A Century After Nanook
A Century After Nanook
Special | 1h 26m 46sVideo has Closed Captions
A community film focused on the Inuit village where NANOOK OF THE NORTH was produced.
An ambitious documentary focused on the drastic environmental and cultural changes that have occurred over the last 100 years in the Inuit village of Inukjuak, the location where Robert Flaherty filmed Nanook of the North from 1920-1921. From the recording of interviews to filming daily life, much of this new documentary was produced by members of the community.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
A Century After Nanook
A Century After Nanook
Special | 1h 26m 46sVideo has Closed Captions
An ambitious documentary focused on the drastic environmental and cultural changes that have occurred over the last 100 years in the Inuit village of Inukjuak, the location where Robert Flaherty filmed Nanook of the North from 1920-1921. From the recording of interviews to filming daily life, much of this new documentary was produced by members of the community.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
How to Watch A Century After Nanook
A Century After Nanook is available to stream on pbs.org and the free PBS App, available on iPhone, Apple TV, Android TV, Android smartphones, Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Fire Tablet, Roku, Samsung Smart TV, and Vizio.
(narrator speaking in Inuktitut) (narrator speaking in Inuktitut) (narrator speaking in Inuktitut) - "Nanook of the North," it's so intrinsically connected to the origin of cinema, even though it's like 25 years after the invention of cinema.
It was done artfully, but it's a spectacle, and I think that's what Flaherty is doing, is doing a show.
(narrator speaking in Inuktitut) - "Nanook of the North" is all adventure.
It's all odyssey to build a narrative, and out there, on the land without trained actors.
It is a great visual record of Inuit way of life, traveling on the land, the nomadic spirit.
"Nanook of the North" is more unique in its time for, first, the collaboration and encounter with people of a different culture.
So I think that's more in that sense that Nanook is special in the history of film.
(narrator speaking in Inuktitut) - Nanook comes into that context in which people in Europe and America are curious about discovering other cultures.
There are still ethnographic exhibitions, you know, where there's about western empires displaying their possessions all over the world, and there's an implicit hierarchy of culture implied in that, not that you look down at them, but there might be the implicit fear of doom, of, like, progress will erase those cultures, so I'm preserving them.
So that's the kind of humanist, classic colonial perspective.
Not the racist superiority complex colonialism, but the romantic humanist colonialism.
(narrator speaking in Inuktitut) (Anna Ohaituk speaking in Inuktitut) - It's, uh, funny, I think, in some parts, where the star Allakariallak makes interesting impressions, like the first time he hears the record player.
That, for example, yeah, it's quite amusing and entertaining, I find.
- I think it's a very good representative in the first place, Inuk people hunting and living igloos and all that, but there's a lot of maybe, I don't know how you call it, but, uh, yeah, dramatized or maybe over-exaggerating.
(orchestral music playing) That music there always just, like, disgusts me.
What a terrible music to have that type of a scenery.
(Anna Ohaituk speaking in Inuktitut) - I was born in an igloo about 30 miles south of here.
The first I think eight or nine years of my life, we lived in igloos still.
That's why I say it's pretty accurate, how they documented the living conditions and so on.
(Anna Ohaituk speaking in Inuktitut) (Anna Samisack speaking in Inuktitut) (Anna Ohaituk speaking in Inuktitut) (narrator speaking in Inuktitut) - We've been forced to go through a lot of extreme situations where it has traumatized I think pretty much every single Inuk in the Arctic, - There was a lot of cultural shock for the people that live here.
They were not afraid to live the life they wanted.
In fact, they were forced to live somewhere else other than where they wanted to live, many of them.
I have family members that were forced to relocate to the High Arctic.
- The Canadian government wanted to relocate people for Canadian sovereignty.
So whole families were moved, relocated further north, and they were promised that, next summer, when the ship came, they would be restocked with fuel, food and building materials.
The ship never came, so left with two years with nothing.
- On top of that, they killed all our Eskimo dogs.
