations of the past that downplayed dissent, and celebrations of ahistorical ideals like the existence of a unified folk. While reviewing Upper Canada Village, journalist Wilfred List describes how “the moment the visitor enters the village he leaves behind the hurry and tension of modern life for the tranquility of a pioneer community that is a living legacy of our past”—a past that was apparently nothing but hoop skirts, barn raisings, stern school mistresses, wagon rides, quilt festivals, and village-made souvenirs and historic ale tastings.

Much in the way that Gone with the Wind’s audience is encouraged to admire Scarlet O’Hara’s resilience while overlooking her status as a slave owner, pioneer museum attendees are told of the settler’s effort and ingenuity, typically exemplified by the life stories of local “self-made men.” Discussions of political and ethnic violence, racial discrimination, displacement, genocide, child labour, infant mortality, urban slums, and workhouses are omitted for the sake of wool shearing, period-dance demonstrations, and cookie consumption. At a meeting of museum curators in 1954, former Ontario Historical Society president Louis Blake Duff described the pioneer period as a time “in which men and women had purpose, perseverance, thrift, and sincerity, qualities not as prevalent in our own age.” By presenting their British past as pure, wholesome, and constructive, advocates drew a tacit, invisible line that separated the true inheritors of Canadian culture from the new existentially threatening interlopers and pretenders.

Why do Canadians identify as a hardy, northern people? Why do we use certain ideas, language, and motifs to define our land as worked and protected? Why is it so easy for some Canadians to envision Gerald Stanley’s rosy homestead on the modern frontier under attack?

Although the pioneer today may seem like a cultural relic of past anxieties, his ideas continue to shape how Canadians view progress and history. In 2011, the University of Manitoba attempted to differentiate itself from other universities across the country by launching an advertising campaign that emphasized its output of pioneers, adventurers, and trailblazers. The York Pioneer and Historical Society continues to display their log cabin at the Canadian National Exhibition, while the Canadian Encyclopedia article on pioneer life uncritically states that “persistence, optimism, thrift, resourcefulness, and the acceptance of unremitting hard work became character traits valued by succeeding generations long after pioneer conditions had passed.” At Butter Tarts and Buggies, a tourist experience in Ontario, visitors can “explore the simple life.” In 2014 the National Post ran an article about “modern settlers” in the Yukon, where “pioneers” are able to “carve their livelihood out of the wilderness.” Perhaps the most nakedly colonial, Pioneers Canada sends volunteers to preach the good word abroad “among peoples who are confused about what they actually believe—those who are steeped in folk religions.”

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While such language and beliefs may seem innocuous, they shelter unresolved legacies of colonialism, providing ammunition to those who uphold the status quo. Attacks on the pioneer tend to elicit hostile reactions from those who draw their identity from these ancestral stump-pullers. This can range from coded comments—those you’d see your uncle making on Facebook—to avowed, explicit racism. Last year, Windsor Star columnist Gord Henderson wrote that “pillars of correctness” have caused Canadians to go from being hardy pioneers to a country “consumed by self-loathing.” On the more extreme end of the spectrum, in a 2016 article University of New Brunswick professor Ricardo Duchesne argues that “almost all the men and women who came to Canada from the British Isles and elsewhere in Europe, and, if you like, from British America, before 1914, were pioneers, not immigrants.” Elsewhere, Duchesne has described Canada as being in “decay,” claiming that multiculturalism is a covert plot to wipe out the white race by the globalist left. The sense of entitlement and hostility to the “Other” articulated by Henderson and Duchesne makes playing hoop rolling on the minister’s lawn seem a little less quaint.

Why do Canadians identify as a hardy, northern people? Why do we use certain ideas, language, and motifs to define our land as worked and protected? Why is it so easy for some Canadians to envision Gerald Stanley’s rosy homestead on the modern frontier under attack?

