(Used by permission: Richart Foot. (1993). Arctic life, Arctic language. Up Here: Life in Canada’s North, May, pp. 14-17.

It was five o'clock on the afternoon of November 12th last year [1992] when Jack Kupeuna’s dreams came true. For two hours, the Inuit leader had been sitting in virtual silence in his Iqaluit hotel room, overlooking the windswept southern shore of Baffin Island. With him were nine nervous colleagues from the Tungavik Federation of Nunavut, awaiting word on the largest native land claim in Canadian history.

Days earlier, the Inuit of Canada's Eastern Arctic had voted on the claim, and now the ballots – flown in from twenty-seven remote villages – were being counted a few rooms down the hall. At stake were not only years of hard work and millions of federal dollars, but hope of an Inuit home-land called Nunavut.

By the time the results were handed to Kupeuna, his face was taut with apprehension. The TFN Vice-president stared at the numbers for a moment. Then, like a caged animal suddenly set free, he let loose a great shout of elation and relief.

TFN President James Eetoolook shook a tearful Kupeuna by the shoulders and yelled, “Pijavut! Pijavut!”(“We've got it! We've got it!”).

Eetoolook's first words to the media were also in his native language, Inuktitut. “The Inuit are about to become full partners in Canada,” he beamed. And, then, in the staccato accent of the Inuit English, he added: 'We'll be using our own language to run the government. We’ll be building a future for our children. I’m happy.”

What made them all happy was the promise of Nunavut – Our Land – part of a complex deal with the federal and Northwest Territories governments that, with the land claim, would create a new Inuit territory by the end of the century. Canada’s Inuit will have the chance to run their affairs in their own language, and Inuktitut could become the first working syllabic language of any government in the Western world – a proud achievement for the Inuit, and a unique first for Canada.

Inuktitut is already the language of daily life in most of Nunavut –  the treeless eastern Barrens of mainland NWT and most of the Arctic islands. In small communities along the Arctic and Hudson Bay coasts – places like Chesterfield Inlet, Cambridge Bay and Cape Dorset – European place-names persist, but Inuktitut lives on in the homes and on the streets among the Inuit. Fly north from Ottawa and you'll find that Canada remains a bilingual country in the Arctic. Only here, it's Inuktitut and English that occupy the same signs. According to Mary Sillett, a member of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People, among Canada's more than 50 native dialects, Inuktitut is considered one of the top three most likely to survive.

Yet despite optimistic predictions, the world's most northerly language faces enormous pressures. Inuktitut literacy rates run between 10 and 15 percent in most of the Canadian Arctic, and often only the oldest member of a community can fluently read and write their first language. Although it's an official language of the NWT (along with six other native languages), most government business is conducted in English. And children still learn English for most of their school years, while watching American television and movies at home.

“Inuktitut is still an everyday language,” says Rassie Nashalik, head of the Inuit section at the NWT government’s Language Bureau in Yellowknife. “But every time I go home to the Baffin, I hear more and more kids talking English. We hope Nunavut will encourage people to speak their own language.”

If language defines a culture, then the future political boundaries of Nunavut in no way encompass the Inuit. Their language unites polar peoples around the Arctic Circle, in an unbroken linguistic bond equaled in scope by no other people. There are weak points, notably in Siberia, where after centuries of non-contact with North American Inuit, the Yupik language has evolved into a separate branch. But across the Bering ‘Strait, Inuit from Alaska to Greenland and Arctic Quebec can, with some effort, understand one another.

Inuit leaders now renew their ties every three years at the Inuit Circumpolar Conference general assembly. At the 1992 conference in Inuvik, delegates from Greenland, Canada, Alaska and (for the first time) Russia talked, though often through interpreters, in six different dialects (Inuktitut being the major dialect of the Eastern Canadian Arctic). “It’s something very special to hear each group using their language,” says ICC vice-president Minnie Grey, an Inuk from Kuujjuaq, Quebec. “We might not understand each and every word, but there’s a common base language that we all identify with. Even the Siberians when we talk we can’t understand a whole sentence, but certain words are the same, especially for food.”

Describing food (seals, caribou, fish) and other aspects of traditional Inuit life is what Inuktitut does best, richly expressing, as any language should, its own culture. There are, for instance, enough words for snow to send a weatherman into ecstasy: qanniq – falling snow, piqtuq – blowing snow, mahaktuq – melting snow, as well as eight other descriptions right through to iglu or snow-house.

