Inuit musicians (from left) Susan Aglukark, and PIQSIQ sisters Inuksuk Mackay and Tiffany Ayalika. Handout photos courtesy the artists
Generations of Inuit artists have always looked to each other for inspiration and encouragement.
Armed with the music and resilience of their ancestors, today’s performers are forging new sonic paths — to resist colonial efforts to eradicate and commodify their culture.
“We’ve really started to change the tide for people like us,” says Tiffany Ayalika, one of two sisters who make up the Juno award-nominated band PIQSIQ.
“And we take that responsibility because we don’t want our kids to go through the same things that we did.”
But the sibling duo couldn’t have done it without numerous generations of other Inuit musicians who blazed a trail.
One artist in particular: three-time Juno-winner Susan Aglukark.
“Susan did pave the way for a lot of us to follow into her wake,” says PIQSIQ bandmate Inuksuk Mackay.
Her sister Ayalika credits Aglukark with “showing audacity and bravery” in the music industry.
“We’ve learned to do that from watching people like Susan,” she tells IndigiNews.
In 1995, Aglukark became the first Inuk musician with a Top 40 hit (for “O Siem,” which reached Number 1 on both country and adult contemporary charts).
Later that year, she made history again as the first to win a Juno (for Best New Solo Artist, and Best Music of Aboriginal Canada, for her album Arctic Rose).
But for Aglukark — with 10 albums, Governor General’s Lifetime Artistic Achievement award, and Order of Canada honours under her belt — the intergenerational inspiration is mutual.
“When I first heard PIQSIQ’s music, it was so exciting,” she says.
“We’re going to find more courage to keep taking up those spaces. I think that has a lot to do with the growing numbers of up-and-coming artists.”
On Sunday, PIQSIQ and Aglukark will perform together on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) territories, at the University of British Columbia’s Chan Centre for the Performing Arts in “Vancouver.”
The concert is being billed as a “celebration of Arctic sounds and Inuit artistry.”
The trio spoke to IndigiNews about cultural pride, healing colonial traumas, and why Youth give them hope.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
David: I’m honored that we get all three of you together! Susan, you’re probably a familiar name to a lot of our readers, given your long career. What has changed in the music of your people in the decades since you came to prominence?
Susan: Clearly, we’re living in a time where there’s just so much beautiful Inuit music coming out — all kinds of music. When I first heard PIQSIQ’s music, it was so exciting to hear, especially for young people to be exposed to those possibilities.
Even in the last 10 or 12 years, you’re seeing so much more out there. We have Beatrice Deer, we have Elisapie, and we of course have our brilliant, beautiful Tanya Tagaq.
I mean, this past Juno Awards, we had Christine Piunguałaq and her pisiit [Inuit drum songs] — the first time a traditional stories-and-singing album has been nominated.
It’s really exciting to watch all of this happening at this point in our lives as Indigenous artists.
David: What do you think has changed the most, Susan? I’ve noticed that there’s a lot more collaborations, partnering and crossover.
Susan: Certainly in my time, 35 years ago, it was not an issue of whether I felt safe or not in the space I was beginning to occupy — recording studio space, songwriter space.
But I certainly felt alone. Now I’m not.
And I think the more of us that know each other in terms of culture — Inuit-for-Inuit, First Nations-for-First Nations, Indigenous-for-Indigenous — the safer we feel, and the more the numbers are going to grow.
We’re going to find more courage to keep taking up those spaces. I think that has a lot to do with the growing numbers of up-and-coming artists.
David: Inuksuk and Tiffany, what do you think about that?
Inuksuk: We owe it to people like Susan for blazing that trail.
I don’t even know how to put it into words, the feeling we had watching Susan on MuchMusic Countdown. Or the vivid memory of seeing her on the cover of Chatelaine.
It just did something to our brains in terms of what was possible.
Sure, singing was something we really enjoyed. But to think it was possible to make a career out of it, as Inuit women, didn’t really occur to us.
Truthfully, people like Susan did pave the way for a lot of us to follow into her wake, and to fill that space as well.
Tiffany: I’m just pinching myself that not only are we able to be interviewed together, but that we get to be on the same stage together!
Inuit in Canada, I would argue, are among the most marginalized within an already marginalized group of Indigenous people in this country.
Our extreme isolation, and extreme small numbers, in Canada — all of the extremes we experience, from cost of living, health care crisis, housing crisis, all of these things that we’re up against that further push us to the margins — make it even more stunning and incredible that there were people like Susan who showed us what was possible.
Because when you’re pushed, pushed, pushed so far, so far out into the margins every day, it seems like a very intense and hard thing.
To be able to dream into a space outside of your immediate survival — which is a huge experience for a lot of Inuit still today — that’s a thing we don’t take lightly.
