Intro to #amautiq from Inukshuk MacKay

I have been enjoying - yes! enjoying - the posts of Inuksuk MacKay, a Yellowknife based artist who performs with @QuantamTangle. She’s hosting @indigenousXca this week. I say enjoy because most of my indigenous-related twitter traffic is full of rage, despair, injustice. Inukshuk is just providing a fabulous peek into #Inuit customs and ways.

Inukshuk did a thread on the #amautiq, which she describes like this:

#Inuit designed the most incredible baby carrying coat for arctic conditions called #amautiq where baby goes in a pouch on the back with a large hood. They were sewn from skins traditionally. Modern materials are also used nowadays.

Her thread led off with a picture of her daughter being carried by an auntie, and she posted a series of her own childhood photos - herself as a baby in an #amautiq, and as a little girl carting around, variously, a husky puppy, an E.T. doll and a kitten in hers. Her aunties lined up back towards us showing some exquisitely fashioned #amautiq made by her grandmother.

With the recent, albeit meagre, media coverage of Trudeau’s apology to the #Inuit for the mistreatment over having TB, the north has been on the edges of my mind. There isn’t much there actually - throat singing, seal whacking, and the stereotype/caricature of the Eskimo - I’m sure you can conjure something appropriately stereotypical. These shared-from-the-heart looks inside customs and ways are a thoroughly positive reminder of why the work of #decolonization and #IndigenousResurgence is so vital and I am honoured to play even a tiny role in it. Next stop will be checking out this music: