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On her first day of school in the south, Lynda Brown and her mother were called in to see the principal, who told them it wasn’t appropriate to send a child to school in “slippers.”
Lynda looked down at the sealskin kamiks and the parka she was wearing — similar to clothing that had kept her ancestors warm in the Arctic for centuries — then looked at the other children at her Edmonton elementary school. No one needed to tell her she didn’t fit in. So at six years old she decided that being Inuit was nothing to be proud of and starting telling other children she was Chinese “because it was more accepted.”
Now 40, Brown is one of the faces of an urban Inuit movement that is embracing culture and traditions — even adapting some new ones.
She found her lost Inuit heritage, she says, in Ottawa.
“This is where I learned everything. I didn’t speak the language. I didn’t drum dance. I didn’t throat sing growing up. I learned it all here.”
With more than 3,000 Inuit residents, Ottawa has the largest Inuit population south of the Arctic, making it ground zero for a blossoming “loud and proud” urban Inuit movement. The community includes people who come from the North temporarily, those who come and stay and, increasingly, those who have lived here most of their lives.
There is a growing sense of cultural pride, especially among children who are steeped in Inuit culture in a variety of programs that are unique to the city.
Ava Hainnu (centre) sits amidst some of the bigger kids and listens intently during circle time at the Ottawa Inuit Children’s Centre.
At Ontario’s only Inuit kindergarten, operated at the Ottawa Inuit Children’s Centre in Vanier in conjunction with the Ottawa Carleton District School Board, children play games with seal bones and caribou legs and are taught in Inuktitut. At after-school programs, in addition to homework help, Inuit students get lessons in their cultural heritage.
Ottawa is also home to the only Inuit family health centre in the world, one that northerners envy. There are numerous other programs for the community – from food banks, housing and addictions treatment to church services conducted in Inuktitut and regular community feasts and field trips to pick apples and berries, organized through Tungasuvvingat Inuit, Ottawa’s Inuit social and community organization.
Many of these services are located in Vanier, sometimes called Little Nunavut, but members of Ottawa’s growing Inuit community are settled across the city. Children are bused from across Ottawa to attend Inuit Head Start and after-school programs in Vanier. And a program called Bridging the Gap has held presentations about Inuit culture at dozens of schools across Ottawa.
It’s all part of a push to carve out a place in a city where negative cultural encounters like the one Brown and her mother had with the principal can still take place.
Many Inuit mothers here say they have been approached by strangers and told that carrying their babies in the back of their amautis (the parka worn by Inuit women of the eastern Arctic) is dangerous, for example. One Inuit father had a visit from the Children’s Aid Society investigating a complaint that his three children were “spending too much time outside.”
Brown, a mother of three and director of youth services at the Ottawa Inuit Children’s Centre, doesn’t want children to feel the shame she felt wearing traditional clothing all those years ago.
It’s why she’s passing traditions on to her own children and teaching others. And, she says, she’s already seeing the results.
“These kids,” she says, “walk with pride.”
By the Numbers
725: The number of Inuit living in Ottawa, according to the 2006 census. Inuit organizations say a more accurate number would have been 1,800
3,300: Ottawa’s Inuit population in 2015
1: Ottawa’s rank among Canadian cities with the biggest Inuit population outside of the Arctic
65 per cent: Growth in Ontario’s Inuit population between 2006 and 2011, according to the National Household Survey
15,000: Estimated Inuit population in Ontario in less than a decade, based on the current growth rate
56 per cent: Percentage of Inuit in Ontario who were under 25 years old, according 2006 census numbers
59 per cent: Percentage of Ontario Inuit who complete high school, compared to more than 80 per cent of the general population
7 per cent: Percentage of Ontario Inuit who have a university degree
15 per cent: Percentage of Inuit in Ontario who are unemployed — about double the rate for the general population
Related
The southward migration of Inuit to Ottawa began decades ago. Inuit come to Ottawa for health care, for jobs, for education or because other members of their family are here.