(Abraham speaking in Inuktitut) - It was such a wound for our men in particular when the 20,000 dogs were killed off in the name of health, they say, but, really, it was to coerce communities into, you know, people into the communities from the outpost camps.
(Annie Nulukie speaking in Inuktitut) - And then, in early '60s, I was one of the people that were rounded up, children, to go to residential schools.
- We had to go to residential schools in Fort Simpson, Northwest Territories, and my parents had no choice.
I think it was September to June.
No contact with the family.
There was no telephone.
There was no telephone in the community, no letters, no post office, nothing.
- I was sent away for school at the age of 10.
Yeah, that era where two years with a family in Nova Scotia, three years at residential school, three years in Ottawa.
So a total of eight years raised by basically strangers in a very different way of life and land.
So that was that severing of, sudden severing from my very traditional culture that I was coming from to what the south was living at the time.
Food, principles, values, all very different.
- So, here, we have three full traumatizing events.
So, a culture that has changed quite a bit.
- Inuit culture was trying to be assimilated and that has an impact on an individual.
When you look at it at an individual perspective, an individual's psyche, on their worth, on their value, it's kind of a chain reaction.
Negative impact after negative impact that keeps growing and growing.
- The population has lost some of its cultural traditions.
Alcohol is a problem.
That's the main problem.
It's being supplied by bootleggers.
- We've lost many people because of alcohol, including me.
- I think, with the colonization, Inuit, because they were stripped of their dignity, their livelihood, their selves, I see a lot of Inuit not seeing their power, their full potential, and if they saw that, oh my God, what a world, how different it would be.
(Annie Nulukie speaking in Inuktitut) - When traumatic experiences are un-dealt with, they keep coming back and back and back.
I think we're at a stage where we're finally realizing we have to do something about these issues I think that still impacts us.
What can we do?
How do we resolve them?
Let's understand them.
Where are they coming from?
(Charlie speaking in Inuktitut) (Rhoda speaking in Inuktitut) (Lucassie speaking in Inuktitut) (Eva speaking in Inuktitut) (Elisapie speaking in Inuktitut) (narrator speaking in Inuktitut) (narrator speaking in Inuktitut) - That film allows me to understand the changes that has been made.
The climate change is one thing.
- When I was learning to hunt, we were able to eat for evenings to drive back home because the top of the snow was frozen by the time the sun had gone down a little bit.
Now, the snow melts even in the evenings.
(Abraham speaking in Inuktitut) - It's more and more hot in the springtime sooner, too early for hunters and so on.
Looking down at the ice, they used to be thick, you know?
Now they're not thick anymore.
- The waters are so much warmer than they ever were, so the ice forms differently.
So you may be able to see on the surface, the hunters often say what we see on the surface is not what's happening underneath that ice that we don't see, and so it's more precarious and it's harder to read.
So the traditional knowledge of our elders is becoming minimized.
As the ice goes, so does the wisdom, the Inuit wisdom that we teach our children, and many of our elders have often said too, "I'm teaching you all of this.
However, with climatic changes, it's not always going to be that way, so you've got to be more vigilant and much more careful and cautious when you're traveling out there on the ice."
- [Local] Yeah!
- This past month, we had about nine Ski-Doos go through the ice, you know, because hunters were thinking it was safe.
The sea ice is just forming right now where it used to form, you know, middle or beginning of December, and now we're like one month late every year.
- It's affecting hunters too, and we are not seal hunting right now.
Like, it's our favorite thing during winter.
- So we're going to have to alter our harvesting ways.
If we won't be able to use a snowmobile until only for a couple months of the winter, there's not gonna be much harvesting coming in.
- You know, you kind of worry that, you know, is there gonna be any more winters or is it gonna be from fall to spring every year?
That's something that really worries all of us.
- [Child] Dada!
- [Child] Bye-bye!
Bye-bye!
- Every summer, we like Arctic char.
They start to looks like disappeared.
There used to be a lot of this around here.
Now they have to travel further north with a lot of gas.
- Arctic char, I mean, we still catch 'em a lot further up north, but here, there's some, but not a lot, not like before.
