NORTHERN EXPOSURE
Docu-drama puts focus on North
Layer up, Canada.
The Canadian Arctic almost falls off the map when it comes to mainstream pop culture, but a new CBC docu-series hopes to make the North a landmark.
True North Calling, premièring Friday, promises a rare, intimate look at our country’s North and the resourceful, compelling Canadians not just surviving — but thriving — in the unforgiving, breathtaking terrain. They include a young family of sustainable farmers, a third-generation fisherman and an Iqaluit TV producer shooting an Inuktitut-language comedy series. Each northerner combines traditional knowledge and modern savvy to keep their personal, family and community’s dreams alive.
“They are all incredibly resourceful and inspiring,” executive producer, Allison Grace, says of her cast. “They all want to sincerely create a better future for the North…. They would not want to live anywhere else.”
Kylik Kisoun Taylor is a case in point. The 30-year-old operates Tundra North Tours in remote Inuvik, N.W.T. The CBC crew embarks on one of his tours alongside Inuvialuit reindeer herders.
He hopes the show delivers a realistic, non-dramatized portrayal of northerners — showing not only “how they live,” but “why they live there.” Beyond showcasing the region’s wild beauty and cultural richness, he believes TNC can help dispel some stereotypes.
“People have asked me if I live in an igloo,” Kisoun Taylor laughs. “We have houses. We have hospitals. We have libraries. We wear the same clothes you do. Everything is the same… it’s just colder.” He just happens to also know how to build an igloo, shoot a bow and paddle a traditional kayak (or qayaq).
“The misconceptions are that the North is dangerous, that there is nothing up there, that there are only Inuit,” he says. “There are people from all over the world making the North their home.”
None of this comes as a surprise to McGill University professor Marianne Stenbaek, an expert in Canada’s northern regions and Nunavik literature. “A lot of people still see it as this great, white nothingness… and they think of Inuit, if they think of them at all, with very negative stereotypes,” she says, adding mainstream news coverage of the North is often limited to issues like alcoholism, suicide, housing shortages and the seal hunt.
She thinks a major network series focused on northerners’ ingenuity and diversity is long overdue. While the CBC show touches on the social problems afflicting northern communities, its overall theme is one of optimism. From groundbreaking artists to sustainable food advocates, it showcases people re-defining the North.
The most popular northern tales to date tend to focus on how it was “hundreds of years ago,” Kisoun Taylor explains. For example, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, the award-winning 2001 Inuit movie, is set roughly 1,000 years ago. Voted the top Canadian film of all time in 2015, it’s probably the most acclaimed portrayal of Canada’s North.
Stenbaek points to musicians Susan Aglukark and Tanya Tagaq as two successful Northern cultural exports to the rest of Canada. After that, things quickly get on thin ice. There are rare TV dramas like Arctic Air and the 1990s North of 60, and reality series like Ice Road Truckers and Ice Pilots NWT.
On the literary front, novelists seem more likely to use the frozen landscape as a dramatic vehicle for murder mysteries, or survival tales — think U.S. author Jack London’s White Fang and The Call of the Wild. These works of fiction rarely focus on the North’s culture and indigenous peoples. Other popular reads, like Farley Mowat’s autobiographical Never Cry Wolf, tend to put more focus on nature.
Given the North makes up roughly 40 per cent of Canada, it often seems to gets frozen out of the storytelling circle. Money is one major barrier, says Grace, whose crew shot TNC over 10 months in the Northwest Territories, the Yukon and Nunavut.
“It is very costly to be in the North, live in the North, to shoot in the North,” she says. Limited daylight (less than three hours a day during parts of the CBC shoot) and a frigid climate can wreak havoc on production schedules and equipment. Local film crews are also harder to come by.
Stenbaek says the lack of storytelling about the Canadian North is self-fulfilling.
“If people saw more, they’d be more into it … Canadians don’t know much about the North, so there isn’t the demand.”
Atanarjuat’s success created a brief spark, and was followed by such films as The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006) and Before Tomorrow (2008). Genie Award winner The Necessities of Life (2008) was partly shot in Nunavut.
TNC could potentially take the baton from The Fast Runner and hurtle forward into the 21st century. Kisoun Taylor is certainly hopeful the series will convince more studios and broadcasters to heed the true North’s call.
It turns out, the CBC show and his tour company aim to provide the same thing. As he puts it, “an authentic interpretation of what life is like in the North.” Kisoun Taylor, who also sits on the Aboriginal Tourism Association of Canada, says he’s currently looking into the possibility of bringing a major movie production to the N.W.T.
Grace hopes her docu-series inspires additional storytellers to travel to Canada’s territories, and the region’s people to continue to work for their Northern vision. “We gave a small snapshot, but we barely got to tell the story of the North.”