As we’re starting to come up in our career and be passed certain batons of this role not only as artists, but a duty, a responsibility to be helping our youth and our community, and showing audacity and bravery in spaces.
We’ve learned to do that from watching people like Susan.
READ MORE: ‘Art can be so healing’: A conversation with Inuk photographer Katherine Takpannie
David: How do all of you navigate performing for a non-Indigenous audience commercially — representing your people to others — versus creating music for your own people? Does it change the types of songs you create?
Susan: I was very fortunate in the early part of my career. When I wrote and released my first album, Arctic Rose, I had just left home in Kivalliq, Inuit Nunangat; I was simply writing from the heart, I was writing what I knew.
And I knew a lot of trauma. I knew a lot of loss and grief. And so that kind of launched my career.
I had to stay true to that. There was never pressure to be influenced by outside influences, non-Indigenous influences. I had to stay true to what I started.
Performing changed partway through my career. About 15 or 16 years ago, I had an epiphany: This is who I am, like me or don’t like me, that’s not my problem. I have to sing the truth.
That was a huge step for me, because I kind of always tiptoed around being as safe as I can because I needed the work.And I needed you to stop doing that. But then an ironic thing happened: we got busier!
Your people find you, and you find your people if you’re true to yourself. It was just a very major turning point for me in my personal healing journey.
As a writer, I have to write the truth. As a performer, I have to tell the truth from the stage, no matter who gets uncomfortable.
Tiffany: We’ve been really fortunate to do a lot of international touring this past year-and-a-half. When we’re performing for our home community or up in Nunavut, there’s a shared understanding.
We don’t have to explain a lot — that baseline fundamental understanding is there. You’re talking to your family, you’re talking to your peers, your community members, your Elders.
We can just start running right away; there’s this feeling that you can just get right into it — tell different stories and jokes, it’s a lot more like inside baseball.
The fear of misunderstanding is not the same as when we’re in Hamburg or somewhere people have never heard throat singing, or they’ve only heard Mongolian throat singing, or we are the first Inuit they have ever seen, ever.
There’s sometimes this pressure that we need to do a Colonization History 101 in a nice, tidy little way to help the context.
Which is also interesting to do in places that are not Canada, because sometimes Canadians — settler and Indigenous — can really buy into our own propaganda that we’re so friendly, and we’re leading the charge for human rights, that we are this equitable and just and fair society.
When the experience of Indigenous people is definitely not that.
So trying to have challenging conversations with settler audiences or people that call themselves allies — bringing up certain things that are kind of uncomfortable — it’s a challenging thing to get through that widely believed ‘nice-guy’ image we have, this ‘we all do a land acknowledgement and that’s how we’re helping decolonize,’ or whatever.
David: What was it like for PIQSIQ to perform in New Zealand recently, and meet Māori people?
Inuksuk: So amazing. Their language is very much intact in a lot of ways that we strive for. And their ceremonies, their welcoming practices, their dances, and their songs are such a part of their daily life.
I saw a lot of cultural pride in the young folks, which just was so beautiful.
We brought my 17-year-old son to take care of Tiff’s little guy, and he was connecting with young folks there. It was so powerful for him to see young brown Indigenous folks who carried themselves with cultural pride.
And I think he’s taking some of that home, in a way that is going to help him continue that path to learning about his own culture and sharing it in meaningful ways with others.
READ MORE: In Nunatsiavut, the Inotsiavik Centre is connecting Inuit with their culture
David: Being stripped of that cultural pride has such a huge impact, it’s life-or-death. Why is that so especially important for Youth, and how does music fit into that?
Susan: So at our charity, the Arctic Rose Foundation, we utilize all of the arts to connect participants with artists and with our Youth workers in community.
A couple of weeks ago we were in Rankin Inlet with two dancers — a dancer named Simik [Komaksiutiksak] and a First Nations dancer — and we had 10 middle-school-age Youth participating.
The young boys just got so into Simik’s dancing; to watch and observe these young boys so comfortable dancing, you don’t see that any other time.
It just made me believe more deeply that we are on the right track as artists — in terms of reconnecting them with self. Because self is community, and their community is an Inuit community.
We’re often working against an identity crisis in our communities. We’re bringing Inuit artists into these communities to connect them with all the possibilities of all the art you can do as an Inuk person, so they can claim Inuit identity.
We are working to understand the history — as Inuit, we are all deeply connected to that, but also contemporary. Seeing Inuit children and Youth watching Inuit professional dancers is quite stunning.
We’re expanding what we think culture is: staying true to self as contemporary Inuk.
That’s a long answer, David, but it’s a conversation we need to be comfortable to have. Because a lot of our children and Youth may be dealing with an identity crisis; it had been taken away from them for so long.