- Makivvik has been operating and running a research center for 45 years, collecting data, merging traditional knowledge with Western science.
We usually travel either by snowmobile or by boat or canoe to these areas, but when it is not permissible to access those areas, we're unable to put food on the table.
So a lot of families are unable to provide because they're not able to go out and harvest the animals that they're used to to hunt or fish.
(mosquitoes buzzing) - And there's more insects, mosquitoes and black flies.
Warm weather, you know, they come out in droves.
(mosquitoes buzzing) - Caribou calves are heavily impacted by mosquitoes.
In normal circumstances, those mosquitoes would've hatched and would've showed up a month later when the calves, the caribou calves are stronger and healthier, but right now, they're being preyed on when they're much weaker, a month ahead of time or even a month and a half ahead of time.
- In the fall, it's supposed to snow a lot, but we have seen a lot more rain because of the mild temperatures.
That is affecting a lot of the forage or the animals that are unable to collect their food.
In the spring, there was a year where the geese were flying back and forth and they lost a lot of body weight and a lot of body fat and we didn't see as much eggs.
- It's slow but gradual, but it's really happening, like lots of animals and bugs that are coming up right now.
Black bears are much, much more than before.
- I mean, these are indications that the world is changing.
- My grandparents and even my parents, they were able to predict what the following month's weather pattern's gonna be like 'cause that was the norm.
It never changed extremely in a matter of days or weeks before.
It used to take months for the ice to leave, and then for the last ice to melt used to be end of June, maybe until July, but from, I was still planning to go camping by snowmobile, but I had to go down south for work and I kept my snowmobiles on the ice 'cause it's not gonna be there for a matter of weeks, but by the time I got back the week after, the ice was gone.
The snow was gone in a week.
- Sometimes, in July, we still have ice, but this year, it melted so quickly.
We were all surprised.
This last year, at this time, we were still on our snowmobiles, going out for belugas, but today, we're on our boats now.
The weather is changing every year.
It's never the same every year.
- You know, when you're used to a pattern that you've been used to your whole life, you know, you can work with it, but when there's extreme weather, it's hard to adjust.
You know, I mean, we all learn to adapt, but it seems like, every year, there's something extreme, you know, one season or the other.
(narrator speaking in Inuktitut) - Oh, so many changes.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, so many changes.
(Abraham speaking in Inuktitut) - We've come from ice age to space age in one lifetime, where most societies have taken, what, 350 years to adjust and adapt to this modern world we live in.
For us, in one or two lifetimes, we've come from that to this.
- We're still holding onto the language strongly and the traditions.
Like, there's some elders that are making sure that we don't lose completely our culture, but how do I say this?
We're, like, juggling the two worlds of the qallunaat and the Inuit.
- The biggest change is I was actually born inside the igloo when my parents were still living nomadically, and they, in the same year when I was born, they got their small house, and that's the time when they stopped being nomadic.
(Annie Kokiapik speaking in Inuktitut) - So how I grew up is now completely different.
We have to deal with money, and now I have to measure the amount of work being done, who's doing the work, who should get paid, and how much.
It was a big challenge for me, because living without currency, I'm now living with the currency.
It's a transition with a different lifestyle that people now have to live.
- I mean, we used to camp all summer, leaving springtime on Ski-Doo and coming back in fall, and, like, many family groups, like 12 family groups in a big camp and other people there, and right now, it's not like that anymore.
- Starting from spring, we go to camp, and come back in August.
It was fun and we never went back to town for four months, and it used to be fun, but now we have to go back home, do some work, make money.
- Our time is different.
We have jobs, we have houses, and we have to wait for the time to go hunting, camping, 'cause our priorities are different now.
- When I was a small kid, this town had about maybe a hundred, a little more than a hundred in population.
Now, it's about 1,500 to 1,700 right now.
- Yes, it's a lot of change, and these changes have impacts both positive and negative, but we try to balance it today as we live.
- So many changes so quickly, and we can still feel the effects of it.
Like, negative effects, plus the positive effects.
I'm so thankful, like when I'm sick, I don't have to be sick in a cold igloo.
