Episode 11: Life is Too Hard Without Music
Episode Length: 30:31
Focus
Inuit rock bands, the language of the Canadian Arctic, and how language impacts our understanding of the world
Locations
Nunavut, Canada
Keywords
language, colonization, Nunavut, music, culture, assimilation, residential schools
Episode Outline
These outlines are intended to help you locate ideas and topics more easily, but these are narrative episodes with many interlocking themes and ideas, so you may want to share segments that cross multiple points in the outline.
MINUTES: 00:00 - 05:05
Exploring language and history through five Inuit rock stars from the band ‘Northern Haze’ in Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut:
People in Arctic Canada share a common root language from Western Alaska to Greenland
The forced relocation of Inuit people and the residential schools that severed culture and language
How the way we’re taught to speak changes how we think and act
05:05 - 09:26
Putting Northern Haze in historical context:
Oral history of Northern Haze in the 1980s, as they made one of the first rock albums in an indigenous language in North America
Despite the creation of Nunavut in 1999 and the struggle for Inuit self-governance, the proportion of people who speak Inuktitut declining
09:26 - 16:07
The power of the Inuktitut language:
Inuktitut grammar and vocabulary, and how English words and concepts are incorporated
How Inuktitut can adapt to a changing world without losing its identity
Aaju Peter on the Inuktitut term Sila, ‘the knowledge of the mind,’ and how it relates to her childhood in Greenland and being sent to a school that prohibited her language
16:36 - 21:25
The music scene in Nunavut:
The history and revival of Inuit throat singing
The pressure by the music industry to sing in English
21:25 - 30:31
The future of this music:
Obstacles to culture and language goals in Nunavut; schools still mostly
teaching in English
Music as a form of resistance