More students Are leaving the North to Attend College
Life can be harsh in Salluit, yet Montreal Gazette reporter found beauty, hope and optimism. This is Part 6 of a seven-part series.
SALLUIT There are things about Jaaku Tarriasuk Mark that make him a fairly typical teenager.
Jaaku flashes a grin when he talks about getting his high school graduation ring in the mail. He’s had the phrase “Taurus 4 Life” engraved on the band in honour of his Zodiac sign.
“I’m really into astrology,” Jaaku said. “I think it’s just, well, it’s interesting how everything can be connected.”
He daydreams about basketball, loves pro wrestling and though he’s unfailingly polite, Jaaku can’t go more than a few minutes without checking his cellphone. Rather than scrolling through Instagram or other social media, Jaaku mostly uses the device to listen to music.
“You know, the rapper Machine Gun Kelly? I love that guy. He’s a Taurus, too,” said Jaaku, who explains that while Tauruses can be a stubborn lot, they ’re also reliable, down to earth and persistent.
Even Jaaku’s physique — the spindle-shanked limbs, goofy smile and cheeks still rounded with baby fat — is a snapshot of teenage awkwardness. But there are things about Jaaku that make him exceptional.
Last fall, he boarded a plane and left his remote Inuit village to attend college in Laval, some 2,000 kilometres south. Though he tries to play it off as something most kids go through, this is a big deal in Ivujivik.
Only two students from the local high school were eligible to graduate last year, according to Jaaku. The high school dropout rate among Quebec’s 15 Inuit communities hovers around 80 per cent and, for some kids, just getting to school every morning with a belly full of food is a struggle.
The transition from a village of 400 — where most families live by subsistence hunting and fishing — to the province’s third-largest city is a jarring one. In this outpost at the top of Quebec’s jagged northern coastline, the only way to navigate to the nearest village is on an airplane, a fishing troller or by trekking across the tundra for days.
At Collège Montmorency, Jaaku can hop on a métro and swoop into any corner of the metropolis within minutes. But Jaaku says he’s not intimidated by this. In fact, he says, he’s excited to be near the action, to go to concerts, to eat his favourite fast food (the spicy chicken at Thai Express) and make friends.
“For a lot of our youth, it’s an adventure to head south for school,” said Barbara Papigatuk, a Salluit resident who earned a degree in anthropology at Concordia University. “I remember there was this incredible sense of possibility. I could get in my car and drive across the country if I wanted to. And I did.
“But I also felt like a visitor in a foreign land. There was this freedom to roam this place, but it didn’t feel like I belonged. I missed the big open skies, the feeling of really belonging to the land, of being connected to a place.
“I used to live near the airport in Dorval and in the spring I’d watch the geese migrating overhead. I remember just missing home in those moments. I remember wanting to be back here for the goose hunt. It’s hard to describe that isolation.”
In the last eight years, there’s been a dramatic increase in the number of students leaving the north for a college education, according to Kativik, the school board that oversees education in Nunavik. When the school board was founded in 1979, there were only a handful of Inuit enrolled in post-secondary programs.
Today that number has swelled to more than 100.
“Things are changing fast. Twenty years ago, it wasn’t even close to what it is now,” said Lisa Mesher, director of post-secondary services at Kativik. “When I came down in ’94, there weren’t so many of us . ... I remember the pace of everything was just, it was fast. It’s laid back up north. When you come here, you need to tie up your shoes and be ready to run with everybody else.
“But people adjust and they succeed. There was a time when you went back to your community after graduating and everybody looked up to you like it was this incredibly rare thing. Now you have secondgeneration students, people whose parents came down south and went home with a diploma. And it just keeps growing.”
Mesher says one of the biggest adjustments for students like Jaaku, 18, is how competitive things can be in Quebec’s CÉGEP system.
“In CÉGEP you’re graded using a formula that compares you to everybody else who’s taking that course in the province,” said James Vangenberg, an education consultant with Kativik. “The (Inuit) students aren’t used to that type of competitive behaviour. Learning doesn’t happen like that in the North. It’s a much more collaborative process.”
Despite these obstacles, Vangenberg says there’s no reason for Kativik to lower its expectations. He said he made that mistake once
when assigning homework to a cohort of Inuit students in 2012.
“They very first essay I read was by a young woman from Kuujjuaq. It blew me away,” said Vangenberg. “It completely blew me away. I thought, ‘I don’t need to help this woman at all, she’s got it.’ Whatever happened in her life to get her to this point has prepared her very well for CÉGEP. She’s at Concordia University now and she’s doing great.
“Ever since that day, that’s how I’ve looked at the students. They ’re capable, they’re ready. You see some of them who have three kids at home, speak three languages and English is their third language. And they’re still passing all their classes. The potential is incredible.”
It’s clear Jaaku’s journey from one of Quebec’s northernmost villages to college hasn’t been an easy one. He doesn’t talk much about his childhood, but the parts that slip through hint at a turbulent upbringing.
“My dad, he’s just a lazy, drunk kind of guy,” he says in a matterof-fact tone. “My mom, she lives across (the sea) in Cape Dorset. It’s OK, I live with my older brother now.”
Growing up, Jaaku’s uncle acted as a surrogate father, teaching the boy how to hunt, trap, fish and survive on the land. When he speaks about good memories from back then, they usually involve Jaaku’s uncle and his little cousin.
The happiest moment of his life, Jaaku says, came when he shot his first waterfowl — a Canada Goose. He was seven years old and walking to school with his little cousin that morning. They spotted a bird waddling along the dirt road that leads to town.
“It was right next to a pond by the road. I think its wing was broken,” Jaaku said. “So we went back to (my uncle’s) to get the .22 long rifle.”
When he returned to the pond, Jaaku stood about 30 yards from the goose, steadied his rifle and gently squeezed the trigger.
“The bullet went straight through its neck,” he said. “That day, I went back home with a dead goose on my back. My whole family ate it, we were like six people in the house and it was enough for everyone. That was the best day of my life.
“My parents were very proud. I still have the picture. The goose was as tall as me. I gave half of it to my arnaqutik (godmother) and we ate the other half.”
When he has children, Jaaku says he wants to give them a life filled with these kinds of memories. To that end, the plan is to earn an electrician’s degree in Laval, enjoy city life for a few years and come home to work as an installer for Hydro- Québec.
“I know that there’s pressure for me to succeed, I know that my little cousin looks up to me, that he’s like a little brother,” Jaaku said. “My cousin, he already dropped out of high school. He’s a great hunter and that’s his path in life. For me, I think it’s (graduating from college). It’s going to take a long time, there will be summer where I won’t be able to go on the caribou hunt because I’m in school, but that’s only for a short time. I need to do this right now.”