I can take a shower or lay on a soft bed.
Like, taking what's good in that culture and taking what's good in the other and using it to, like, live in this 21st-century Inukjuak.
- We need our language.
That's where our identity is.
We just need to put the worlds together in a way that we can really strive in life, and we need our Inuit culture, Inuit language, Inuit everything.
The positive side that I see is a lot of the cultural oppression that's been around is starting to be lifted and that we are capable to do our own stuff, decide on our own behalf, and that's a big step that I see for my community.
- Living up up here in the Arctic where the climate is harsh, you need to be very strong, very knowledgeable about the environment, and have compassion at the same time to wanna survive with the family.
I think the Inuit has always been very strong.
I think that's what keeps us going today.
(Anna Samisack speaking in Inuktitut) (Abraham speaking in Inuktitut) - The Inuit, they're still having a good relationship with the land.
Like, making sure not to take things more than they need.
(Sarah Samisack speaking in Inuktitut) (Sarah Samisack speaking in Inuktitut) - When my mom was picking the down.
(Anna Ohaituk speaking in Inuktitut) (Anna Samisack speaking in Inuktitut) - Our men often still say, when I am out there, you know, you're leaning over that ice, right?
And you're just waiting for the seal breathing, you know, to come up for hours.
You can be in that position.
It's a meditative state, and many of our men will say, "This is my peaceful place," and they really need that peaceful place with the chaos that we live in.
The women, as they're beating or sewing or preparing the skins, that's a meditative state.
We don't have that anymore.
Everything is noise.
You know, the TVs, the radios, the phones.
Everything is noise constantly.
We are smack in the middle of that too in the Arctic, you know, just as much as the rest of the world, - It helps when somebody's angry or something.
They just need time alone, not in town or something.
Uh.
It's healing.
(Annie Nulukie speaking in Inuktitut) - It is very important to open up talk and go out on the land and heal yourself.
Like, what we're doing right now is we're healing ourselves.
We can only heal with each other, with others, and with our environment.
- The Indigenous way is, I think, not just medicine for us, but I think the Indigenous way is the medicine for the world.
For us, we protect what we love, our culture and our way of life and our food, our country food.
It's like a part of us.
- When we eat together, we're almost in celebration.
Country food to us is caribou, fish, geese, ptarmigan, seal, whale, walrus.
I mean, this is our food.
- And, you know, eating from the same animal is like an incredible experience.
It really brings community together and we really celebrate those moments, and we do it often because it's really important for us to bring ourselves together to our own ancestry.
Country food is not just about nutritional value.
There is emotional value to it.
You know, connection to identity.
It helps to calm all the chaos that's going on in our communities due to these tumultuous changes that happen in our world in such a short period of time.
- We usually have events for elders every year, like taking them out for outings.
So we went to the Unaaq Camp today for lunch and served them traditional meals.
(Annie Ohaituk speaking in Inuktitut) - With each passing elder, the knowledge dies with them, but they're full of knowledge.
They're full of wisdom.
- When elders are telling stories or are talking about how their parents used to do or used to be like, when I do it, it makes me feel proud.
Like, I'm proud to do what our ancestors used to do.
- We're very lucky in our community.
We have a good number of elders that can provide that knowledge and it's vital knowledge, you know, that you know how to build a igloo.
You know, if your Ski-Doo breaks down or if you're lost or if you run out of gas.
You know, for a community to understand that, you know, that these skills are important to pass down from one generation to the next.
- This organization is called Unaaq Men's Association of Inukjuak.
We teach youth and kids hunting and hunting equipment making, these kind of things.
Inuit culture.
We teach Inuit culture.
We create leaders, and those children that used to follow, they're leaders now.
- We've been in existence for 20 years now, and now, you know, we have the young men that are teaching the very same skills to the younger children now.
So it's come for full circle now where, you know, the elders have, you know, devoted a lot of their time that we gave back to them to teach the younger generations how to raise a dog team.
You know, how to make a kayak.
You know, how to hunt properly, where to hunt, when to hunt.
