“You Hear It in Their Voice”: Photographs and Cultural Consolidation among Inuit Youths and Elders

Abstract

In April 2009, 19-year-old Inuk student Natasha Mablick recounted to me her experiences conducting interviews with Inuit elders in her community of Pond Inlet, in Nunavut, the Canadian central arctic territory established in 1999. Like all of the case studies discussed in this volume, the interviews that Natasha conducted centered around photographs as memory prompts and sites of social engagement (see Figure 5.1). Natasha recalled: Some [of the interviews] really make me want to get involved in politics… I have a feeling of just wanting to fix absolutely everything but I know that’s impossible… And I’m kind of finding myself juggling a bunch of mixed emotions. A part of me is kind of mad at the government [for] moving my ancestors into communities… taking my parents away from their homes and putting them into schools and in some cases breaking up some families and their relationships with their family members but on the other side, I know that if this didn’t happen, these people wouldn’t be who they are today. So it’s just juggling and what I believe is right and wrong.2