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Windspeaker.com Books Feature Writer
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
For more than three decades, three-time Juno award-winning singer Susan Aglukark wrote songs that laid bare the trauma she experienced from being sexually assaulted at a young age. What she found more difficult to write though was Kihiani: A Memoir of Healing.
“I think what's kind of magical about the songwriting and performing, it is in your mind. They're three-and-a-half minute pieces. They're just glimpses of parts of your life. Whereas the memoir, it's just about everything,” Aglukark told Windspeaker.com.
Kihiani is an Inuktitut word that means “because we must”, and it was the right time to tell her story, she says.
“What I didn't anticipate was … (the) personalness of it, the intimacy of details and sharing that and documenting that and putting it out there forever and forever. And there's something about doing that … I felt very vulnerable. I didn't feel threatened, but I felt very vulnerable throughout.”
Aglukark approached writing her memoir the same way she writes her songs—in collaboration.
As she doesn’t read or write music, her role in that collaboration is to tell “lived or living stories” that she experienced or stories she knew others had or were experiencing. Her partners created the melody and arrangements.
“With writing a book…it's a huge process. There's a lot of parts to writing a book is what I've discovered,” said Aglukark. “So having someone to keep me on track, to keep the story and all the different parts of the story cohesive (was necessary). That's a gift and I don't have that.”
Aglukark worked with Andrea Warner, a non-Indigenous writer, critic, broadcaster and podcaster, who she acknowledges for “creating that safe space for this process.” Initially Aglukark submitted “a series of little stories” to Warner, who responded with prompts and questions to flesh out the details.
“And I wonder if in that process—it is your words, it is your stories, it is your life—but having a different set of eyes and ears adds an element of curiosity, so they have a different way of getting the story out of you,” said Aglukark.
The story she tells starts with her almost idyllic life growing up in the Kivalliq Region, west of Hudson Bay in Nunavut, with her six siblings and preacher parents. This is the “before” of her childhood, she writes.
In working with Warner, Aglukark said, “In the early part of the book, I went back there. I remembered it. I remembered all the detail. It was just a very pleasant experience that way.”
The “after” of her childhood comes at nine years of age when she is lured into the home of a man known to her family and is sexually assaulted. A year later she tells her mother what happened. While her mother believed her, “nothing was done about it, and it became even harder for me,” writes Aglukark. “I started to hate myself more, and the confusion around all of it became even stronger. I felt stifled, silenced.”
She refers to this with the Inuktitut term ilirasungniq, which describes a feeling of being intimidated, powerless or "in a state of emotional fear.” It’s a term Aglukark uses both personally and in relation to Indigenous peoples.
At 22 years old, Aglukark left Nunavut for a government job in Ottawa with the Inuit division of the then-Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. There, her singing career accidently started when a co-worker turned “Searching,” a poem Aglukark had written, into a song.
Aglukark recounts the difficulties of filming a music video and having to look into a camera. Her abuser had taken polaroid photos of her.
She was lonely and scared. Through her music she began to heal and through her music she learned that she was not alone in living with the sexual abuse trauma that many Indigenous people experienced and continue to experience. She became an advocate for Inuit, and in 2004 she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.
It was an appointment she struggled to accept but eventually did.
“At the time that this award was offered…the institution that it comes from had done so much damage to our community, to all respective Indigenous groups, Inuit, First Nations, Métis,” she said.
In her memoir she explores the larger picture of what became known as the “Eskimo problem” with Inuit being relocated to the High Arctic, given identification numbers, sent to residential schools, (or in Aglukark’s case, boarding schools), losing their culture and way of life.
“What I decided to do was focus on keeping myself on the path and moving in the work that I am doing, the focus of which is always healing. Does (the Order of Canada) contribute to that process? And it does. And so that was my lesson there,” she said.
Aglukark used the award and the Order of Canada pin to keep in the forefront the plight of missing Indigenous children and residential school survivors, she said.
When she speaks at events, she displays her beaded orange T-shirt pin above her Order of Canada pin. As she writes, “The rule is that nothing sits above the Order of Canada pin but until every child’s body is recovered or answered for and every family who knows a child who was murdered and never returned finds resolution, that orange pin stays above my Order of Canada…”
In 2012, Aglukark and her husband started the Arctic Rose Foundation to change the way “we as Inuit think and engage.” Arctic Rose was the name of Aglukark’s first record. It was independently recorded. It led to her first Juno award in 1995 and to her signing with a major record label.
In 2018, Aglukark testified at the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut.
What Aglukark has learned over the years, and what she addresses in Kihiani, is that healing is not a linear path. However, she also points out that in writing her memoir she realized she was correct when, in around 2012, she recognized the single moment she knew she was going to be okay.
“And to know all this time later, that moment is still very real and very strong in my body. And so it was real. It was a real moment. I didn't imagine it. I didn't make it up that there is, in fact, a time in your life (with) all the work we do to get well, to get better, to be a good partner, to be a good mother, to be a good anything, all that work that we do is worth it and that I wasn't wrong when I recognized that moment. And that was a very powerful moment for me while we were writing the memoir,” she said.
While many of Aglukark’s years as a singer and songwriter were lean, she wants Inuit to understand from her memoir that if that’s the path set out in front of them, they should take it.
“You have choices and decisions to make, and sometimes they're very, very hard,” she said. “I hope you love the path you choose and that you're on, and that you learn to measure success differently… I hope you stay the course. It's an incredible path if you can stay on it and I hope they read that in the book.”
As for non-Indigenous readers, Aglukark wants them to “give us the time and the space that we need to make these discoveries.” There are history and trauma and many things along the path that will be triggering. “We want to build the best life possible for ourselves, but we're doing this dual path right now, and maybe we're on this dual path for a generation or two or three. I hope this story helps you understand what that means.”
Aglukark stresses that she never set out to become a public figure “but a series of opportunities presented themselves, and I find myself on this incredible path that has also been my healing, which comes with all of its implications. It got messy. Things are going to get messy. Let us walk the path we need to walk to stay on the life and to build the life that we want to build.”
Kihiani: A Memoir of Healing is published by Harper Collins Canada and was released in September. It can be purchased online at https://www.amazon.ca/Kihiani-Memoir-Healing-Susan-Aglukark-ebook/dp/B0….