Some come temporarily and return to the North. Others, like Louisa Pootoolik, an administrative assistant with Inuit Non-Profit Housing, never intended to stay. She came to Ottawa 17 years ago to attend Carleton University and is still here. She talks about returning to the North some day, but then thinks about the price of food, the weather and other hardships.
“I never thought I would live down here,” she says, “but I really like living here because of the warmer weather and cheaper food prices and because of the Inuit community. I have so many friends here.”
Aigah Attagutsiak, who came to Ottawa from Arctic Bay in 1998, is another who wasn’t sure she would make the city her home. Later this year, Attagutsiak will be ordained as an Anglican priest, the first Inuk to be ordained in the Church’s southern diocese. She will give up her job as a patient navigator at the Akausivik Inuit Family Health Team and move down the road to Vanier’s tiny St. Margaret’s Anglican Church, where she will become a full-time priest and conduct services in Inuktitut for the church’s Inuit population.
As Inuit from the North continue to arrive in Ottawa, they’ll find a new generation of urban Inuit who, like Brown, have spent virtually all of their lives in the south.
Brown has a T-shirt that tells their story. “Lifelong Urban Inuk,” it says.
Those words began as a joke between Brown and a friend, she says, but they “have come to define who I am and what I represent. We urban Inuit are creating a new and exciting culture, earnestly trying to preserve a noble heritage steeped in tradition and knowledge. In Ottawa, we are a mix of those born in the North and those born to Inuit parents yet raised in the south. We are trying to fix something that has been broken.”
Makpa Amarualik helps his daughter, Yvonne, 2, use a traditional Inuit knife to cut play dough at the Ottawa Inuit Children’s Centre.
In a classroom at Rideau High School on a chilly spring afternoon, Ottawa’s Dion Metcalfe is holding the attention of more than a dozen Inuit children with a discussion about life in Nunavut, a place many of them have never been.
Metcalfe, the son of an Inuk from Labrador and a Dutch mother, has himself never been to Nunavut. Growing up, he says his father didn’t talk much about his Inuit heritage and he grew up knowing little about it. That wasn’t unusual for his father’s generation, many of whom had been punished for speaking Inuktituk. Metcalfe now travels to schools around the city talking about and demonstrating Inuit culture with the program Bridging the Gap.
Today, part of the cultural lesson includes a segment on the crippling price of food in the Arctic.
Displayed on a screen at the front of the room is a picture of a small can of frozen, concentrated juice. In one Northern community, says Metcalfe, it sells for $11.25. Add the bottled water that is needed to make it, because the water is undrinkable in many parts of the North, and a jug of juice costs $28. A case of pop, he adds, can cost up to $126.
The children’s eyes widen.
Meanwhile, as Ottawa’s Inuit community comes of age, there is a market for traditional food — so-called country food. Joe Hess recently opened Nunavut Country Food in downtown Ottawa. Its freezers are full of Arctic char. Hess plans to also sell seal, whale and other traditional products shipped from Nunavut.
On a recent afternoon, Josie Padluq, who came to Ottawa from Nunavut for treatment and stayed, was buying a whole Arctic char, which she planned to eat raw. Like many members joeof Ottawa’s Inuit community, she craves country food from home and asks relatives to send food such as char and whale meat from the North, or to bring it when they visit.
Every indication is the market will continue to grow, as the trickle south has become a steady stream of Inuit travelling in and out of Ottawa and growing numbers of them are making the city their permanent home. At a recent Inuit day gathering, more than 500 members of Ottawa’s urban Inuit community – known as Ottawamiuut — met and feasted on an entire seal carved by elders.
It’s a far cry from the 1970s, when there were no services for the Inuit who lived in Ottawa so people began crossing to what was then Hull and going directly to the federal offices of Indian and Northern Affairs looking for help.