You know, how to skin.
You know, how to butcher.
You know, all those skills are being revived through our men's association.
- When we are teaching our young people out there traditionally, we're not just teaching them to become natural conservationists and great providers for the community.
We are teaching them character and life skills.
Nature, just by the nature of it, teaches them that you're out there waiting for the winds to die down, the snow to fall, the ice to form.
You're being taught patience.
You're being taught how to be courageous under really stressful situations.
You're being taught how not to be impulsive, because if you're impulsive, you put yourself and others at risk.
- One of the things we're discovering with the high suicide rates is it's an impulsive act.
We've got to understand that the traditional way of teaching our children teaches them to be strong and resilient and have strong coping skills.
That's nature.
That's what nature does with you.
You learn about yourself.
(Annie Nulukie speaking in Inuktitut) - What our grandparents experienced, what our parents experienced, what we ourselves experienced, there's a certain level of traumatic situations that each of us have experienced, and we're finally saying, "Stop this."
We have to find a way to find a solution for the things that we're going through and how do we solve them and what will be the best solution.
- Nowadays, we need better tools and modern tools to be able to be a strong Inuk, modern Inuk and traditional Inuk, but in one.
- Nunavimmi Pigiursavik, and it's located in Inukjuak, and it's all aimed for our Nunavik region students.
The options of the programs here are professional cooking, construction equipment mechanics, carpentry, pharmacy, technical assistant.
The major benefits are that the education that we have is free and all your meals are paid for and you even get student allowance for coming to school.
Everything's covered.
With this, we can start building our culture, we can start building our education, and we can start building our economy, and with those, that's gonna really start something new here.
- In 2002, when we noticed that Inukjuak had a very high growth rate, at the time, it was 23 point something percent growth rate, and it was 18% unemployment rate, these were astonishing statistics.
We were trying to find ideas that could provide a long-term sustainable development for our community that could help us overcome these challenges, which was lack of development within our community, lack of employment, and we wanted to come up with something that would minimize environmental negative impacts.
- We kind of dared to ask ourselves, "Well, what about hydro?"
You know, what about hydro energy?
- The Trinity Corporation said we have some preliminary data that Inukjuak River is able to sustain or produce energy throughout the year, even winter time.
I said okay.
- We realized that we had a very good location for our hydro project.
- We held a vote in 2010, and we got 83% support from our members.
It's going to generate revenue for the landholding cooperation.
Funding we receive, whether it's government programs or regional programs, they always have some kind of criteria that we have to follow, and in this case, we're gonna be making our own criteria, our own restrictions, our own rules, and how we want to use it, how we want to spend it.
We're talking about at least a million a year for the next 40 years.
That's freedom that we're gonna have thankfully to this project, and we've never had that before.
- We'll be funding some ways of getting our culture back or start teaching younger people how we older generation used to live and do things.
- We're gonna be able to do more stuff in our community and come up with more programs to help our community grow, keep our culture strong, keep our language strong, and keep who we are and make ourself proud.
That's the hope that I have.
And at the same time, we're gonna be eliminating 700,000 tons of greenhouse gases.
At least we're eliminating that from our community.
That's our contribution towards the environment.
(Abraham speaking in Inuktitut) - I think Inukjuak should be commended for this work that they've done, and hopefully it will pay off in the end and the people will see that it was a benefit, not just for the community but for our atmosphere as a whole.
- It's the first hydroelectric project that's being built in this latitude in the High Arctic.
Hopefully, it creates the chain of reaction where more communities will wanna do it, and hopefully we can be an example, not just in our own region, maybe around the world as well.
(Shaomik Inukpuk speaking in Inuktitut) (Anna Samisack speaking in Inuktitut) (hosts speaking in Inuktitut) (vocalist singing in Inuktitut) - "Nanook of the North."
Wow.
It's the hundredth year.
Marking it first time for the first time as a hundredth-year anniversary is quite something, and to know the star Allakariallak is walking distance from my office here, which I don't think we make time to realize that his grave is, it's in town.