“Inuktitut has evolved from the whole way of life on the land,” explains John Sperry, the former Anglican Bishop of the Arctic, who is one of the relatively few whites to have learned the language. “It tells the story of their life in the Arctic, and reflects the survival of the Inuit in what is a really tough environment.” Never knowing for sure if the caribou herds would arrive or what the weather might hold, the Inuit learned to speak carefully about the future. They do not say, “When it gets light,” but rather “If it gets light.” “If we eat.” “If we are alive.” Inuktitut is a language of uncertainty.

Bishop Sperry learned Inuinnaqtun, the dialect of the Central Arctic (Kitikmeot), when he came North as a missionary in the 1950s. At that time, no one spoke English, and Sperry had little choice but to learn the language, which he did while traveling between camps and traplines along the frozen Arctic coast. Sitting in iglus, he listened to the Inuit tell their family stories. Later, Sperry wrote the first Inuinnaqtun bible. But he encountered some problems, notably in the New Testament verse where Jesus says to Simon and Andrew, as they cast their nets on the Sea of Galilee, “I will make you fishers of men.” How was Sperry to get across the ideas of fishing for men, of finding lost souls, to a people who fished without nets, and usually through the ice? After some searching Sperry settled on the word hiuq – to hunt – a term the Inuit also use to describe a search party out on the tundra looking for a hunter who has lost his way. The result: Inukhiuqtinguqtiniagaptik – which, literally translated means, “It will cause you to become hunters (or searchers) for a person.”

Grammatically, linguists compare the Inuit language to a Lego model: long, single-word sentences that are built by adding suffixes to a base word. To someone seeing the written words for the first time, it might look like a cat has just walked across the typewriter keyboard. But to linguists, Inuktitut has a logical, workmanlike and predictable structure, where new things outside the traditional culture can easily be described by their function. A car, for example, could be a nunakkuurut (“an instrument that goes by the land”) and a helicopter a qulimiguulik (“an instrument that has something going through the space above it”).

Europeans, seeking Christian converts, first put the Inuit dialects into written form. In the 18th century, a Danish missionary in Greenland, Hands Egede, used Roman orthography to translate the Bible. The Inuit Roman alphabet – a system of three vowels (a,i,u) and 19 consonants – now thrives in Greenland and is standard form across most of the Arctic. Inuktitut is the exception, standing on the linguistic map as a great syllabic divide between Greenlandic and its Roman cousins to the West. Originally designed for Canada’s Cree Indians, the syllabic orthography was introduced to the Inuit in 1876 by English missionary Edmund James Peck, “the one who speaks well” – to his converts in northern Quebec. Easy to learn and quick to write, the system spread north to the Arctic islands and the Hudson Bay coast. Despite its British origins in Pitman shorthand, the syllabic alphabet of 15 phonetic symbols is now as much as part of Inuit culture as dogsleds and kayaks.

Yet syllabics are coming under increasing attack. Alaskan and Greenlandic members of the ICC have asked that the language be standardized under a Roman system; some Inuktitut-speakers say syllabics are cumbersome, outdated, and scare away non-Inuit from trying to learn the language. “Syllabics are not an original part of our culture,” argues John Amagoalik, a respected Inuit leader and Nunavut campaigner. “If we love our language, we must move away from syllabics and join the modern world.” Most citizens of Nunavut disagree, especially many older Inuit, who have never learned the Roman alphabet.

“I’d like to see syllabics go on,” says Rassie Nashalik. “It's part of our identity. It's our working language in the Eastern Arctic, and it would be really hard to go back after all this time.” Says Don Couch, who is vice-president of Arctic College in Iqaluit, a centre of Inuktitut learning: “Syllabics are not a problem. They’re not difficult to learn, and can easily be used in modern life.”

More than 2,000 kilometres away, in Canada’s Western Arctic, the debate is not over which alphabet to use, but more urgently, how to keep the language alive. Among the Inivialuit of the Mackenzie River Delta and the Beaufort Sea (a region outside the future Nunavut), Inuvialuktun is near extinction as a living dialect, and the only words anyone is likely to hear in Inuvik today are English. Much of the blame lies with the whaling ships, missionaries and white traders who set up stations in the Beaufort region decades before similar contact was made with Inuit farther east. John Sperry acknowledges the loss white culture caused to both the Inuvialuit and their Inupiat neighbours in Alaska, but he takes issue with the purely negative perception of the church.

“The interesting thing about missionaries is that they learned the language,” he says. “They had a lot to do with getting the language into written form. Whatever can be said about the church, it did the most for preservation, and led the way in understanding the language and improving literacy.”

