Donate NowLinda Matchan, for the Pulitzer Center (Photos by Michele McDonald)
I'm here, near the top of the world, to write about Artcirq, an Inuit circus in the high Arctic region of Canada. It's an unlikely story: It was started by Guillaume Saladin, a circus acrobat from Montreal who'd spent summers here as a boy and wanted to return to help the community. A lot of help was needed. Life is tough here in Igloolik: people are poor and young people – including friends of Guillaume's – were starting to take their own lives.
Against all odds (no money, no equipment) Artcirq has taken off. The Inuit, it turns out, are natural acrobats – flexible, strong, agile, traits cultivated by life in nomadic times. Young people who'd never been on a plane before, were now performing in Africa and Mexico. They've been invited to represent Nunavut at the Winter Olympics next February.
But you can't talk about the circus without telling its back story, and this has to do with suicide. Nunavut's suicide rate is higher than 10 times the national average. But not many Inuit want to talk about it. "I'd be fired," one Inuk (singular of Inuit) woman told me this week, after backing out of an interview we'd arranged.
A view of Iqaluit, Nunavat's capital, taken Thursday Oct. 29 in late afternoon (3:46 p.m.)
I've only been in Igloolik a few hours, not long enough to know much about it except that it's on a small (2000 people) island directly south of Baffin Island, dark and insanely cold. My fingers froze on the short walk between the airplane and the terminal. (Which begs the question: How are we going to take pictures?) It's also said to be very traditional, rooted in historic Inuit traditions; yet also very innovative. Besides being the home of Artcirq, it's a haven for film and video – home of noted filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk and ISUMA, producers of the feature "Atanarjuat The Fast Runner" which won the Camera d'Or at Cannes in 2001; as well as "The Journals of Knud Rasmussen." Igloolik also has a women's film group, Arnait Video Collective, which co-produced the acclaimed feature, "Before Tomorrow."
But this is my third trip to Arctic Canada where I've visited seven communities, and it isn't hard to see that Nunavut suffers from a mosaic of social ills – poverty, drug abuse and alcoholism, domestic violence, a housing shortage, not enough jobs, a lot of school dropouts, malnutrition, and of course suicide, particularly among young men.
Nunavut was formed in 1999, carved out of the Northwest Territories as the result of a hard-won land settlement agreement. It's a giant land mass with 26 tiny communities spread far away from one another and linked only by airplane or, in the winter, by long difficult treks across the ice via snowmobile. Spend a day in Iqaluit, the territory's capital, and the picture you'll see is not pretty. The nice houses belong to the white people. Men linger in doorways in the cold. A lot of the children are toothless and inevitably you'll see them in the Northmart store buying pop and eating candy: It's horrendously expensive to fly food up here, so they eat what's cheap. (Little known Arctic fact: So much soda is consumed here that Iqaluit has its own Coca-Cola bottling plant.) Photographer Michele McDonald and I puzzled over a sign we saw on a wall of Inuksuk High School: "Make learning safe." It means," keep teachers and students from being abused," guidance counsellor Sheila Levy explained. I keep having to remind myself that this is Canada, where I grew up, one of the wealthiest and most progressive nations in the world.
But the high suicide rate, highest among young men aged 15-24, is a particularly tragic aspects of life here and this is suicide season. "October, November, December, are the traditionally bad months," Nunavut's chief coroner Tim Neily, told us today. "It's hair-raising."
It's also relatively new, beginning around the time of the federal government's assimilationist "resettlement" policies of the 1950s and '60s. Canadian authorities coerced the nomadic Inuit into communities, and sent their children away to residential schools where many were physically and sexually abused, and forbidden to speak their native language, Inuktitut.
One woman I spoke to on one trip North – she made me promise not to identify her name or her community – went through her own particular hell. When she was three years old the dreaded coast guard medical control ship, the C.D. Howe arrived in her community. Its mandate was to to identify tuberculosis patients which hit hard up here in the 1950s and '60s. She was diagnosed with TB and immediately ripped away from her parents. "There was no discussion," she said. She was given a metal tag with a number, and that's how she was identified. She spent two years, alone, in a sanatorium in southern Canada; her parents had no clue where she was. (Her sister was on the boat, too, but was sent to a different city.) When she came back, she didn't recognize her parents and had forgotten how to speak Inuktitut.
It's a common story here, with various twists. The theme, though, is that the ripple effects of the resettlement policies are still rippling – hard – in 2009. "We are no longer what we were," the woman told me. Many young Inuit are neither grounded in the old ways nor able to absorb the new. Some do graduate from high school, some find jobs, some move "south" for work, but a lot of them don't bother going to school – what future do they have here anyway? It's particularly demoralizing for the men, she said. They were accustomed to being the hunters, the breadwinners. Now – with few jobs here to be had -- there is nothing for many of them to do.
This woman worries that by speaking out, will be shunned by other Inuit. I asked her to paint a picture for me of what young men's lives are like at home.
They are sad, she said.
Their parents are drinking. They don't care where their children are.
They don't have decent or warm clothes, another reason they won't go to school.
They are packed into houses that are overcrowded. (There's a shortage of housing stock here so families double and triple up, sleeping in shifts.) The houses haven't been painted or fixed since the 1950s. The doors on the rooms might not fit.
"Part of the fault is ours," she said. "We are drunk and punching walls."
They are a generation in transition. "We've had, literally, just two generations since nomadic life." She is in her 50s, and was herself born in an outpost camp, out on the land, as they say here
"We are just adjusting. We're good at adapting; this is the only way we've survived. A culture cries, gets angry, and moves on." 