How Nunavut’s Inuit teens are dancing to endure a youth suicide epidemic
A conversation with filmmakers Ed Ou and Kitra Cahana on their film Dancing Towards the Light, documenting the resilience of a remote community in the face of post-colonial trauma.
The remote Arctic village of Arviat faces an epidemic of youth suicides—a tragedy that affects all of Nunavut, Canada’s northernmost territory, populated primarily by Inuit people. But Arviat’s teens are dancing their way towards hope, offering a way through the grief and intergenerational trauma faced by the whole community. Their unique dance culture is now being shared with the world in the short film Dancing Towards the Light — created by TED Fellows and Canadian filmmakers Ed Ou and Kitra Cahana, with the support of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Watch the film below, then read on for more of Ou and Cahana’s experiences getting to know and understand Arviat’s dance culture—as well as for their take on the important cultural and historical context leading to this phenomenon.
How did you come to make a film about young dancers in a remote Canadian Arctic community?
Kitra: Over the last few years Ed and I have been working together in Nunavut, in the Canadian Arctic, towards a feature film, making repeat trips back to an Inuit hamlet called Arviat. There, we’ve looked at hunting rights, the way polar bears are intersecting with the town, and in this most recent film edited by Kevin Klauber, the high suicide rate, and how young people in the town are finding healing through dance.
In the process of working on the broader feature film, we’d known about the weekly teen dances and we’d filmed them many times before. Then during this past trip in November and December 2016, we decided to make a short film about the annual Sila Rainbow teen dance competition. We started following some of the teams who were planning on competing, and began filming their practices. We started interviewing them about the role dance played in their lives.
Slowly we realized that in a town that has lost so many of its youth to suicide, dancing meant so much more to these youth than just dancing. Youth suicide is an epidemic that affects all of Nunavut — which has the highest suicide rate of any province or territory in Canada. In this community, dancing is a way for young people to honor those they’ve lost. It is a way to channel their sadness, their anger and frustration, as well as a way to remember all the happy memories they had dancing with their closest friends.
For example, one of our subjects, Andy, told us that before dancing, he often dedicates his dances to someone that he has lost to suicide. When he’s dancing, he feels closer to them.
What do you think is causing the suicide epidemic in this town?
Ed: There are so many factors. I don’t think anyone can say definitively, and I am certainly in no position of authority to unpack this academically, or assume to speak for the history and trauma of a people who are not my own.
This isn’t just an issue in the Arctic, but many First Nations communities throughout Canada, especially in Northern Ontario and Manitoba. I believe it’s the effects of colonial trauma that still persists to this day. It truly is one of the living scars of Canadian history, a result of intergenerational trauma caused by residential schools.
When the practice began before turn of the 20th century, missionaries thought that they were doing good by converting Inuit and First Nations communities to Christianity. As an extension of that, they wanted to make sure everyone spoke English, essentially assimilate and “become a part of modern Canada.” What ended up happening was children from First Nations communities and Inuit were essentially kidnapped and forced into residential schools either down south, or in various communities in the Arctic that were mostly run by Christian missionaries.
Ed (cont.): Inside these schools, children were forbidden from speaking their native languages—Inuktitut in the case of Inuit — and they were forbidden from practicing any of their traditions. A lot of children were sexually abused, humiliated and deprived of food. Children who tried to flee were either then caught, beaten, or died trying to make their way home. This period was one of many seminal and tragic points in Inuit and First Nations history. Many children returning from residential schools came back broken, and suffering from trauma. The last residential school closed down in 1996.
It was cultural genocide in every sense of the word, and something that the Canadian government, and we as Canadians, have really not addressed or come to terms with as one of the darkest parts of our nation’s history. The residential school experience set in motion a myriad of traumas which manifests itself to this day — I believe that the suicide crisis is one of them. The Canadian government has only formally acknowledged the extent of the abuse and apologised to residential school survivors in 2008. Even then, those are just words, and many feel that not enough actionable policy changes have been implemented to heal these intergenerational wounds.
How big is Arviat?
Kitra: Arviat is a community of 2,800 people. What I’ve come to understand working in a community of this size is how every suicide unleashes a web of interconnected traumas. Ed and I spend a lot of time with people as they recount their stories — where they were at the time when a suicide occurred, for example. Maybe it’s because we’re outsiders, but we often find that people confide in us without us asking them to. In the process, we’ve become privy to the small personal details of many people’s experiences with suicide — the thoughts they were thinking when they first heard that a close one had died, the colors that stood out to them, the triggers they’ve had to live with ever since, the way a toddler became catatonic after witnessing a suicide firsthand.
Slowly, as listeners, we begin to build up a picture in our own heads of the event in question and the way that trauma has splintered throughout the community — how a single traumatic event can have an endless and long-lasting ripple effect on a community. You start to realize how everyone’s pain is interconnected with everyone else’s pain. When I imagine all the historical traumas on top of everything that is going on today and the lack of resources available to Inuit and First Nations communities, the magnitude becomes unimaginable.
What kind of support is available for such remote communities?
Ed: There is very little access to social services—and this is not just in Nunavut, but all over First Nations communities in Canada—and very limited services for any sort of counseling related to mental health or trauma. Especially given Arviat’s isolation, almost everything requires flying down to Winnipeg. There are no full-time doctors in hamlets like Arviat. There are very few counsellors. Most of the doctors in Nunavut live in hub cities like Iqaluit and Rankin Inlet. This is part of the problem: government inaction and lack of focus on mental health services—or even general physical health—in many of these remote communities.