That led to the creation of Tungasuvvingat Inuit (TI), the Ottawa organization that has been providing services to the city’s Inuit community since 1987. The Inuit children’s centre began as a Head Start program for Inuit children at TI, as did Ottawa’s Inuit family health team. The organization is also responsible for weekly food banks and monthly Inuit feasts, and more.
“We see part of our responsibility, aside from food banks and social support, around community development,” said executive director Jason Leblanc, “creating strength and pride and identity.”
Ina Zakal is a cultural teacher at the OICC and often speaks in her native Inuktitut.
Community development is crucial because the migration south is not always easy for Inuit. Moving from communities where everyone knows everyone else to a city can be isolating and overwhelming. Many say they have encountered racism and felt unwelcome.
“They would call me savage in Vanier. The French people called us savages all the time or called me chief,” was among comments from parents recorded in a 2012 report on the state of Inuit families in Ottawa.
“My kids had eggs thrown at them and kids would say ‘Go home where you belong, go back to China’,” another parent said. One woman said she wants non-Inuit organizations to know “that all Inuit are not drunks and drug addicts.”
“Perhaps the most agreed upon challenge faced by Inuit living in Ottawa was experiences with racism, discrimination, judgment and disrespect,” wrote the authors of the community needs assessment for Inuit children and their families in Ottawa.
“We heard countless stories of parents who had been treated poorly because they were Inuit, who had been exposed to degrading comments and remarks and whose values and cultural practices had been attacked by members of the general public, service agency personnel and government employees, including the police. An astounding lack of awareness and compassion led to many parents feeling inadequate, unworthy and unwelcome.”
The struggles faced by Inuit in Ottawa are not only from the outside. There are also significant challenges within the community, including alcoholism and homelessness. Easy access to alcohol in Ottawa can exacerbate unresolved trauma and the culture shock of living in the south.
The tragic case of Annie Pootoogook, an award winning Cape Dorset artist whose work is in the collection of the National Gallery, and who has ended up addicted and living on the streets of Ottawa, underlines some of the challenges. For more than a decade, an Inuit treatment program funded by the City of Ottawa, Health Canada and the Government of Nunavut has operated in Ottawa.
Natalie Lloyd is the director of Early Years and Community Initiatives at the OICC.
But despite these challenges, those who live and work in Ottawa’s Inuit community say a growing sense of optimism reflects the many opportunities available in the city.
“It feels so positive right now,” says Karen Baker-Anderson, executive director of the Ottawa Inuit Children’s Centre, which has become one of the centres of cultural activities for Ottawa’s Inuit families.
Baker-Anderson and her husband are adoptive parents of an Inuk girl whose music — a combination of throat singing and beatboxing — could be a symbol of Ottawa’s urban Inuit renaissance.
“They are still facing a little bit of racism. They are still affected by (issues such as) residential schools and addiction — those issues are all there. But they have a place to be together and to celebrate their culture. We have created a community here. These kids feel empowered and feel like they are part of something positive. I feel like we are moving in the right way.”
Jobs and training are easier to find in Ottawa, as is access to higher education and activities such as hockey for kids. The unemployment rate among Inuit in Ottawa — while higher than for non-Inuit residents — is lower than in the North. There are many opportunities for Inuit who are fluent in English and Inuktitut. Housing is easier to come by than in the North and food is significantly cheaper.
But life in a city full of strangers, where people don’t say hello when you see them on the street, can be daunting to those coming from small communities in the North. Community links with a focus on culture, say Ottawa Inuit, help a big city feel like home.
“I learned to appreciate my culture because up North you don’t think about it. It’s just a way of life,” said a parent interviewed for the study on Inuit families in Ottawa. “But there’s so much focus here and it’s so promoted here. Living here, it really opens my eyes and I am more proud of my culture.”
Leblanc notes that Inuit, who have survived and thrived in one of the harshest climates in the world, tend to be both adaptable and optimistic. “We see a brighter future.”
epayne@ottawacitizen.com
查看原文...
