Today is Nunavut day, July 9th, the day the Canadian Parliament passed the Nunavut Act and the Nunavut Claim Agreement Act in 1993, creating defined rights for Inuit of Nunavut under Canadian law.
We commemorate or dedicate certain days for various reasons: for religious or spiritual purposes, to honour specific groups of people, seek community action or attention, also to memoralize historic events.
Today is one, to remember laws created in ‘our favor’. As social beings we are prone to lean to ritual and ceremony, as awkward as some dedicated days can be in our calendared lives – remembering one day a year something that should be an intrinsic part of life, like love, or being Inukfor that matter.
What does Nunavut day mean? People joke, it means it is the day we get hotdogs. Summer celebrations having now attached an easy food for the masses, the hotdog. Perhaps there’s more meaning to the joke, that the day has been metaphorically reduced to low quality processed food, like our lives. Or maybe I’m reading too much into the joke, or maybe not.
As our lives are determined by the Gregorian calendar, with 24 hours days, 365 days a year, everyday is lived in measurable units to suit capitalistic centered lives. The only time we get to lose ourselves in unmeasured time is on our ‘holiday’ or out on the land, when we joke ‘what day is it?’ to indicate we’re finally relaxed enough to forget the uber structured life we now live in. So, to dedicate one day for specific reflection can be a bit absurd. We go along with it, unquestioningly like so many strange western habits we’ve adopted such as hollowedly asking acquaintances ‘how are you?’ as if our lives are intertwined enough to deeply care to hear the truth of how someone is doing if they answered sincerely.
Many of us remember and still manage to hold onto small spaces of cyclical sense of time determined by cosmology and ecology, where our immediate and planned needs determine our days, and we can breath with ease without exterior sense of oversight of looming deadlines. As limited as these spaces may be, as there is always a defined timeframe to relax. The momentary freeing of external deadlines, allowing us to go into meditative state with working with our hands, and to focus what we need to get done. That life is about kin and interdependent care and love, that work and effort is for that. Not about organized sense of time, or power granted to us, and we get to remember who we are once a year within that frame.
Nunavut day is meant to celebrate a milestone in our relationship with the colonial state of Canada, that we came to an agreement on the terms of our relationship. The state recognized we exist, with rights they were able to agree to. An Indigenous Peoples whose lives were ruptured by dominance and oppression, but still manage to exist negotiating space within continued disenfranchisement.
It is difficult not to ask though, how can we celebrate when we lose more and more to the vortex of dispiritedness caused by oppressive systems? Thinking about how my day started with a startle by a shout of a drunk man passing by our house this morning, watching for some time not only for his safety but ours as he walked along. Do we celebrate those of us managing ok in these systems, those of us lucky enough to be on a path of reclamation? Certainly unsettling way to begin a day that is supposed to be about celebration. Maybe the universe’s reminder not to forget about the man, and his needs.
I’m not saying we have nothing to celebrate, as I do recognize and don’t take for granted Inuit are still very culturally rich and still center familial relations largely. We see how food sharing systems are still integral in our smaller communities. I just want us to think what we are doing, and doing things with intention.
Perhaps we can determine the reason for the celebration, even if it was dedicated to a day parliamentary acts were passed. That it should be or is about our existence, on our terms. That to ‘just be’ inuk, Inuit, the resistance to be otherwise, that today should be about demanding action for the state of our society. Demanding and acting on protecting our essence of being, our culture and language which define our identity. It is ok to celebrate Inuitness, but we cannot ignore how very dire many of our kin are in. We cannot celebrate while forgetting those not doing ok. We need action, so that everyday is a reminder of who we are and pride is attached to that remembering because we’re living in kin again fully.