Because we are conditioned to think of Canada’s colonial history as an idyllic morality play. According to a 2003 survey by The Pasts Collective, museums are Canadians’ most trusted source of historical information. Pioneer history museums continue to be a mainstay of Canadian field trips and family outings, and are considered a rite of passage in many areas. The silence on difficult history muddies the origins of problems facing contemporary Canadians, allowing contented visitors to imagine that they live in a just society with wholesome, didactic roots. That makes pioneer history and its purveyors not just complicit, but active in reinforcing a vision of our colonial society that values settler and Indigenous life differently.

QAVAVAU MANUMIE, ARNINIQ INUUSIQ (BREATH OF LIFE), 2017 STONECUT AND STENCIL 62 X 79 CM · REPRODUCED WITH THE PERMISSION OF DORSET FINE ARTS

Alexia Galloway-Alainga pushes in a pair of earbuds to tune out the clatter of cutlery and coffee cups hitting cafeteria tables at Ottawa’s Carleton University. She looks straight into her smartphone camera, wearing a slight smile, and begins speaking: Sanngijuq, she says slowly, the last syllable coming from the back of her throat. The Inuktitut phrase means “he/she is strong.” Pijunnarniq, she continues, translating as she goes—“to be able.” Then Galloway-Alainga uploads the video to her Instagram feed.

The 20-year-old Inuk woman follows the social media feeds of the Qikiqtani Inuit Association (QIA) based in her hometown of Iqaluit. A few times a week, the QIA posts Inuktitut words and phrases on Facebook and Twitter, so people can learn as they go. Galloway-Alainga’s followers comment under her posts, offering advice and encouragement. Qinuisaarniq means patience, she reads in another post. “Qinui-saa-rniq,” offers one follower. “Long A sound and not the N. Keep it up!!”

Moving to Ottawa from Nunavut invoked a desire to speak Inuktitut—a language Galloway-Alainga grew up with but never spoke fluently. Many of her Inuit relatives do. “So I find it very important to try and learn just so I can communicate with them,” she says.

While English remains a broadly used means of communication across Nunavut, the inability to speak Inuktitut poses a hurdle for youth like Galloway-Alainga, who equate those language skills with success and well-being in their homeland. The social work student aspires to work in territorial or Indigenous politics. But she also wonders, “Am I Inuk enough?”

***

Galloway-Alainga has seen other Inuit grapple with the same question. On September 17, 2015, Labrador-raised, Iqaluit-based, and not-quite-bilingual Natan Obed ran to serve as president of Canada’s national Inuit association, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK). He went on to win the election, but not before his language and identity were scrutinized by other Inuit leaders.

“There are ancient words given to us to live by,” Cathy Towtongie, president of Nunavut’s land claim organization, told Obed that day in 2015. “What do you recall in your Inuit identity that you have not lost while you went through the western education system?”

“I recognize that not being fluent in Inuktitut is a liability,” Obed responded, noting he has a strong skill set to make up for it, including his experience in Indigenous governance and socioeconomic development. “What most people who don’t have the language struggle with is that they’re not as Inuk as those who speak the language,” Obed told the board members. “The fact that I don’t have Inuktitut is only one small part of who I am.”

In fact, Obed’s fluency in Inuktitut—or lack thereof—tells a much larger story about Inuit in Canada. The legacy of Canada’s residential school system is one of loss—children were sent away from their communities with a goal to withdraw them from their “savage” surroundings, as former prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald once described it. In that sense, Inuit, living in isolated, northern regions, were able to safeguard many parts of that culture. Obed’s family wasn’t so fortunate: His father spent many years of his youth in a residential school where he lost most of his language. In turn, he never spoke Inuktitut to his children.

Still, Inuktut, a term that encompasses all the country’s Inuit dialects, remains the second most spoken Indigenous language among Canada’s Indigenous groups, only after Algonquian languages. Sixty-four percent of Inuit say they can carry a conversation in their mother tongue, and that percentage is much higher in parts of Nunavut and the Nunavik region of northern Quebec.

