When I moved from the South to Nunavut, I knew almost nothing about the Inuit.

I want to be honest with you. There is a lot of information online about Inuit history and culture. But if you do not know what you are searching for, or if you are not even searching for it to begin with, you will never find it.

So I wrote this post for you.

This is not a full history. It is a small summary of where the Inuit come from, the struggles they lived through, and the way their society is built. I hope it makes you curious. I hope it pushes you to go online and learn more about this important part of the history and culture of Canada.

Let us start at the beginning.

Life before colonization

Before colonization, the Inuit did not live in one fixed place. They moved with the seasons.

In the winter, they lived in igloos made of snow. In the summer, they lived in tents made of animal skin. They followed the animals and the weather, and they carried their home with them.

Storytelling was a big part of their life. So was throat singing. So was drum dancing.

These were not only entertainment. They were how the people kept their history, their lessons, and their connection to each other alive. There was no writing the way we know it. The stories were the library. The songs were the record. An Elder who passed away was like a whole book being lost.

Throat singing video is a good example. It is often done by two women, standing close, making sounds back and forth until one of them laughs. It is playful, but it is also skill that takes years to learn.

Leadership worked in a different way too. A leader was not someone who took power. A leader was someone the people trusted because of their skill and their generosity. Respect was earned, not imposed.

And the language they speak is Inuktitut, with many different dialects across the North. The land is wide, so the words change a little from one region to another.

A change that happened in one generation

Here is the part that surprised me the most.

The shift from a moving life to a permanent settlement did not happen slowly. It happened largely within a single generation. It happened around the 1950s and the 1960s.

And it was not a free choice.

A few things pushed the Inuit to stay in one place.

The trading posts made people stay closer to one location. When you trade in the same spot, you stop moving as much.

The killing of the sled dogs was another reason. Between the 1950s and the 1960s, the RCMP and other authorities killed thousands of Inuit sled dogs, known in Inuktitut as qimmiit.

The Qikiqtani Truth Commission later investigated this deeply. They found that while it wasn’t a government conspiracy to trap people in towns, authorities rigidly enforced new animal control laws with complete indifference to how the Inuit lived. The result was just as devastating. Without their dogs, families lost their mobility. They could no longer travel or hunt the way they used to, and they were effectively forced to stay.

When you lose the ability to move, you lose a way of life. You lose your food. You lose your independence. And slowly, you become dependent on the store and on welfare instead of on the land. That is a very different way to live, and it was not the way the Inuit chose for themselves.

The High Arctic relocation

There is one story that shows how far this went.

In the 1950s, the Canadian government relocated Inuit families from Inukjuak, in northern Quebec, all the way to the High Arctic. The main destinations were Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay, around two thousand kilometres away.

Why? One reason was to assert Canadian sovereignty in the High Arctic during the Cold War. Having people living there was a way to show that the land was occupied.

The families were promised housing. They were promised health care. They were promised better hunting and the chance to return home after two years.

But that promise was never fully met. Sometimes it was not met at all. The families arrived to find no buildings and very little familiar wildlife. They were not allowed to go home.

In 2010, the Canadian government delivered an official apology for this relocation.

The places we now call hamlets

To my understanding, the settlements that we call hamlets today are not the places the Inuit chose to live.

They are the places they ended up in.

That is an important difference. A home you choose and a home you are pushed into are not the same thing. The weight of that history is still carried by the people today.

I think about this often when I walk around my community. The buildings, the roads, the shape of the town — none of it grew the way a town in the South grows. It was placed here, in a hurry, by people who were not from here. And the families had to make a life inside it.

Nunavut today

Nunavut was created in 1999. It was a huge moment, because it gave the Inuit a territory and a form of self-government. For the first time in modern Canada, a region with a majority Indigenous population could make many of its own decisions.

But the past does not disappear just because a border is drawn. A new map does not heal an old wound.

Today, the suicide rates in Nunavut are among the highest in the world. This is not random. It comes from a housing crisis, from food insecurity, and from intergenerational trauma. When one generation is hurt, the pain is passed down to the next.

These are heavy facts. But I think we need to know them. We cannot understand the beauty of this culture without also understanding the damage that colonization caused.

It is easy to live in the South and never hear about any of this. That is part of the problem. The story stays far away, so it stays easy to ignore. When you live here, you cannot ignore it. You see it in the price of food. You see it in the crowded homes. You see it in the strength of people who keep their culture alive anyway.

The Qikiqtani Truth Commission

The Inuit have not stayed silent about this history.

The Qikiqtani Truth Commission was established by the Qikiqtani Inuit Association. Its goal was to create an accurate and balanced history of the decisions and events that affected Inuit living in the Qikiqtani region in the 1950s and after.

The recommendations that came from it were about acknowledgement and about healing. They asked for the wrongs to be recognized. They asked for Inuit culture to be strengthened, for governance to be strengthened, and for healthy communities to be built.

It is a way of telling the truth so the future can be better.

The values that guide Nunavut

Now I want to end with the part that I find the most beautiful.

There is a set of traditional knowledge principles that shape policy, education, and counselling in Nunavut. They are called Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit. There are eight of them.

• Inuuqatigiitsiarniq: respecting others, relationships, and caring for people.
• Tunnganarniq: being open, welcoming, and inclusive.
• Pijitsirniq: serving family and community.
• Aajiiqatigiinniq: decision making through discussion and consensus.
• Pilimmaksarniq: developing skills through observation, mentoring, and practice.
• Qanuqtuurniq: being innovative and resourceful.
• Piliriqatigiinniq: working together for a common cause.
• Avatittinnik Kamatsiarniq: respect and care for the land, the animals, and the environment.

These are the foundations for the Inuit people.

Look at them again. Caring for people. Being welcoming. Sharing. Listening before deciding. Respecting the land. None of these ask you to be rich or powerful. They only ask you to be kind and useful to the people around you.

And in my belief, they should be the foundations for everyone. Especially now, in the society and the world we are living in.

Learn more, and please correct me

If you want to learn more about Inuit history and culture, I suggest looking at the resources linked below (a big thank you to my co-worker Sandy for sharing them with me):

• The Meaning of Ice, by Shari Fox, Lene Kielsen Holm, Andrew R Mahoney
• The Canadian Inuit Dog, by Kim Han
• The Right to Be Cold, by Sheila Watt-Cloutier
• Angry Inuk, directed by Alethea Arnaquq-Baril 
• The Last Ice, directed by Scott Ressler 

And please, do not hesitate to message me if you want me to expand on a topic, or to correct me on a piece of information, as I am still learning too. I am not an expert, and I do not pretend to be. I am only someone who came to live on this land and wanted to understand it better. If this small post makes one more person curious, then it has done its job.