Lynda looked down at the sealskin kamiks and the parka she was wearing — similar to clothing that had kept her ancestors warm in the Arctic for centuries — then looked at the other children at her Edmonton elementary school. No one needed to tell her she didn’t fit in. So at six years old she decided that being Inuit was nothing to be proud of and starting telling other children she was Chinese “because it was more accepted.”
Now 40, Brown is one of the faces of an urban Inuit movement that is embracing culture and traditions — even adapting some new ones.
She found her lost Inuit heritage, she says, in Ottawa.
“This is where I learned everything. I didn’t speak the language. I didn’t drum dance. I didn’t throat sing growing up. I learned it all here.”
With more than 3,000 Inuit residents, Ottawa has the largest Inuit population south of the Arctic, making it ground zero for a blossoming “loud and proud” urban Inuit movement. The community includes people who come from the North temporarily, those who come and stay and, increasingly, those who have lived here most of their lives.
There is a growing sense of cultural pride, especially among children who are steeped in Inuit culture in a variety of programs that are unique to the city.
Ava Hainnu (centre) sits amidst some of the bigger kids and listens intently during circle time at the Ottawa Inuit Children’s Centre.
At Ontario’s only Inuit kindergarten, operated at the Ottawa Inuit Children’s Centre in Vanier in conjunction with the Ottawa Carleton District School Board, children play games with seal bones and caribou legs and are taught in Inuktitut. At after-school programs, in addition to homework help, Inuit students get lessons in their cultural heritage.
Ottawa is also home to the only Inuit family health centre in the world, one that northerners envy. There are numerous other programs for the community – from food banks, housing and addictions treatment to church services conducted in Inuktitut and regular community feasts and field trips to pick apples and berries, organized through Tungasuvvingat Inuit, Ottawa’s Inuit social and community organization.
Many of these services are located in Vanier, sometimes called Little Nunavut, but members of Ottawa’s growing Inuit community are settled across the city. Children are bused from across Ottawa to attend Inuit Head Start and after-school programs in Vanier. And a program called Bridging the Gap has held presentations about Inuit culture at dozens of schools across Ottawa.
It’s all part of a push to carve out a place in a city where negative cultural encounters like the one Brown and her mother had with the principal can still take place.
Many Inuit mothers here say they have been approached by strangers and told that carrying their babies in the back of their amautis (the parka worn by Inuit women of the eastern Arctic) is dangerous, for example. One Inuit father had a visit from the Children’s Aid Society investigating a complaint that his three children were “spending too much time outside.”
Brown, a mother of three and director of youth services at the Ottawa Inuit Children’s Centre, doesn’t want children to feel the shame she felt wearing traditional clothing all those years ago.
It’s why she’s passing traditions on to her own children and teaching others. And, she says, she’s already seeing the results.
“These kids,” she says, “walk with pride.”
By the Numbers
725: The number of Inuit living in Ottawa, according to the 2006 census. Inuit organizations say a more accurate number would have been 1,800
3,300: Ottawa’s Inuit population in 2015
1: Ottawa’s rank among Canadian cities with the biggest Inuit population outside of the Arctic
65 per cent: Growth in Ontario’s Inuit population between 2006 and 2011, according to the National Household Survey
15,000: Estimated Inuit population in Ontario in less than a decade, based on the current growth rate
56 per cent: Percentage of Inuit in Ontario who were under 25 years old, according 2006 census numbers
59 per cent: Percentage of Ontario Inuit who complete high school, compared to more than 80 per cent of the general population
7 per cent: Percentage of Ontario Inuit who have a university degree
15 per cent: Percentage of Inuit in Ontario who are unemployed — about double the rate for the general population
— Source: Ottawa Inuit Children’s Centre
Related
The southward migration of Inuit to Ottawa began decades ago. Inuit come to Ottawa for health care, for jobs, for education or because other members of their family are here.