(Charlie speaking in Inuktitut) - I feel that it is very important for the community because the film was made inside the community.
We are able to identify the landscapes in the background.
So it's very important for our community that this film be celebrated because there are a lot of changes that happen.
If our ancestors were able to survive in that environment, so can we, so we should not feel hopeless even if we're down to the minimal thing where we should feel lucky.
Everyone should feel lucky after watching that film.
(Charlie speaking in Inuktitut) (Shaomik speaking in Inuktitut) - One time, they lost me.
Everybody was panicking.
The big rock is removed here.
They found me behind the big rock, berry picking.
I crawled behind there.
I have memories of first time seeing an airplane.
I was traumatized because of the sound, and I remember first time catching a fish.
I must have been two or three 'cause I couldn't pull it.
- This area right here is my grandpa's home.
This is where he worked.
This is where he lived.
This is where my mother and my mother's sister, Martha, were born.
It's also the place where Robert Flaherty's son Joseph used to live and work as a weatherman over here.
Our family was relocated from right here all the way up to Grise Fiord.
(Rhoda speaking in Inuktitut) - Change can happen if one wants to change!
(Elisapie speaking in Inuktitut) - My goodness.
"Nanook of the North!"
(Elisapie singing in Inuktitut) - The week that we had with the event, and I got to really see it, experience it, and it really made me appreciate that they had captured the culture then that we don't have now.
The part when everybody started clapping was when he caught animals, you know?
And, like, yeah, of course, we're gonna celebrate.
And that part really was like, yeah, that's something Inuk.
(crowd cheering loudly) We were really striving so that the event could be exactly a hundred years.
Who else have done that?
Just us and it was so hard.
Like, will it be okay?
Let's just go for it.
♪ Wolves don't live by the rules ♪ ♪ Wolves don't live by the rules ♪ - [Sarah Lisa] The timing and the aligning was perfect.
Everything had a flow, and we were where we're supposed to be at that very moment, and it really showed.
- From when it started at the gym, it ended at the community feast.
You know, there was a flow for it, so the timing of that event was right on.
(Anna Ohaituk speaking in Inuktitut) (Sarah Samisack speaking in Inuktitut) - [Sarah Lisa] What I really noticed and loved was to see a lot of hopeful change or hopeful expectation that I saw in the community, - And you could really see it in people's faces.
They were smiling, happy, and that really summed it up for me that we're good, we're happy, we're healthy, and now we can go forward, and that's what I saw and I loved it.
- Oh, okay.
Yeah, yeah.
(phone ringing) - We are here a hundred years later.
Even before 1922, we were there 4,000 years before.
Through thick and thin, through celebratory times, and more sad times, Inuit, they continue.
- I'm somewhat worried, for sure, just like everyone else, but I trust in our adaptation skills.
(Annie Nulukie speaking in Inuktitut) - I want my children to have a better future than what I had.
I want them to be able to be who they wanna be and know who they are and where they come from.
- I believe that we can find a way to improve the issues that we have in our communities and find solutions to make life a little more easy for everyone in the community, as individuals, as families, and as community members.
- I can see, in 50 years, I see the community striving.
I see them alive and knowing that they can do anything they want to do in life.
I can see it 'cause the energy is shifting.
(vocalist singing in Inuktitut) - We survived the hardship.
We survived the genocide attempt.
It cannot be done.
So every society is important.
No matter which culture you live in, everybody is important.
Every one of us is given a chance to be here on this earth one time, so make the most.
Make the most out of your one time on this earth.
♪ Wolves don't live by the rules ♪ ♪ Wolves don't live by the rules ♪ ♪ Wolves don't live by the rules ♪ ♪ Wolves don't live by the rules ♪ ♪ Valleys to hills, you can hear the cry ♪ ♪ They have to fight to stay alive ♪ ♪ No one can change it ♪ Mother Nature knows the reason why ♪ ♪ Oh, wolves don't live by the rules ♪ ♪ Oh, wolves don't live by the rules ♪ (uplifting folk music continues) (uplifting folk music continues) ♪ They're born to kill
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