Mentor Of The Month

Q & A WITH ALETHEA ANN AGGIUQ ARNAQUQ-BARIL

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Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, the work that you do and how you got into it?

I originally went to school for computer science in Ontario at University of Waterloo. I entered that field because I wanted to get into educational video games—interactive media design. I discovered I hate programming. It’s a soul-less job. I switched into visual arts. I took illustration at Sheridan College because I realized that art is another way to get into developing educational content for youth and so that’s the route I took. When I returned home to Nunavut after graduating from Sheridan I kind of got sucked into the film industry. I saw an opportunity to work as a trainee for a filmmaker and I thought that would be pretty cool too, because really my end goal was to create content for youth that would encourage them to speak the Inuktitut language and to continue practicing our culture.

What have been some of the projects that you are currently working on?

The project I most recently completed was a documentary called Experimental Eskimos. It’s for broadcast on Aboriginal Peoples’ Television Network and also on CBC. I co-produced with White Pine Pictures that’s based in Toronto. It’s a documentary about three Inuit men who, when they were young children in the early 60’s, were taken from their homes in Nunavut (it wasn’t even Nunavut back then—it was the Northwest Territories). They were taken from their homes and put into schools in the south. They were put into foster families and the idea was to see if they could assimilate into southern culture and to see if Inuit had the intellectual capacity t function in white southern society. They were actually called “experimental eskimos” in government documents. It was sort of a horrifying idea but in the end the experiments sort of backfired on the government because the three men went on to be big political leaders in the Inuit world and negotiated the Land Claims agreements for Nunavut as well as northern Quebec. It’s an empowering story.

How do you strive to empower other youth in your community to have a voice?

As many people are aware there are a lot of social ills—I guess—in Aboriginal communities and in the higher Arctic with the Inuits it’s no different. Employment is really low and often youth can feel quite helpless and don’t really know what to do with their lives so suicide rates are quite high. As a young adult I was really struggling with: what can I do to make the most difference in my life, with my peers? I went through the phases of: should I be a social worker, should I be a doctor, should I be a teacher. What’s the best thing I can do? In my opinion one of the most powerful things you can do is to give people a voice and after working as a trainee on a film I realized what a powerful tool it is and how well suited it is to Inuit because we’re oral storytellers. For the most part we didn’t have a writing system until one was given to us by Christian missionaries. So, film is a really powerful too and a natural tool for Inuit to use because we’re very visual and artistic and oral storytellers. I realized that one of the really cool things about film and digital media in general is that you can be kind of fickle. You can take an interest in one topic, make a film about it and then do a complete 180 and study a completely different topic. You can be an activist on one issue and do all you can in that area, and then you can drop that and move on to another issue. It’s great for people with sort of short attention spans and obsessive qualities to research things to death. It’s an opportunity to educate not only people in the outside world about Inuit issues, but it’s also an opportunity to get Inuit conversing within our own communities about issues that maybe people aren’t thinking about so much and should be.

What sort of advice would you give to someone living in the north, a young Inuit arts professional, that wants a career in the arts? Who should they connect with? What are ways of supporting your career?

It’s nearly impossible to be a filmmaker in the north without also being an advocate on behalf of filmmakers in the north because there are so few of us and there are extraordinary challenges that we face that not everyone in Canada faces. A lot of remote communities face the same challenges we do geographically. What many people don’t realize is—for example, I just flew to Ottawa from Iqaluit and that cost $2,000 and that’s the easiest community to get to in Nunavut so there are challenges like that and you’re constantly trying to educate funders and support organizations—training organizations all across the country. You’re constantly reminding people that we exist up there so it’s really great when people remember to not just go from coast to coast, but to go from coast to coast to coast because we’re really far away.  One advantage that we have is that because we’re so small we can be really well connected. We stay in touch a lot and one of the ways we do that is we have the Ajjiit Nunavut Media Association and we encourage all people who are in film, television or any kind of digital media, to be a member. [We also encourage] service providers to those industries to be members and we stay in constant contact. So any funding deadlines we know that are coming up we e-mail our membership, any workshops that are happening. We try to hold workshops and also get the funding to fly people in from the communities because there aren’t any roads going between communities so we have to fly everywhere. Even within Nunavut you can spend $5,000 on a plane ticket. There are those kinds of challenges but by staying connected and keeping on top of things…if people are already coming into town for one conference we try to tack on a couple of extra days to that conference and get them to stick around for another workshop. It’s crucial to stay in touch with each other.

How can people who are living in the southern part of Canada, who I think can get a little closed-minded and forget how much territory is up there above them, how can they stay more informed as to what’s going on in the north or connect with opportunities that are in the north?

That’s actually an interesting question when you talk about opportunities in the north because we face big challenges in terms of budgeting for travel and that kind of thing but also because of that a lot of organizations love to receive proposals from the north, or anything to do with the north and they’re really supportive of us. Although we might have trouble finding people who are fluent enough in English to write a proposal for a really great project, partnering with people in the south who are good at writing proposals, good at being producers…it’s not easy but there’s a lot of opportunity to partner with Inuit artists up there if you actually make it up.

What keeps your passion? What keeps you coming back to this, because I think all artists and all arts professionals face many challenges that can be quite taxing on us. What are the things that inspire you?