Many southerners who end up working in Nunavut are there only for a few years, and leave before establishing any firm roots in the community. This makes it difficult for any meaningful, long-term relationships to form. It’s hard for people in the community to engage with mental health workers when they know that they will inevitably leave.
It’s important to note here that isolation has historically been used by the Canadian government to keep First Nations and Inuit communities at bay. When roads were built, telecommunication cables are laid, or hospitals are staffed, it was usually for the benefit of industries like mining or logging. Any benefit to First Nations or Inuit communities was usually an afterthought.
How does the intergenerational trauma play out in people’s lives? Is it broken relationships, alcoholism, poverty? How does it lead to suicide?
Ed: One major problem is bullying. Many people who went through residential schools came back broken. This trauma has been passed down from generation to generation. It manifests itself in domestic abuse, and a lack of proper parenting skills, which was never fully learned because residential schools created a seismic rift in the transfer of wisdom between generations.
So if the victims of residential schools weren’t able to be proper parents, then what examples are they setting for their children, and their children’s children? There is a lot of bullying amongst the youth. I asked a teenager who was being bullied why there are so many bullies. He told me, “It’s because their parents don’t know how to be parents.”
Have all their traditions been stripped away now, or have they hung on to anything at all?
Ed: Older practices like shamanism and spiritual beliefs have been very much replaced by Christianity. In Arviat, Inuktitut is widely spoken, but that’s not true for a lot of places. Having said that, there are still a lot of very vibrant traditions in Nunavut. Hunting is a major part of life there, so people will traditionally go out caribou hunting, or beluga hunting in the summer, or polar bear hunting in the winter.
Even to this day, though, those practices, especially seal hunting, are routinely demonized by animal rights groups like PETA and Sea Shepherd, who rally to admonish entire cultures for living off the land as they have always done. To me, it shows how liberal colonialism still exists to this day, and is no different from missionaries or the government going into indigenous communities and dictating to them what their way of life should be.
Colonialism forced many indigenous groups to be ashamed of their culture. But this form of dance demonstrates that the right to self expression can never be fully extinguished. Cultural expression is a constantly evolving continuum that doesn’t need to be compartmentalized into “traditional” and “modern.” That’s one of the things that really drove us to tell this story.
Kitra: A few of our subjects draw the connection between the electronic dance-style music they’re listening to now and traditional Inuit drum dancing — and even throat singing. One of our subjects in the film, Ian and his half brother Peter, told us that the electronic dance–style music they listen to has similarities to Inuktitut, even though they are in totally different languages.
While break dancing, Ian shouts out in a way that borrows from traditional Inuit drum dancing, wherein the drummer will shout out as well. Another team talks about how, when they’re dancing, they feel the presence of their grandfather, who was a great lover of drum dancing. They feel that by dancing in the competition, they are both honoring him and the drum dancing tradition.
How do you see your own role as Canadian journalists in telling this story?
Kitra: Both Ed and I began our careers in journalism over a decade ago in the Middle East. Despite both being Canadian, neither of us had spent much time working for Canadian publications, nor focusing on Canadian stories. I spent my teenage years there, but I wasn’t very aware of the legacy of colonialism that existed within the country.
It was really the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that concluded in 2015 that woke me up to the historic and ongoing injustices Inuit and indigenous people have suffered, and continue to suffer. The TRC broadly exposed the abuses and traumas that the Canadian government inflicted on Inuit and Indigenous communities. The TRC concluded with a series of recommendations and practical calls to action. What really struck me was the section that focused on the role the media has to play in reconciliation.
Every Canadian has an imperative to ask themselves how they can participate in making amends for historical traumas. As visual journalists, Ed and I have the tools to tell emotional and intimate stories — we are aware of the power that we can yield to change narratives, bridge divides and turn the “other” into someone more familiar. We also recognize the privilege/access to the halls of power that we have been able to establish — connections to editors and publications — and the responsibility that comes with that. The question is not only what stories to cover, but how we as journalists cover these stories, too. At the forefront, I think about how we can tell stories that hands agency back to our subjects.
What do you hope this film will achieve?
Ed: Our most important audience for this story is the youth in Nunavut themselves. We really hope they will see it, feel pride, and feel empowered to take the platform and make it their own to amplify their own voices. We’ve done a lot of work to make sure to reach that population.
For example, we built a website that is accessible in both English and in Inuktitut. In a pretty unusual step, the CBC posted the entire documentary on Facebook as well as online, because we knew Facebook was the primary way Inuit youth engage with media. And we compressed all our videos because the internet is incredibly slow and expensive, as everything is on a satellite connection due to the remoteness of these villages. A lot of families wouldn’t be able to afford the bandwidth it takes to watch our documentary, so we tried as hard as we could to account for that reality.
Kitra: We hope that every Inuit person who sees this film will feel proud of this most amazing and flourishing dance culture that’s exploded in the Arctic, and proud of their young people who are standing so courageously in the face of the suicide epidemic. Inuit people have always been able to survive in one of the harshest climates in the world. I’m always in awe of the resilience, creativity and ingenuity of Inuit communities whenever I spend time with them.
More broadly we really hope that this film will wake up Canadians across the country to start asking questions and demanding that policies change. The youth in the Arctic deserve better. They are resilient, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t deserve access to all the mental health resources any other Canadian would receive. For me, it goes back to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s recommendations. How can we all play our part in reconciliation? Reconciliation isn’t a singular event. It’s not a moment in time. It’s an ongoing way of being in this world that we all can choose again and again in the decisions that we make.
The TED Fellows program hand-picks young innovators from around the world to raise international awareness of their work and maximize their impact.
