Maintaining your history
Deborah Kigjugalik Webster, 49, has a memory for each season she headed out on the land with her father, either by boat or by snowmobile and qamutiik, a traditional Inuit wooden sled.
“There’s nothing like the social aspect of ice fishing in the spring, breathing in the scent of the tundra in the summer, blueberry picking with my aunt in the fall and skidoo rides and sliding in the winter,” says Kigjugalik Webster, a children’s author.
“The outdoors was our classroom and playground!”
She grew up in Baker Lake, or Qamani’tuaq, a hamlet in Nunavut, where she remembers being surrounded by family in the close-knit community.
She and her family — including her mother, an Inuk woman, and her father, who originally immigrated from England and moved up north for a teaching job — moved to Ottawa so that she could go to high school, as her home community did not have one, but moved to Yellowknife after university.
She has been back in Ottawa for six years and loves how strong the Inuit community is here,
She says her mother, Sally Webster, is often invited to say a prayer and light the qulliq — a traditional Inuit oil lamp — at community events.
She also makes tapestries featuring pictures of the people and places she knew back home.
She says the community has complicated feelings about celebrating Canada 150, given the history of how Inuit were treated by the Canadian government.
“I know Inuit were used as human flags in the north and relocated to the high Arctic when it wasn’t their traditional land,” she says.
Still, she says she is proud to be part of this country and plans to celebrate the event on Parliament Hill.
“I think now is a special time of healing and it’s good when we come together for events like this.”
Paul Nguyen, 37, was born not long after his parents arrived in Canada from Vietnam, as part of the wave of so-called “boat people” who came as refugees after escaping war.
He knew little about that part of their history though, as his parents did not talk about it and he says he never thought to ask them.
“I was born here, grew up here, you’re just kind of used to it,” says Nguyen, a filmmaker in Toronto who runs a website for his community of Jane and Finch.
“You go tobogganing in the winter, you play street hockey, it’s kind of a Canadian thing. I never thought to think about my past until I was much older.”
A few years ago, he reached out to Robert Sargent, an older white man the family called Uncle Bob, who had played a big role in their immigration story.
Sargent had noticed a group of young, Vietnamese men hanging around outside a hotel while he was on a break for lunch and started to get to know them, knocking on the doors of rooms to say he had a car and would be willing to get them where they needed to go.
Nguyen says the volunteer helped his parents find an apartment, taught them how to use public transit and otherwise helped ease their integration into Canada.
He says he is glad he finally learned the story, as he wants to maintain his cultural heritage and worries it might disappear with the next generation.
“I think it’s important to know your history and try to maintain some of it and pass it along.”