'So much more to learn:' Inuk rights defender Aaju Peter on becoming a student again
Nahlah Ayed | CBC Radio | Posted: February 6, 2025 10:24 PM | Last Updated: 7 hours ago
It was in Iqaluit, says Peter, where she learned to 'decolonize' her mind
Long before she acquired a blackbelt, before she became a lawyer and a teacher and a member of the Order of Canada, Aaju Peter was a keen 11-year-old student who was taken from her Inuk community in Greenland and sent away to learn the ways of the west.
In the process, she lost her language entirely.
Now 65, the polyglot activist and designer eventually made her home in Iqaluit, Nunavut. It is a community that has been both patron and witness to her journey to reclaim her Inuit culture.
That journey has been marked by toggling between loss and healing, and between learning and teaching, and back again. Even as she teaches, she's about to begin new language classes as a student, with a view to acquiring a master's degree in law.
"They say it takes a community to raise a child," she told IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed during an interview in Iqaluit.
"It was that community that raised me, on how to decolonize my mind."
'Starving' for knowledge
Peter's journey in Nunavut began in 1981 after marrying into the community. She quickly immersed herself and became a voracious student of Inuit culture: learning Inuktitut and traditional skills like fishing and sewing with seal skin.
Soon she was collecting knowledge and history from elders — key among them her mother-in-law, Mary — and memorizing old songs and stories.
Before long, she was also passing on what she learned to a new generation of young Inuk keen to reconnect with their culture.
"If I had just stayed in Greenland and not gone to school, I wouldn't have known what a treasure the Inuit in a culture is, what a treasure the language is, because I would just have been living there," she said.
"The loss of language and community and my culture really made me so hungry. I was starving for all that knowledge."
Getting back what was taken
Having learned the language sufficiently to teach it was especially poignant for Peter.
"It gives me so much joy," she said. "When you're taking something that was taken away from you and you're taking it back — It just makes the puzzle greater."
Her efforts would later contribute to making Peter a member of the Order of Canada for preserving and promoting Inuit culture.
She was teaching others while busy raising her own children, when Peter became a student by enrolling in Inuit Studies at Nunavut Arctic College.
Then in 2005, at the age of 45, she was one of a handful of students to graduate from a law program designed to bolster Inuit representation in the new territory's legal system.
The graduates attended a special ceremony held in Iqaluit, and Peter was called to the bar in 2007.
This month, she begins classes again at Pirurvik, an Inuktitut language institute in Iqaluit where she has also been a teacher, to learn a higher level of the language. She hopes her new skills will help her write a book, and take her back to school yet again for another degree — a master in law.
"I have so much more to learn."
Decolonization progresses
While Iqaluit has been the place of so much growth and knowledge-seeking for Peter, it was also a place of unbearable loss.
It was where she lost her son to suicide. Tragically it is not a unique experience in the Arctic. She says it's not talked about nearly enough.
It's partly why she addressed her loss in the 2023 documentary, Twice Colonized, so titled to reference her experience of life as an Inuk both in Greenland and Canada.
Her decolonization, she says, is an ongoing process. But she adds that what she learned along the way in other languages and cultures has also been valuable. "It made me much stronger and much bigger."
Iqaluit has been an incomparable school. and it's where her journey to reclaim her heritage continues.
"It's a community that welcomed me as one coming from the outside and totally made me feel so at home that I think that I'm part of this community," she said.
Download the IDEAS podcast to listen to this episode.
*This episode was produced by Nahlah Ayed and Pauline Holdsworth.