healing words Volume 4 Number 3 • Fall 2004 • A Publication of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation PUBLICATIONS MAIL AGREEMENT NO. 1573519 http://www.ahf.ca inside Inuit Traditional Diet PAGE 3 Inuit Suicide Prevention PAGE 17 iujaq, Nunavik Um Inuit of Northern Interviews with 25 Quebec Incarceration healing words PAGE 29 Igloolik Elders 2 19 Inuit Games PAGE 33 Sport Prevents A Nomadic Life – 5 the Young from Between Two Chesterfield Inlet (1955-1969) Suicide Worlds PAGE 40 Country Food 23 Healing Our Spirit 6 Worldwide 2006 PAGE 22 Species Nutrition: Ringed and The Need to Define PUBLICATIONS MAIL AGREEMENT NO. 1573519 Bearded Seals “Elder(s)” RETURN UNDELIVERABLE CANADIAN ADDRESSES TO: 11 CIRCULATION DEPT. 330-123 MAIN ST 12 TORONTO ON M5W 1A1 email: [email protected] Healing Words Editors: healing words healing words Good morning: Healing Words ISSN: 1703-5813 I am an Aboriginal man who has been working as a therapist for fourteen years. Most of my clients ubmit your articles, letters, (both female and male) are survivors of child or other contributions by sexual abuse and violence. Sfax, mail, or email to: I am interested in subscribing to your newsletter, The Editors, Healing Words Healing Words (I would appreciate accessing the Giselle Robelin: 75 Albert Street back issues?) with an aim to both learn about how Ottawa, Ontario this mammoth wrong is being addressed K1P 5E7 regionally across the country and participating in events/publications. Our fax number is (613) 237- Kindest regards, 4442 and our email addresses Fred Andersen for submissions are: * [email protected] Dear Fred You are most welcome to join our list of readers. Your interest and understanding of the issue in very encouraging to us, and I thank you. Wayne K. Spear: The demand for our newsletter has grown to exceed [email protected] our expectations and we are running short of back copies. Please include a short biography with your submission as well as I have forwarded your contact information to the a return address and phone person in charge of our mailing list, so you should number. We may need to receive the next issues of Healing Words (free of charge) from now on. contact you about your submission. Thank you again for your interest. Published and distributed three times a year, Healing Words is a free publication that concerns The ahf does not pay for Giselle Robelin. issues related to Canada’s Aboriginal residential published submissions, but we schools (including hostels and industrial, do provide contributors continued on page 21 boarding, and day schools) and healing. with copies of the newsletter. The views expressed by contributors to Healing Words do not necessarily reflect the views of the ahf. Healing All submissions are subject to the approval of the editorial team and may be edited for Words spelling, grammar, and length. To receive Healing Words, write to us at Suite Inuit issue 801, 75 Albert Street, Ottawa, Ontario, K1P 5E7 or phone 1-888-725-8886. (In Ottawa, A SPECIAL phone 237-4441). Our fax number is (613) THANK-YOU TO 237-4442 and our email is [email protected] or ALL OUR [email protected]. Keep in mind that the newsletter C ONTRIBUTORS is available in French and English and is free. Also available on-line! http://www.ahf.ca Healing Words 2 Volume 4 Number 3 hunger, if not actual starvation. People from the Inuit are very surprised by how Inuit Traditional Diet outside world have a difficult time understanding that an environment that looks so little is understood by outsiders empty can actually offer great abundance in every season of the year. about the importance of the country foods that we continue There have, of course, been times in the living memories of our elders when hunting was not to harvest throughout the year successful and hunger was present, at least for a short period. Most everyone has encountered of bearded seals to collect the eggs of the difficult times, but these make the best stories to cliff-dwelling murres. And of course, when we tell. We seldom tell stories about the day-to-day encounter the polar bear, we have the skills and reality in which everything seems to be okay. knowledge to return to our camp or community Sometimes, even a very good hunter can have with the meat and skin. When we make a map very bad luck. The wind can blow for days or of our land use, it looks quite simple. We simply the ice can push against the shore or floe edge to say we go here or we go there to harvest the prevent the movement of people and animals. animals we need. But it is not simple. And it is Equipment can break down when hunters are far very hard work to get the food that remains spe- out to sea or a great distance inland. Any of us cial to all Inuit. Even though things are much who hunt on a regular basis have had to face different in the way in which we live today, most these experiences. Not too long ago, sickness, Inuit still prefer to eat our own food. brought to our land from the outside, created great problems because it took away the health Today we have what is referred to as a "mixed that hunters needed when searching for food. economy." This means that sometimes we earning a living through employment and Skills and knowledge are what it really takes to activities such as carving or guiding tourists. This information is available from the Inuit be a good hunter. Our knowledge about the Other times we are actively pursuing a hunting Tapiriit Kanatami website at : movement and behavior of animals helps us to way of life. Almost everything in our get to the right places at the right times, and our communities now costs money, so Inuit must http://www.itk.ca/english/itk/departments/ ability to read and understand the many signs of use money we earn to buy and maintain equip- enviro/ncp/nutrition.htm nature enables us to know what is going on and ment that we use for hunting. We also use our to make plans. It is from our skills and knowl- money for buying foods imported from the and edge that we know how to walk quietly and to south. We can now go to the store at any time always stay downwind of the animals we are of the year to buy these foods. Although this http://www.itk.ca/english/itk/departments/ stalking. We know how to cut a small hole has created important changes to the way we eat, enviro/wildlife/seal_n.htm through thick freshwater ice, spot fish moving country foods still remain the most important below, and then thrust our fish spear in the right part of our diet. direction at exactly the right time. We know how he food we obtain from hunting, or to find the breathing holes of seal in the winter what we call country food, contributes sea ice, and we can tell which holes are being T to our health and it gives us a sense of actively used. We have the patience to wait with- wellness by providing us with a way to out moving in frigid temperatures, and we know participate in our culture. It is while hunting when a seal is preparing to breathe and when to and living on the land that our elders teach drive a harpoon accurately into the breathing responsibility and the skills that give us hole. We have the skills to sneak up on walrus at confidence. their hauling-out spots, and when the time is right, to rush toward them and thrust a harpoon; The time we spend on the land helps restore our or get a quickly killing shot with a rifle. inner harmony and balance. It also helps maintain our mental and physical well-being. We know to be on watch in exactly the right Much of the time we spend with our family and location when the beluga or narwhals pass by friends happens while we are out hunting, close to the land in the fall, or along the floe preparing the country foods, and taking part in edge in winter and spring. We know exactly meals. Eating land foods helps us to feel whole. where to go and what to do when we lower our- It wasn't so very long ago that the only imported It keeps us "in tune" with nature. selves through cracks in the thick winter sea ice foods that would be available to us throughout at low tide, so that we can search the tidal zone the year would be staples like flour, salt and under the ice for a mid-winter meal of mussels, sometimes lard for making bannock, maybe Maintaining a Traditional Diet clams and seaweed. We have the skills and some powdered milk, and certainly tea and knowledge to find caribou when the population sugar. These would be brought by the ship that Over the past five thousand years, we have has declined and they are no longer moving arrived once a year, in August. The ship would developed and constantly refined the technology, about in large groups. We can find the small, also bring things like potato chips and soda pop, skills and knowledge needed not just to survive, well-hidden nesting sites of ducks so we can col- cookies and candy bars that everyone would rush but to flourish as northern hunters. One of the lect their eggs and gather down from the nest.