It’s a point of pride among Inuit. But it also places undue pressure on those who haven’t mastered the language. It challenges Inuit identity and divides communities, in a time when Indigenous language reclamation is synonymous with reconciliation.

***

Inuit identity isn’t just questioned in the North; it extends to many urban centres, where Inuit communities are small but tightly knit. Ottawa is often considered the unofficial southern capital of Nunavut, with an estimated population of 2,500 Inuit, and is home to a number of Inuit organizations and services. Lynda Brown is the manager of youth programming at one of them, the Ottawa Inuit Children’s Centre, which offers culturally relevant child care and community programs. She’s called Ottawa home most of her life; she was born in Iqaluit to an Inuk mom and white dad, though her family moved south to Edmonton when she was six. Her mom wanted to make sure her children’s English was strong, so she stopped speaking Inuktitut at home. Brown didn’t think much of it until her mid-20s.

“I remember when I first started learning [Inuktitut] and some people not being so encouraging with my pronunciation,” Brown recalls. It was the late 1990s, and Brown was working the reception desk at Tungasuvvingat Inuit, a centre for Inuit-focused health and cultural services. She answered a phone call from an elder, who was speaking Inuktitut. When Brown responded in English, she said the woman went on a tirade about not getting served in her first language. “Why are there qallunaat working there?” the woman demanded, using an Inuit term to describe white people. “Well actually, I’m Inuk,” Brown replied, and broke into tears. The incident turned her off Inuktitut for a period. When she decided to give it another try, she opted to learn Inuktitut through song at the early childhood program where she worked. Singing masked her accent, and she was encouraged by the children’s voices accompanying hers. Brown spent years learning to work her tongue around the song called “Quviasuliqpunga,” or “I Will Be Happy,” until an Inuktitut-speaking co-worker congratulated her on how much her pronunciation had improved.

Even for those who are willing and able to learn, Inuktitut-language training and courses aren’t always accessible. It varies across the Inuit Nunangat, the Inuit regions of Canada. In the best-case scenario, classes are taught in Inuktitut from kindergarten until Grade 3, as is the case in Nunavik and roughly half the communities in Nunavut. But try as it may, the Government of Nunavut hasn’t been able to increase the presence of Inuktut in its schools since the Inuit territory was created in 1999.

That concerns Ian Martin, an associate professor in the Department of English at York University’s Glendon College who’s studied language in the territory since its inception. The use of Inuktut in Nunavut homes dropped from 76 percent in 1996 to only 61 percent in 2011. If current trends hold, he predicts that Inuktut will be spoken by just four percent of Inuit in Nunavut by 2051. He’s further incensed by amendments made last year to the territory’s Education Act, which had proposed delaying plans to introduce bilingual English-Inuktut education up until Grade 9—a goal the government once set for 2020 and has now pushed to 2030. “If we can’t use the school system as a place where language is strong… why bother having a Nunavut?” he asks.

Language instruction options aren’t much greater for adult learners, but they exist. Following the creation of Nunavut, educator Leena Evic founded Pirurvik Centre, an Iqaluit-based centre for Inuit language, culture, and well-being. The centre’s first language students were non-Inuit government officials contracted to take the class, but Evic gradually saw the need to develop a program for Inuit who wanted to learn Inuktitut as a second language. That required a re-think of how the language was taught; even Inuit who speak only a handful of words in Inuktitut tend to be familiar with certain elements of the language that newcomers are not.

“Inuit already have our own way of teaching and learning. We try to come from that perspective,” Evic explains. “If I’m taught to make an amautik—a traditional Inuit woman’s parka with a wide hood used for carrying babies—my teacher won’t start with little pieces. She’ll show me the whole product first and that’s how I start learning.” The course uses the tupiq, or “tent,” as a metaphor: Attavik is the beginners’ level, where you look for the best ground to pitch a tent, and then kajusivik ensures the learning builds on a strong foundation. Naarivik, the course’s advanced level, takes on cultural issues and traditional knowledge, imparting what Evic calls “authentic vocabulary.”