Nevertheless, fewer than 30 percent of Inuvialuit still speak their language today, let alone read or write it. Like so many other aboriginal people in North America, Inuvialuit children were for years encouraged to attend, and in some cases were actually taken from their families to residential schools, where the government tried to turn them into good little colonial citizens. Those children are now adults who have lost their language completely, and despite new efforts to teach Inuvialuktun in school, the problem is self-perpetuating.

“When the kids today go home, they don’t have a support base,” says Cathy Cockney, of the Inuvialuit Social Development Program in Inuvik. “Their parents don’t speak it, so they can’t practice.” Inuvialuktun also has a public relations problem. “There’s a stigma attached to speaking it,” she says. “English has been used in the school system for so long that when you try to speak Inuvialuktun, your peers start laughing.”

A new strategy is to teach the language to parents, who for the first time can attend adult Inuvialuktun classes in any of the six Inuvialuit communities. The teachers, naturally, are Elders, whom Cockney calls the last remaining “language bank.” She believes efforts by the local school board and Social Development Program, as well as media campaigns to renew interest in the language are starting to pay off. “I think Inuvialuktun will catch on,” she says. “People are starting to realize, ‘Hey, we’re a distinct people, and this is our language, we should learn it.’”

Only in the last 10 years have Canada’s Inuit been able to learn their first language in school. The problem has always been a lack of Inuit teachers who meet territorial education standards. If an Inuk didn’t have the right pieces of paper, a teacher from southern Canada was brought to the Arctic, and Inuit kids continued to be taught in English.

Rassie Nashalik remembers her first contact with English. “I didn’t speak any English at all until I was 10, when me and my sister left my family to go to school in Pang (Pangnirtung, on Baffin Island),” she says. “I’d had no English in my life until then. Nothing. To tell you the truth, I used to be very scared of white people. The only ones we ever saw as kids were the nurses – white people used to give us needles.”

School curriculums began to change in the early 1980s, when the first Inuk graduated from the NWT Teacher Education Program. The healthiest situation now is in Baffin Island, where children receive Inuktitut instruction from kindergarten to Grade Three, and thereafter get Inuktitut-language classes up to Grade 12. Similar progress has been made in the Keewatin. In the Hudson Bay hamlet of Rankin Inlet, high school students sit at rows of computers writing programs in “MacTitut” syllabics.

Such strides are part of a growing renaissance of Inuit languages that arguably started when Inuit MP Peter Ittinuar spoke the first Inuktitut words in the House of Commons in the 1970s. Now, two regional newspapers publish Inuit translations alongside the English-language news; a magazine takes Inuktitut as its title; the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation and Television Northern Canada, along with CBC North, broadcast Inuktitut programs on radio and TV. Walk into the NWT legislature on any given day and you’re likely to see an Inuk member wearing a sealskin vest asking questions in his or her first language.

Last year, singer Susan Aglukark took centre ice at the Edmonton Colliseum and belted out the Inuktitut lyrics of O Canada before 17,000 stunned hockey fans. “It was enough to bring tears to my eyes,” said John Amagoalik. In January, Aglukark signed with Capitol Records, becoming the first Inuit performer to receive a major recording contract. The creation of the ICC, the awakening of Inuvialuktun education, and the reality of Nunavut, are larger examples.

Adapting Inuktitut to the demands of a 21st century government is now a major pursuit at Arctic College in Iqaluit. In order to become the working language of Nunavut, Inuktitut needs a much-expanded modern vocabulary. Although a large bank of legal and parliamentary terminology has already been developed by NWT government interpreters (and, as Rassie Nashalik says, “Inuktitut is far more advanced than any of the Dene languages”), college committees of field experts and Inuit Elders are still working out critical terminology that’s missing in finance, medicine and computer technology.

But training Inuit to run the Nunavut government is the immediate challenge of Arctic College. Most students are between 20 and 35 years old. With an Inuktitut literacy level of 10 percent, they are the generation of Inuit who lost their language at English-only residential schools in the ’50s,’60s and ’70s. It’s hoped a new requirement that all students be able to read and write syllabics will boost the literacy rate to 50 percent by the end of 1993.

Yet neither the planners of Nunavut, nor the hopes of its 20,000 citizens can predict for certain that Inuktitut will be their working language. English remains a language of convenience for civil servants and business people across the North, as well as a necessity for access to higher education, southern jobs, and travel outside the Arctic.

But Inuit sense a future full of possibility. “I’m proud to be an Inuk,” says Jack Kupeuna, a man who believes in the power of dreams. “We’re all proud of our heritage. It might take us a few years to get Nunavut up to snuff, but we’ll hold on to our language.”
 

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This page was last updated on Sunday October 03, 2004