ITK’s Board of Directors met in Ottawa May 29
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IT WAS “A BIG STEP” FOR INUVIALUIT, says Brian Elanik, when—over the course of a week in September 2023—he and his team butchered the first 50 reindeer harvested from the regional herd. “That’s our herd that will supply the Inuvialuit Settlement Region with traditional meats and hides,” says Elanik, an operator at the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation’s Inuvik‐based Inuvialuit Country Food Processing Plant. “We brought them into the plant, hung them up, let the blood drain overnight. We made roasts, diced meat, ground meat, sausages, ribs. We try to utilize everything from the animal to provide for our people.”
IN 2020, when the COVID‐19 pandemic shut everything down, Natan Obed, President of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, like many people, went searching for a distraction. What he chose would take him 18 months to complete and solve a 70‐year‐old mystery connected to his favourite set of hockey cards from 1955. Obed has been collecting hockey cards since his uncle Andy bought him his first packs when he was a child in Nain, Nunatsiavut. He’d lose himself in those uniformed faces, sorting and re‐sorting them according to statistics and scenarios. He probably owns about 100,000 cards today and still finds joy when he pulls them out.
IN BETWEEN CONCERTS and amid fine‐tuning for her national and international tours, Salluit songstress Elisapie Isaac found time to chat about her newest album Inuktitut, released in September 2023. The album is a collection of classics from the ’60s through to the ’90s, reimagined in Elisapie’s mother tongue and unique voice.
Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami is spearheading the establishment of a university in Inuit Nunangat. There is a great deal of work to make this vision a reality, but we are guided by our mission for a future in which Inuit students earn degrees in areas such as education, history and governance, health, medicine, and Inuktut, as well as environ mental sciences and engineering, all based upon Inuit ways of knowing and being.
Kuuvik is the northernmost major river of the west coast of Nunavik, Québec. Several islands are at its mouth, including Aqiggituut which means abundant with ptarmigans. Inuit knew of the abundance of seals and whales in this area, making it an ideal place for Inuit families to winter.
Shelly De Caria from Kuujjuaq, Nunavik, became the first Inuk CEO at Canadian North in December 2023
ITK is calling for government to consider a legislative response to protect the livelihoods of Inuit artists
Federal and Inuit leaders meet to discuss housing, education at ICPC meeting May 9
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami President Natan Obed deliver opening remarks at a meeting of the Inuit-Crown Partnership Committee (ICPC) in Ottawa
MY NAME IS JESSICA WINTERS and I grew up in Makkovik, Nunatsiavut. Christine Nochasak was my Inuktitut teacher for several years at the school in Makkovik.
When Katherine Takpannie was 15, she took a point‐and ‐shoot camera she got from her uncle and began a project where she took a photo every day for about nine months: people, nature, buildings. She still has those photos and when she looks at them now, she sees how the seeds of curiosity and wonder bloomed into a career in photography.