Teaching Inuktitut as a second language to Inuit is still a relatively new concept. But Evic, who’s counted Obed among her students, says the program is helping address the rapid level of Inuktut loss in Nunavut. “We must always take into account how our language looks 20 years from now, what state it is in—in that time. And because it is at stake presently, we need to ensure we address its importance right now. All Inuit should be given the opportunity to continue to learn in their own language formally.”

That, however, will require a greater commitment on the part of the federal government, whose funding dedicated to the instruction and promotion of Indigenous languages pales in comparison to how it funds its two official languages, English and French. (Inuktut is an official language of Nunavut, though only at a territorial level.) The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report notes that Canada spends about $14 million each year for the preservation and revitalization of the country’s 90 Indigenous languages, compared to the $348 million earmarked for official minority language communities. In its most recent federal budget, the Trudeau government has committed more money to Indigenous languages—$89 million over three years, money meant to help implement an Indigenous Languages Act his government has yet to produce.

Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami has taken a more Inuit-focused lead on language revitalization; the national organization oversees Atausiq Inuktut Titirausiq, a group exploring a unified writing system for Inuktut. While a number of Inuit regions favour the use of syllabics, a writing system developed by English missionaries in the late 19th century, the group has recommended a shift to Roman orthography for all written Inuktut. The proposed changes have created conflict in certain regions, where Inuit worry those changes will erase the unique character of regional dialects. But proponents of a universal writing system, like Brown, believe it will help preserve Inuit language in the long term by creating standardized learning materials across the Inuit Nunangat. The process makes her optimistic that the Inuit language will flourish throughout the lifetime of her Ottawa-raised children and, she hopes, into her future grandchildren’s generation.

***

For many years, Brown used the expression Qanuippit? when she greeted other Inuit. “How are you?” she thought she was asking. An elder finally explained to her that the expression directly translates to English as: “Are you feeling better after being sick?” It was adapted as the common western greeting, typically asked without much concern for an honest response. There’s no such greeting in Inuit culture, Brown learned: “Inuit just smile at each other instead.” But that’s besides the point; Brown thinks the many Inuit who’ve responded “I’m fine” to her question over the years are part of a supportive network of Inuktut speakers who have made it possible for her language skills to grow.

“For those who are trying—keep trying. You’re going to make mistakes,” Brown says. “No one picks up anything with the snap of a finger. And for those who speak the language and hear people who are learning, be really conscious about how you correct them. Because how you correct them can either empower them to go further or impede them. If I listened to that first lady who made me cry on the phone, I wouldn’t have learned any more.”

More than two years into his leadership at ITK, Obed has pushed Inuit to move beyond what he calls a “hurtful and divisive debate” over language and identity, and instead focus that energy on building stronger, healthier Inuit communities and regions. “There are so many things that bind us,” he says in an interview from his Ottawa office. “No matter who you talk to, all Inuit want culture and language, we want to be able to express ourselves in our language.”

A scroll through Facebook or Twitter in November would have brought many Nunavummiut to the Qikiqtani Inuit Association’s latest Word of the Day: katimmajuuk, which means “together,” illustrated by a Saimaiyu Akesuk print of two geese with necks intertwined. It seems to drive Obed’s point home. But for many Inuit, language learning will be a lifelong endeavour. Since we first chatted last spring, Galloway-Alainga hasn’t kept up her own Inuktitut Instagram feed, though she gets a chance to practise the language on her visits home over the holidays. In Iqaluit, her grandmother has adopted a baby who is being raised in Inuktitut, and she hopes to be able to converse with the child on her visits North. “I want to be part of the generation that keeps our culture and keeps our language alive, because that’s very important to who we are as Inuit,” she says. “That’s very important to Nunavut.”