We’re teaching them Inuit art, and they’re reconnecting and feel safer to challenge the misconceptions and return to their true self as an Inuk person.
This is very exciting for me to witness and to observe, because it’s an unintended benefit of the work we are doing through the Foundation.
David: That’s very powerful. Tiffany or Inuksuk, how does your music play into Youth feeling pride in their identity?
Inuksuk: Shame is a barrier to learning. Scientifically, it dysregulates your nervous system, which makes it just impossible to learn.
So when we create barriers to learning anything, especially culture, we’re not doing ourselves any favours.
Anywhere that we can de-shame and show young people that Inuk ways are still for you — the values are for you, the songs are for you, the dances are for you, you can feel welcomed in and connected, you belong — we’re doing a huge service to carrying on the culture, and allowing it to adapt.
READ MORE: In new podcast, Iñupiaq storyteller brings Northern tales to a digital platform
Tiffany: 100 per cent. We’re parents ourselves — Inuk has teenage sons, I have a three-year-old son.
Inuit culture celebrates and balances roles and responsibilities between all the genders. But the way we have set up this very patriarchal, capitalistic society does a huge disservice to our men.
I was almost crying hearing Susan talking about those young boys dancing together.
We do not let men have a huge spectrum of what it means to be a man and masculinities. There’s so many different expressions of that.
Part of Inuit culture is being very flexible with gender roles, and very open to letting people participate in community, and do the things that really resonate with them. Because we all have something to contribute.
When you can feel part of a team, and part of a community, in that way that’s open and accommodating and also provides support — that’s just something our Youth don’t have right now.
We just are totally in awe of the people like Susan and Arctic Rose Foundation doing this kind of work. Because we see it in the needs of our own families that still live up in Nunavut. This is a very real and present need that continues to exist.
The music video we just did for one of our songs, ‘Mahaha’ — we wanted to celebrate the brilliance of our Inuit games and our sports, and the cultural pride we feel pushing ourselves physically to do these games and these feats.
We wanted that to be a source of pride for our boys, for my nephews, for Inuk’s sons, and for Inuit Youth to see, ‘Wow, there’s this motion-capture augmented-reality thing, and that’s still Inuk; that is still an expression of Inuit culture.’
We’re showing traditional games, we’re showing katajjaq [throat-singing game], we’re showing storytelling, and using technology that is vibrant and exciting for young people.
We want the world to see the brilliance of Inuit ingenuity.
David: What gives you the greatest hope for Inuit music going forward into the future?
Susan: I get inspired every time I hear new music. And when you see it being done by this generation, that gives me hope. I’m not going to catch up, I’m okay with that. But to watch it, to observe it, to witness it — I’m so excited to share a stage with [PIQSIQ].
Because dreams and dreamers are important. Without them, there’s a deep disconnection from hope. Dreamers allow us to do that: to stay connected to hope.
Tiffany: What gives me hope is continuing to have our kids be part of our process. We joke around that my three-year-old is our band manager; when he needs a snack, everybody needs a snack.
And that it gives me hope that the industry is slowly changing to accommodate families, to accommodate women better, and slowly starting to accommodate neurodiversity — different ways of looking at things, based on the hard, hard work of people like Susan.
We’ve really started to change the tide for people like us, and we take that responsibility because we don’t want our kids to go through the same things that we did.
As long as we just uplift — and don’t pass things down that shouldn’t be passed down — that gives me a huge amount of hope. My son sees it as totally normal that ‘mommy and auntie are doing a concert,’ and ‘mommy and auntie are doing this thing’ — to normalize this reality we’re doing.
Susan: Normalize success.
Inuksuk: I do some work with a northern Youth organization called FOXY [Fostering Open Expression among Youth], and young Inuit who come through the program will come up to me and say, ‘Can we throat sing?’ and we’ll have a little exchange.
Then they’ll pull out their phones — they’re using technology, right? — and they’ll say, ‘Can you please sing that song for me so that I can practice when I get home?’
There’s probably dozens, if not hundreds, of little voice notes of my voice on kids’ phones throughout the Arctic, with these little throat songs on them.
And then they’ll come back the next time they engage with the program and they’ll be like, ‘I learned it and I found a partner and we’re singing together.’
That grassroots, on a community level — young people just being like, ‘We know these songs.’
When Tiff and I were younger, it was harder to learn. Not everybody wanted to talk about these things, and it was hard to learn new songs.
So to see young people with a starting base that’s much broader than where we started with is just so encouraging. I have a lot of hope from that.
Susan Aglukark and PIQSIQ will perform on Sunday, April 12 at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts at UBC in “Vancouver.” Tickets available here.
The post ‘We want the world to see the brilliance of Inuit ingenuity’: Q&A with Susan Aglukark and PIQSIQ appeared first on Indiginews.
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