Is there a Canadian culture? Is there an Inuit culture? An Inuktitut word for ‘way of life’ is inuusiq. Based on the word for person, inuk, it means something like ‘the way of being a person’. Is there a connection between the language I speak and the person I am? Let us tell you a story.
Some years ago, Kublu applied for a job with an Inuit organization in Ottawa, and
dashed off the usual résumé. On checking it over, however, she thought, “But this
is an Inuit organization. If the person who reads this résumé is a traditional Inuk,
what will he think of it, and of me?
”
So she translated it into Inuktitut... and it sounded arrogant, boastful, and cold, cold, cold. Then she sat down and wrote a résumé directly in Inuktitut. It came out fine, until she translated it into English. The English version was vague, unfocused, even wimpy!
In fact, studies have suggested that many fluently bilingual people shift their personalities (or shall we say their cultures?) as they shift language. So there is a connection.
For an Inuk like Kublu, language and culture are inextricably entwined in the perception of who she is, to herself and to others. In the eyes of older people in the community, she is a child who has tapped into the mysterious powers of the qallunaat (white people), but who still depends on her Elders for so many answers about daily life in the past.
To her colleagues at the college where Kublu works, she is, we hope, an equal, with a professional competence extending beyond her particular role as instructor of interpretation and translation. To her students, she is a role model, one who has attained a balance between two worlds. To herself... well, she knows she can never be the kind of Inuk her Elders were, but, with all due respect, she doesn’t want to be, and she never could be a qallunaaq.
The language of Inuit, Inuktitut, has changed in the last century, but it is still the same. In a good portion of the circumpolar world, it is alive and well. Kublu can communicate quite successfully with Greenlanders, for example, and if parachuted into Point Barrow in northern Alaska, which is much further away, she would be able to do the same after about a week or so.
The culture of Inuit has changed more than Inuktitut has, but most of those changes are on the outside. Kublu does not lead the same life her parents did, but in her approach to life, her system of values, her appreciation of the world around her, she is closer to them than to her qallunaat colleagues.