Urban Inuit: Nomads from the Arctic find new home in Canada's capital

OTTAWA, Canada — Dion Metcalfe pulls up his shirt to reveal an inukshuk tattooed onto his stomach. The stone cairn, used to guide or mark a path in the North, is coupled with a compass and the names of his family.

“My Inuit name is Aalla; it means stranger,’’ he says as his fingers trace the Inuktitut syllabics.

For most of his life, Metcalfe has been a stranger. Born to an Inuit father and Dutch mother in St. John’s, Newfoundland, on Canada’s east coast, the family moved to Ottawa when he was six months old. His father went to a residential school, a system notorious for its abuse of students, and what he suffered there he inflicted on his son. Metcalfe grew up bullied at school and at home, caught between two cultures.

Long known as nomads of the Arctic, the Inuit have been migrating to southern urban centers for nearly a half-century now. To outsiders, the Arctic is a barren polar desert, but the Inuit communities thrived there for thousands of years, braving winters with little daylight, and in some areas, temperatures that dipped below -50°C. Dog sleds were once used both for day-to-day travel and hunting, these days largely replaced by planes and snowmobiles. Because of the uniquely isolated nature of life in the North, myths about Inuit lifestyle, such as kissing with noses, still persist.

The urban Inuit community is not just a homogenous group of recent arrivals. There are some who have lived most of their lives in the city, strangers to their ancestry.

“My dad went to residential schools, so he didn’t want any of us going through what he went through: the shame of his language; the shame of who he was,” says Metcalfe of his absent identity.

Many Inuit have connections not only to family members who were in the residential schools, but also to communities that were deliberately broken up and relocated by government policy.

Hunters, who had long provided for their communities, could no longer hunt the land and were reduced to reliance on government aid. These scars of government policy mark the lives of many. Others who grew up in urban areas share this experience.

“I actually told people I was Chinese, because in Edmonton there was a huge Chinese population, and I’d rather fit in there,” says Lynda Brown. “My mom was convinced that for us to succeed in school, and to succeed in life, learning English was the only way to go. She stopped speaking Inuktitut to us when I was three.”

On the surface, there is a temptation to liken the Inuit challenges to the problems facing indigenous populations across the country, with low rates of education and employment, and high rates of foster care and incarceration. However, as one caseworker at the community outreach center noted, the numbers are amplified with the Inuit demographic. For example, 71 percent of those identifying as First Nations have a high school diploma, where as only 50 percent of Inuit have one.

Over time, collective identity and self-esteem were stripped through assimilation and racism, says Metcalfe. A report released by the City of Ottawa lists instances of Inuit being told to ‘go back home’ when they are mistaken for residents of Asian descent or being denied job interviews because of stereotypes labeling them as ‘lazy’. Rather than sliding further however, the community pushed back hard by establishing education and resource centers that not only provide social services, but also serve to instill cultural pride in Inuit youth.

In order to preserve the language and other cultural practices, the urban Inuit must display the same ingenuity and adaptability used by previous generations to flourish in one of the most inhospitable regions on the planet. Like its speakers, the language is agile and adaptive in the face of change. In the past throughout Canada, more than 65 aboriginal languages were spoken. In a testament to its staying power, Inuktitut retains its strong oral tradition in the North, being one of the few indigenous languages still widely spoken amongst its population. In the South, it is in the midst of a revival.

For decades, both the Anglican and Catholic churches had a large presence and influence in the Arctic, much of which has since been judged as a dark period in its history. Despite the Church’s record in the North, one Anglican church is an unlikely southern ally in the preservation of the Inuit language.

In Ottawa, Reverend Roger Briggs, who spent fifty years up North as a priest and community worker gives weekly Sunday sermons to a congregation of 45, using a mixture of Inuktitut texts and interpreter Aigah Attagutsiak. The church’s aim is to provide not only a forum for community discussion, but also to do so in Inuktitut. For those now living in the city, the language serves as a guide for navigating the confusions of a new way of life. Tears are shed on one Sunday morning during the sermon, as Briggs weaves English and Inuktitut together in a discussion of personal tragedy and coping. “We need to have these kinds of discussions. But what is the vocabulary for it? You often don’t know what you’ve lost until you’ve lost it.” To many of the congregation, life in the North is a distant memory, anchored by language.

The changes and migration coalesce around a rapidly evolving Inuit identity. “Parents who may not have self-identified as Inuit, who didn’t learn the culture, have children who are now saying ‘we want to know who we are’,” says Christine Lund, Coordinator at Tungasuvvingat Inuit, a community center set up almost 30 years ago to provide social services unique to the fledgling diaspora. As cultural losses deepened, members of the community worked to preserve many of the traditional practices of their ancestors. “We were part of that uprising, the gaining of control and power and regaining self-esteem. It was a lot of work by a lot of people.”

While prejudice still follows the community, it is now met and resisted by a fierce pride in heritage and culture through the steady proliferation of Inuit-centric educational opportunities. For some, like Metcalfe and Brown, the community push for preservation has led them to rediscover their Inuit heritage. Brown travels around the world as a traditional throat-singer, and Metcalfe, through interactive traditional hunting games, educates youth in public schools about Inuit culture and history. They also both work at the Ottawa Inuit Children’s Centre (OICC). The education center was set up eight years ago to provide both education in Inuktitut and immersion in Inuit culture. Both have had their children go through the different programs offered by the OICC.

The programs promote Inuit culture and language. Students learn storytelling and oral history from cultural teachers, and once a month ‘country food’ is served as snacks. The foods, staples of the North, are often caribou, seal and artic char. All are eaten frozen or dried in keeping with traditional preparation. The youth also have the chance to meet with elders, an important facet of the culture.

For many Inuit in the city, these programs represent a lifeline back to ancestry for a youth with a culturally ambiguous identity. But for those who grew up strangers to their culture, it means something more. Metcalfe smiles after watching his daughter throat sing. In a relatively short period of time, he’s watched urban Inuit pride grow in tandem with interest from the youth he educates in public schools. “Instead of shaming someone for being Inuit, they want to know more about it. Before they were scared of it, now they’re in wonder of it.”