In 1985, I returned to Montreal after three years in three different settlements along the Hudson-Ungava coast. I had spent my time there as an elementary school teacher to children in the Inuit communities of Salluit, Kangirsuk and Akulivik.
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| Kujjuuaraapik Airport |
Salluit had been my first glimpse of what I would now call the most beautiful part of Québec— Nunavik— and I was there as a student teacher doing my five-week field experience through the kind manouevrings of Peter Burpee, then on faculty at McGill University. That short visit changed my life. I felt like a pioneer, in some ways. I got a taste of what the explorers coming to the New World must have felt when they arrived to these untouched parts. On foreign turf and away from family and friends and all the expectations of me, it was also the first time in my life I could try on a new persona, the first time I could look myself in the mirror and discover what I was all about. Never before had I had the opportunity to confront myself, warts and all. Who was I? What did I want out of life?
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| Umiujaq |
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| Two churches, Umiujaq |
All I knew after that practicum was that somehow I had to get there for good. And I did. After graduation, I was hired by the Kativik School Board, and spent the next three years in two different villages north of the treeline. There, I experienced life in all its simplicity and in all its prisms: I trekked through shoulder-deep snow in minus 60-degree weather to fetch my mail. I overnighted in an igloo, canoed through icy September rapids, camped on the tundra, hunted for ptarmigan, shot a rifle, and ate frozen caribou--raw. I tasted the most delicious blueberries right from the bush. I washed dishes in the meltwater of chopped ice. I learned to say my name (Kallai) and a few simple phrases in Inuktitut. Mostly, I came to appreciate the long, drawn-out silences, something that "southerners" rarely get to experience with the incessant stream of noise in our lives: the technology, the traffic, the all-talk radio stations.
In the end, I decided not to stay in the north forever. But the north, I believe, stayed in me.
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| Afternoon at the co-op |
I always felt upon my return that the education I received there greatly outweighed what I gave my students. Until an email arrived in my inbox last spring from a former student, a grade 3 kid from my very first class in Kangirsuk. Shy little Vicky, who used to look away or turn beat red whenever I called upon her for an answer. I made a rapid mental calculation. She would now be thirtysomething. What she wrote in her letter still embarrasses me. Makes me even blush a little. Talk about coming full circle. Much of her letter talked about how her year in my class changed her life. I responded to her email: “It was my first year teaching. If you really want to know, I had no idea what I was doing.” Truth be known, I barely recalled what I did to have been so inspirational to her. After all, it had been over twenty years ago! But she remembered. She recalled how I’d once asked them to draw the most beautiful thing they knew and how she drew a killer whale. And she explained how we visited the grade two class to show off their work and how proud she felt about what she had drawn. I am sure she wouldn't mind my sharing her own words:
"I remember you used to wear skirts and I liked it because it made you look like a real teacher. LOL :-)... I remember we made little purses out of leather and made ties and learnt how to tie a tie. To this day, I think of you when I tie a tie for my boyfriend or my brother. I remember we did a dance show for the new school opening and I was so proud ... because we were being creative and doing a show for the community... I also remember we had a sleep over at your home. It felt like a special class. I was always curious what we were learning next. Learning was fun in Grade 3. ... I think in a way, a child may have a talent and they need that special someone to spark their fire. I think you lit my talent in writing and being creative. Ever since then, I always took writing seriously in every form, in letters, stories, poems, notes, diaries, and so on. ... So I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your patience and love you gave us, the little JBNQA generation children. Your time in our hometown was worth every penny."
She delivered an update on her life. Turns out Vicky, a teacher now herself, juggles a career and children— in Greenland! Like me, she is also a writer. She says she is even contemplating a university degree in journalism. All her news— it came at me so fast. I can still barely reconcile my vision of her at eight years of age with the full-grown woman she has become. She had been the quietest kid in my class. For her, I had imagined what I imagined for most of those girls in my class: that they would stay in their community, that they would marry and raise children. Maybe they would work, maybe not.
I confess. I was on a high for several days after her email, but slowly, this nostalgic visit backwards began to recede. And then, the convoluted itinerary of my life presented me with a rare opportunity to return to the place I had not been back to in twenty years. Not to the same village, but to another Nunavik settlement- Umiujaq- one that did not yet exist when I left there in the mid-1980s. As a poet and a teacher, I had been granted a contract by the Blue Metropolis Foundation to help a class create a photo-essay of their community for an upcoming book. An all-expenses paid trip to a place that costs more to get to than three times the return airfare to Paris! Much as I had always wanted to return to this land of clean horizons and majestic silence, I never believed I would ever have the kind of money it took to get there. Talk about an opportunity for closure.
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| Alicia, Johnny, Joe, Lizzie, Minnie |
Long story short, I spent only one day in Umiujaq with Amanda Juby's lovely class of Secondary 4/5 students. Some of it had to do with a plane delay due to engine troubles. Despite six long hours of waiting around in Montreal’s Pierre-Elliott Trudeau Airport, even this made me smile, remembering how life had been in the north some twenty years ago when I was there in my youth. Back then, you never knew from one day to the next whether a plane would actually show up when it was supposed to. Yes there were schedules, but the only way you knew for sure was by looking out your window. If trucks and Ski-doos were buzzing off to the airstrip, it meant a plane was on its way. Maybe this, maybe that— nothing was ever certain in the north. And you learned to live with it.
When finally I made it onto the plane—now a Dash-8 and not the twin otter of days gone by— I grabbed hold of the Winter 2007 issue of Makivik magazine neatly tucked into the seat pocket ahead of me. I thumbed quickly through it and then my heart froze in its tracks. There, on page 31, in a story written by her, was Vicky, my Vicky, smiling back at me with her elementary students in Greenland.
No, nothing is ever certain in the north. But maybe, just maybe, one of those kids will grow up to be like her.