I know what you mean. I’m working on a documentary right now. I just finished shooting and I’m about to start editing and it’s a documentary about Inuit traditional tattoos. There’s very little documentation on the subject and I had to travel all across the territory and raise huge amount of money to travel and interview dozens and dozens of elders across the territory on the topic. It was so extraordinarily difficult as an emerging artist. It was my first film as a director. I’ve actually started and completed other films that I started after I started this one but because it was my first one it was just my baby and really difficult to accomplish. There were times when I really felt like giving up and [thought] “is this really worth putting off buying a house and getting married and having kids?” You really have to throw your whole life into a project sometimes, especially when you’re starting out. But what really kept me going was knowing that if I completed the project I’d be contributing something to my culture that might otherwise disappear. A lot of the projects we do up north have a sense of urgency because so much of our culture that’s still alive, but really on the fringes and starting to die out and not be used anymore—there’s just so much of it to do—there’s so much of it to document and bring to light. So there’s sort of a sense of urgency and a sense of purpose which is really enjoyable and that keeps me going. Another thing that keeps me going is that I was schooled in the south for a number of years and I lost a lot of my language and I’ve had to work really hard to get it back. I’m pretty fluent now but I’m not 100 percent and a lot of young Inuit are in that boat where they’re really feeling like “I’m not fluent enough in my language, I can’t interview elders, I feel sort of useless, I don’t have the traditional skills but I’m also not really educated…what to I do with my life?” I found that I was feeling like that at one point and film, or arts in general really gave me a sense of purpose. Like, I don’t know the history of traditional tattoos. I can’t teach that to young kids but I can write proposals to find out about it and share it with other people. Being that link in the middle between elders who have that knowledge and youth who want to know it is a really empowering feeling. That’s what keeps me going. So it’s not just accomplishing these projects and preserving that history; it’s also teaching other youth that they can have a purpose and role even if they feel useless. There are things that they can do.

Since you were talking about tattoos…can I ask you about your tattoos? Alethea has this really beautiful tattoo on her face that I couldn’t help but notice, and then beautiful patterns on her wrists as well, that look like bracelets. It’s probably one of the most unique tattoos I’ve seen and I was wondering if there is a meaning or a story behind them.

Absolutely. As I mentioned I’m working on a documentary about traditional Inuit tattoos but it didn’t actually start out as a film project. It just started out as me wanting to know more about traditional tattoos because I wanted to get them. The more I looked into it the more I realized there isn’t any documentation on it. Not only is there no documentation on it but the elders really were hesitant to talk about the topic because it’s sort of taboo, I guess. That’s how the project started out and on my journey across the north to learn more about them I realized it kind of opened up a whole other world to me about post-colonialism and people trying to recover their culture after being dominated by another. The questions that came up on my journey were just fascinating and I was amazed at the elders’ response. They were very hesitant to talk about tattoos but I discovered that it’s not because they didn’t want to. It’s because they weren’t sure if they would be ridiculed by their peers, the other elders. They wanted to be sure that I wasn’t going to be sharing these designs with everyone in the world. They kind of wanted to know that I would do it respectfully. After showing them that I put together this huge project and flew people all over to document everything they became more open and wanted to talk about it and they were so happy that this amazing beautiful part of our culture was going to live on through the film. Then I would tell them that I was actually doing the film because I wanted to get tattoos and the response I got was unbelievable. It was a beautiful thing because like I was mentioning earlier, sometimes, there can be this disconnect between youth and elders in the north. There were years where I felt like I had no idea what I was doing, didn’t know who to ask, felt like this black wall was up and I didn’t even know where to start and to be sitting there in front of elders all across the territory, and one after another they were so supportive, it was just an amazing thing that’s given me a sense of strength for the rest of my life that I can’t even really describe. To get back to the question about the tattoos—that was sort of the background of what they mean to me. It’s cultural reclamation and reconnecting with my history and my heritage. But also aesthetically I loved them. That’s why I wanted to get them originally. It’s a row of dots following the cheekbones and then sort of a curved v-shape on the forehead. One of my friends describes them as “princess tattoos”. I like that. It reminds me of an Indian princess or something. They were done for beauty—they were a decorative thing—when you become a woman, when you come of age, when you are ready to marry; when you acquire sewing skills and you have the skills that you need to lead your life and raise a family. That’s what they were for—that’s the face tattoos. That was kind of a rite of passage. There were also the body tattoos which could be on the hands, wrists, arms, breasts, legs—anywhere really. They were also decorative but the designs have meanings and one of these is a zig-zag pattern between lines on my wrist, like a bracelet, as you described. That represents the flame of the seal-oil lamp that the women tended every day that heated the home and gave light to sew by, for sometimes months on end of darkness in the Arctic. Obviously the seal-oil lamp was a crucial part of a woman’s life. Then there are these dangling upside-down y-shapes off of the lines and they are representative of the Caribou sinew—from their hind leg. It splits at the bottom so it’s kind of a y-shape and that would be sort of bent and dried into a shape that you dangle over a seal breathing hole when you’re hunting a seal. You place a teeny little piece of down feather, from a goose or duck, onto the dried Caribou sinew and when the seal comes up for air you can’t actually see them. Their breathing hole is kind of covered by snow so there’s just this tiny little hole so when the seal comes up for air the feather flutters and that’s when you know to harpoon the seal. So those are the actual designs but again, they were all about reaching maturity and showing that you have accomplishments because often they would have little marks—rows of dots or lines—and each one represented an accomplishment, like you caught a seal or you caught a caribou or you sewed a full caribou skin outfit. They kind of marked your achievements in your life. One interesting thing I came across over and over again is that the elders would say that after you passed away, if you had no tattoos your soul was unrecognizable to your ancestors. So it was also a way to bring you to a better place in the after life as well.