Some come temporarily and return to the North. Others, like Louisa Pootoolik, an administrative assistant with Inuit Non-Profit Housing, never intended to stay. She came to Ottawa 17 years ago to attend Carleton University and is still here. She talks about returning to the North some day, but then thinks about the price of food, the weather and other hardships.
“I never thought I would live down here,” she says, “but I really like living here because of the warmer weather and cheaper food prices and because of the Inuit community. I have so many friends here.”
Aigah Attagutsiak, who came to Ottawa from Arctic Bay in 1998, is another who wasn’t sure she would make the city her home. Later this year, Attagutsiak will be ordained as an Anglican priest, the first Inuk to be ordained in the Church’s southern diocese. She will give up her job as a patient navigator at the Akausivik Inuit Family Health Team and move down the road to Vanier’s tiny St. Margaret’s Anglican Church, where she will become a full-time priest and conduct services in Inuktitut for the church’s Inuit population.
As Inuit from the North continue to arrive in Ottawa, they’ll find a new generation of urban Inuit who, like Brown, have spent virtually all of their lives in the south.
Brown has a T-shirt that tells their story. “Lifelong Urban Inuk,” it says.
Those words began as a joke between Brown and a friend, she says, but they “have come to define who I am and what I represent. We urban Inuit are creating a new and exciting culture, earnestly trying to preserve a noble heritage steeped in tradition and knowledge. In Ottawa, we are a mix of those born in the North and those born to Inuit parents yet raised in the south. We are trying to fix something that has been broken.”
Makpa Amarualik helps his daughter, Yvonne, 2, use a traditional Inuit knife to cut play dough at the Ottawa Inuit Children’s Centre.
In a classroom at Rideau High School on a chilly spring afternoon, Ottawa’s Dion Metcalfe is holding the attention of more than a dozen Inuit children with a discussion about life in Nunavut, a place many of them have never been.
Metcalfe, the son of an Inuk from Labrador and a Dutch mother, has himself never been to Nunavut. Growing up, he says his father didn’t talk much about his Inuit heritage and he grew up knowing little about it. That wasn’t unusual for his father’s generation, many of whom had been punished for speaking Inuktituk. Metcalfe now travels to schools around the city talking about and demonstrating Inuit culture with the program Bridging the Gap.
Today, part of the cultural lesson includes a segment on the crippling price of food in the Arctic.
Displayed on a screen at the front of the room is a picture of a small can of frozen, concentrated juice. In one Northern community, says Metcalfe, it sells for $11.25. Add the bottled water that is needed to make it, because the water is undrinkable in many parts of the North, and a jug of juice costs $28. A case of pop, he adds, can cost up to $126.
The children’s eyes widen.
Meanwhile, as Ottawa’s Inuit community comes of age, there is a market for traditional food — so-called country food. Joe Hess recently opened Nunavut Country Food in downtown Ottawa. Its freezers are full of Arctic char. Hess plans to also sell seal, whale and other traditional products shipped from Nunavut.
On a recent afternoon, Josie Padluq, who came to Ottawa from Nunavut for treatment and stayed, was buying a whole Arctic char, which she planned to eat raw. Like many members joeof Ottawa’s Inuit community, she craves country food from home and asks relatives to send food such as char and whale meat from the North, or to bring it when they visit.
Every indication is the market will continue to grow, as the trickle south has become a steady stream of Inuit travelling in and out of Ottawa and growing numbers of them are making the city their permanent home. At a recent Inuit day gathering, more than 500 members of Ottawa’s urban Inuit community – known as Ottawamiuut — met and feasted on an entire seal carved by elders.
It’s a far cry from the 1970s, when there were no services for the Inuit who lived in Ottawa so people began crossing to what was then Hull and going directly to the federal offices of Indian and Northern Affairs looking for help.
