ᐊᑎᕋ Atira

A personal name may seem like a simple concept, it is what you call someone to get their attention or speaking in reference to them. There is so much more to a personal name than just the name you call someone though. It represents a person’s humanity!

Inuit have had a naming system that has gone undisturbed for generations and generations. As part of colonization, suddenly, to be recognized as a ‘citizen’, to be considered a valid person under the Christian/White system one needed to be baptised with a Christian or European name. An Indigenous person was not considered a person until they were Christian, and to be Christian one needed to be baptized with a Christian name. The Doctrine of Discovery in the Americas and other places in the worlds which promulgated European monarchies to legitimize the colonization or stealing of lands are premised on the idea that we were not people at all.

Most Inuit in our region have Inuit names following the custom of having been named after a loved one who has passed on. Or with the permission of a living one, you name a newborn after them out of total respect and admiration for the person. Today, we also have European or biblical names. We still continue this practice of giving European names blindly. Both my children have European/Christian names and Inuit custom names. Perhaps, it is our subconscious understanding we, including our children have to live in a bicultural environment.

With Inuit naming customs,  it is believed some of the strong personality traits or skills of one’s namesake continue through the name sake. Therefore, their spirit continues to live. Or in the case of a living one, it can strengthen them, even possibly prolonging their life.

You can have kinship relationships according to your namesake. My great uncle Qillaq called me mom for example. The kinship terms can even be a generation or more behind, we can use terms of what our namesakes used. I call my mother ‘Leah’ or ‘Liaquti’ (dear Leah) as my namesake called her namesake that.

I am named after many people that had passed on before I was born, so I carry several names even if they are lesser names. Not lesser in value but how often people might refer to me in those names. Their spirit lives on through me and I have kinship relationships through those names. But my dominant one that almost all my family and community call me is my great grandmother’s name Kunuk or Kunuquti, which is a more endearing term for those that were close to her. My grandmother and her siblings were then very close to me, maybe even transpiring to my grandmother spoiling me a bit.

As a child, it was not until I switched to the English stream and had an Anglophone teacher in grade four I started to hear the name Sandra. I knew it was my name, but no one had ever called me that. I was not reflexively responding to it at first. It was as strange to me as if I was being called Ginger. Not only was I learning to read and write English which was foreign, after learning syllabic literacy in Inuktitut, I was trying to get used to being called by my English or baptismal name. It was such a transitional time. Everyone else still called me Kunuk in the community though. I remember sitting at my desk in the classroom, looking at a notebook with my name on the cover. I was staring at it trying to get familiar with S-a-n-d-r-a, as if wanting to imprint it in my brain to remember that IT IS my name.

Something peculiar happens in our society with our Inuit names though. When people grow up, they seem to grow out of their Inuit names to people outside the family. Or when people curse or speak badly of a person they use the Inuk name i.e. ‘Kunuruluk’ – as if the Inuk name is lesser already and you are degrading them is even more by using it in a bad light. By adding -ruluk to a name it is a form of damning the person. But it can also be a form of pity or referring to their pitifulness, depending on the context.

I have never been ashamed of my name Kunuk. I only associate it with love. I especially like to hear it from people from my hometown or those who knew my namesake. When people call me Kunuk, it says to me they are not strangers. There is a familiarity and kinship attached to it. But some feel awkward calling me Kunuk, as if it is demeaning. Perhaps it is seen as being too informal or too familiar to someone who may not be. 

More recently when I started a job with an Inuit organization to study possibility of self-government, I decided to reclaim my name Kunuk. Besides, there was already a Sandra in the office. It was a good time to reclaim my whole self. I was, after all, looking at ways Inuit can better self-determine. I felt the work had to reflect my personal journey as well. It was an interesting ‘transition’.

When I was eleven years old and moved to Iqaluit I was introduced as both Kunuk by my mom, and she’d explain I’m also called Sandra. In the schools I was Sandra, as that is a system name. So that is what I started to be called in Iqaluit, except for select few.

There also seemed to be shame attached to Inuit names or preference for English names, in a place that had higher pressure to Anglicise or to live qallunaatitut. In grade four I remember looking at the names of all my classmates (they had held me back a grade when I moved to Iqaluit), only a handful of us had Inuit last names. We were in Grade 4A, meaning the academic or English stream. I had started in grade 4B the general stream, but my teacher realized I could read English quite well, so she had me transferred to grade 4A. In a class full of white kids and Inuit children with white last names I remember wanting an English last name so bad like most of the children. I felt like the odd one, at least in the beginning.

Over time I learned to be indifferent at first then be proud of my last name. My last name was my great grandfather’s name that my ataatattiaq (grandfather) chose as our family’s second name during project surname – to replace E-numbers which were basically dog tags Inuit had as identifiers. My grandfather had a choice between adopting a Christian name for his first name and having his name as our last name, or adopting his father’s name as our last name. He chose his father’s name Inuutiq, which was registered in the system as Inutiq.

I grew up with mostly my youngest uncles, with other family members that would also stay with us periodically. I moved away from them when I came to Iqaluit. When I miss my uncles I imagine hearing their voices calling me ‘Kunuuk?!’.

My formal name was ‘Sandra Inutiq’. Over the years I would add Kunuk as my middle name. Not wanting it to be erased by the system, feeling my true self was not being reflected in the documents. Kunuk is now in all my official documents.  

Most people I have related to in my teenage years and as an adult know me as Sandra. As that is who I had to be in the force of assimilationist society. We’ve had to exist pretending we are English to be seen as a person, legitimate, valid, existing as a human.

When I started my employment with NTI I listed myself Kunuk Inutiq in their system. For the first time in my school and employment history I had a fully Inuk name. At first I had to retrain my brain to sign off as Kunuk. Tell people my email address does not start with ‘s’ but with ‘k’. Moments of hesitation, and asking myself whether the person I am writing to will know who I am. Internally asking if it seems superficial, trying too hard, but knowing deeply it is who I feel I am. Still now people apologise to me when they call me Sandra, and me explaining that’s ok. Reclamation is an awkward and finicky business.

It is also amazing that we can have bilateral lives, one in the ‘system’ or eyes of the system and one within your community. The strength of Inuit continuing their naming systems even with heavy pressure to abandon it.

I will not hold it against anyone who calls me Sandra. But my real name has always been Kunuk, I am a whole person with that name. Strangely, if I hear someone calling me Kunuk, I respond ‘hai?!’, a response in Inuktut. I am Inuk, I am Kunuk