Nunavut film crew aims to record every Nunavut elder (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

April 30, 2004

Nunavut film crew aims to record every Nunavut elder
Producer hopes project will give youth life survival skills
GREG YOUNGER-LEWIS
http://www.nunatsiaq.com/news/nunavut/40430_04.htm

[photo inset - Jolene Arreak says “the connection between the past and
now is culture, values and tradition” passed on to youth by elders like
her grandfather, Joanasie Benjamin Arreak, of Pond Inlet. (PHOTO BY
GREG YOUNGER-LEWIS)]

A team of Nunavut film producers are embarking on an ambitious mission
to put the legends and stories of every elder in the territory on
video.

A camera crew has already recorded the advice and stories of all the
elders in Pond Inlet for archives being assembled by Inuit
Communications System Ltd., the commercial branch of the Inuit
Broadcasting Corporation. The group travelled to Pangnirtung this week,
and plans to cover four more communities in the next year.

Jolene Arreak, a 26-year-old film producer who played a key part in
making the elders video project into a reality, says it will forge a
bond between youth and elders that she fears is rapidly disappearing,
along with the Inuktitut language and traditional Inuit culture.

“They’re being lost in the modern world,” Arreak said. “[Elders] are
worried about the future of youth and where they’re going, and they
want to make sure they [youth] have at least something to fall back
on.”

Arreak said she hopes the videos will give young Inuit the life skills
that she inherited from grandparents, who raised her and 14 other
children in Pond Inlet. She suggested that without their guidance, she
would have lacked the skills needed for university in the South, a
daunting step for a youth who had never left her community before.

“What I learned from my grandparents helped me survive wherever I go,”
Arreak said. “I’m trying to pass down to youth what’s been passed to me
by my grandparents, because it’s been useful for me.”

Arreak recently met with her bosses at ICSL about recording elders’
stories and teachings on video, after she attended an Aboriginal
conference in the South. Arreak said she was inspired after hearing
that other communities were also struggling with protecting their
language and preserving elders’ traditional knowledge.

But the project didn’t come without sacrifice. For now, film crews have
to volunteer their time to make the elders’ recordings while they’re in
the communities working on other documentaries.

Charlotte de Wolf, production office manager at ICSL, said her company
doesn’t have extra funding for the elders’ archives project, and
instead puts time aside while they’re in communities doing a separate
elders documentary series for the Aboriginal Peoples’ Television
Network.

Through $90,000 in funding from the Nunavut Film Board, ICSL is
assembling a documentary series on Inuit culture as told by elders. The
first of the six films will focus on Arreak’s relationship with her
grandfather, and about her return to Pond Inlet after her grandmother’s
death.

Other films in the series will touch on subjects like Inuit mysticism
and balancing traditional and modern knowledge in Nunavut today.
Although the project will require further funding, de Wolf said she’s
hopeful her crew will travel beyond the six communities chosen so far —
Pond Inlet, Pangnirtung, Iqaluit, Clyde River, Baker Lake, and
Taloyoak.

Once the documentary series and archiving are finished, elders will be
consulted about where their stories are kept and who has access to
them, said de Wolf.

“The elders’ stories are property of the elders,” she said, adding that
the video storage could be anywhere from that National Archives in
Ottawa, to a future facility somewhere in Nunavut.

Arreak’s grandfather, Joanasie Benjamin Arreak of Pond Inlet, said the
elders archives project fits with why his generation dreamed of
creating Nunavut.

“The reason we wanted Nunavut was to bring the culture back to future
generations,” Arreak, 76, said in Inuktitut. “We want them to have the
good life that we lived in the past. We’re trying to bring traditional
Inuit knowledge to the youth for the main reason that we want them to
know the difference between right and wrong. The youth today don’t seem
to know that anymore.”

Most elders have already been chosen for the documentary part of the
ICSL project, but organizers are still scouting for residents in the
communities to coordinate the filming.