That led to the creation of Tungasuvvingat Inuit (TI), the Ottawa organization that has been providing services to the city’s Inuit community since 1987. The Inuit children’s centre began as a Head Start program for Inuit children at TI, as did Ottawa’s Inuit family health team. The organization is also responsible for weekly food banks and monthly Inuit feasts, and more.
“We see part of our responsibility, aside from food banks and social support, around community development,” said executive director Jason Leblanc, “creating strength and pride and identity.”
Ina Zakal is a cultural teacher at the OICC and often speaks in her native Inuktitut.
Community development is crucial because the migration south is not always easy for Inuit. Moving from communities where everyone knows everyone else to a city can be isolating and overwhelming. Many say they have encountered racism and felt unwelcome.
“They would call me savage in Vanier. The French people called us savages all the time or called me chief,” was among comments from parents recorded in a 2012 report on the state of Inuit families in Ottawa.
“My kids had eggs thrown at them and kids would say ‘Go home where you belong, go back to China’,” another parent said. One woman said she wants non-Inuit organizations to know “that all Inuit are not drunks and drug addicts.”
“Perhaps the most agreed upon challenge faced by Inuit living in Ottawa was experiences with racism, discrimination, judgment and disrespect,” wrote the authors of the community needs assessment for Inuit children and their families in Ottawa.
“We heard countless stories of parents who had been treated poorly because they were Inuit, who had been exposed to degrading comments and remarks and whose values and cultural practices had been attacked by members of the general public, service agency personnel and government employees, including the police. An astounding lack of awareness and compassion led to many parents feeling inadequate, unworthy and unwelcome.”
The struggles faced by Inuit in Ottawa are not only from the outside. There are also significant challenges within the community, including alcoholism and homelessness. Easy access to alcohol in Ottawa can exacerbate unresolved trauma and the culture shock of living in the south.
The tragic case of Annie Pootoogook, an award winning Cape Dorset artist whose work is in the collection of the National Gallery, and who has ended up addicted and living on the streets of Ottawa, underlines some of the challenges. For more than a decade, an Inuit treatment program funded by the City of Ottawa, Health Canada and the Government of Nunavut has operated in Ottawa.
Natalie Lloyd is the director of Early Years and Community Initiatives at the OICC.
But despite these challenges, those who live and work in Ottawa’s Inuit community say a growing sense of optimism reflects the many opportunities available in the city.
“It feels so positive right now,” says Karen Baker-Anderson, executive director of the Ottawa Inuit Children’s Centre, which has become one of the centres of cultural activities for Ottawa’s Inuit families.
Baker-Anderson and her husband are adoptive parents of an Inuk girl whose music — a combination of throat singing and beatboxing — could be a symbol of Ottawa’s urban Inuit renaissance.
“They are still facing a little bit of racism. They are still affected by (issues such as) residential schools and addiction — those issues are all there. But they have a place to be together and to celebrate their culture. We have created a community here. These kids feel empowered and feel like they are part of something positive. I feel like we are moving in the right way.”
Jobs and training are easier to find in Ottawa, as is access to higher education and activities such as hockey for kids. The unemployment rate among Inuit in Ottawa — while higher than for non-Inuit residents — is lower than in the North. There are many opportunities for Inuit who are fluent in English and Inuktitut. Housing is easier to come by than in the North and food is significantly cheaper.
But life in a city full of strangers, where people don’t say hello when you see them on the street, can be daunting to those coming from small communities in the North. Community links with a focus on culture, say Ottawa Inuit, help a big city feel like home.
“I learned to appreciate my culture because up North you don’t think about it. It’s just a way of life,” said a parent interviewed for the study on Inuit families in Ottawa. “But there’s so much focus here and it’s so promoted here. Living here, it really opens my eyes and I am more proud of my culture.”
Leblanc notes that Inuit, who have survived and thrived in one of the harshest climates in the world, tend to be both adaptable and optimistic. “We see a brighter future.”
epayne@ottawacitizen.com
查看原文...
