Learning as I went, I have to say that the most important thing I have learned to date is that I am only as good as I decide to be…we don’t always have a choice in personal circumstance or situation, often things happen beyond our control but we can decide not to be emotionally controlled by them. It took me a long to time to realize that I had nothing to do with being sexually abused, I had to un-learn the notion of me being the problem versus him being the sick man. And yet we go through every possible reason why we let it happen, that we are the weak ones. I was in my early thirty’s when I decided I was okay, it wasn’t me, that I wanted to move on, I decided then to fight for my life. Part of what brought me to this place was deciding I was/am an artist, I write, I sing, I create with my hands, I am an artist and for the first time in my life I was starting to feel like I belonged, the irony of it all was I had also never been so alone, not lonely but alone. I think I knew that I had to go it alone for the first little while, I had to find myself before I could let anyone else “help me”.

I think that I have always been a see as you go kind of person and so have often been misunderstood, this created a kind of awkwardness in me that I have never been able to really shake off so that when I connect with someone, I don’t hesitate to befriend them, I can honestly say that in my life I have had 4 very close friends and thank God for them because those days of being lonely as well as being alone came and I often had no one to turn to for guidance, I had management, I had an agent, a band, a crew but no one who really knew me or really knew what was going on in my head.

I remember the drives into Clayton, Ontario while writing for the Arctic Rose album, the discussions about song writing and me thinking huh? Me, songwriting. Meeting other legitimate song writers, me!!!! And than driving to the studio and drive alone was an experience, driving in the country, looking in awe at everything around me and loving it, getting the studio and meeting musicians and singers and thinking eeeef! What do I do now!!! And I would ask, where do I go? Even standing differently to release the voice, loving the small vocal booth, listening to the banter, the tuning of instruments, and then the drive back into Ottawa and back to my day job the next morning thinking did I just dream that? And no one to share that feeling with, the fear, the elation, the daunting-ness of it all, the joy, the fear, the fear, the fear, I couldn’t help but think I’m not a singer, I’m not really a song writer, they are, why am I here! I would sometimes start to be overwhelmed with paranoid thoughts, it’s not me they want to work with, it’s the “native artist”, I’m really not talented, I’m just different, all of this would keep me up at nights and than I’d hear a piece of music and I’d know that I had to keep writing, that stories needed to be told and I should at least do the one album, I had demons and I needed to exorcise them.

I think that is why I could never give up on my dream to fly airplanes, to me it was/is the ultimate get away! Literally! Thank God for friends and thank God for pilot friends!

So my first big choice was deciding to learn, to embrace it all, to be a part of it instead of letting it all happen to me, I will always treasure those drives to Clayton, I think of John Park Wheeler who did more than co-write and co-produce and produce some of the early stuff, he was also the driver, the company to and from the studio, someone I will always treasure as a good friend and early mentor.

…or when to commit. I wanted to commit but I didn’t have “the tools”, I didn’t even know to seek out mentors, to search for training programs and classes etc. I just didn’t have a clue as to how to “commit” to a goal, how to make something truly mine. I knew that I responded at some deep level to art, any art but I didn’t have “the knowing” to pursue it or that it even needed to be pursued, I plain old didn’t know. If I were to describe where I was “functioning” from in the early years of my career, it was like standing on a mountain top screaming out “yes!!!!” at the top of my lungs but when I look down the mountain the mountain is not on any substantial emotional ground but I was on a mountaintop and I was living and that was enough to propel me forward. So I made a decision, I decided that I liked the path I was on, that I wanted to stay on that particular path until it winded down or turned down another, I decided to find the tools, to fill in the blanks and keep moving forward.

So this “crisis” became the first opportunity to exercise my “right to choose”. Seems like an odd thing to say I’m sure but it slowly became clearer to me that the real challenge in my life was going to be making certain choices for my own good and the consequence of those choices because immediately, several challenges presented themselves in that simple act of “choosing to engage”;

1) What was my own good? In some deep down fundamental place, I hadn’t connected, it was all spelled out for us, you go here, you go there, don’t say this, don’t say that…
2) What were the consequences of my new decision, I chose to choose for myself?

3) Who around me could direct me, assist me, walk me through or walk with me?

Making the choice to make a choice meant I would have to figure out my surroundings, who I was in the midst of it all so that I knew what next steps to take…it was like diving into a deep abyss but it was not completely frightening, it was more like free falling. Lucky for me this was around the time we were working on the debut album, This Child because the album became a diversion/purpose. I went into that album completely clueless and in hindsight this was for the best because I had no pre set biases or opinions, I was just glad to be there in that moment. If I wrote, I wrote, if I talked, I talked, if I read, I read, I was set on a path of step by step “self recovery”, pealing back layers and layers of preset ideas and notions that had shaped my life up to that point but were of little value to my new life. Aside from the spiritual connection I had grown up with, I had no other tools to draw from for this new part of my life. I knew I was where I needed and wanted to be, I knew that at the core of my very being, I was/am an artist, I just had to carve out my own path and learning as I went, this was the challenge.

So if I always walk(ed) away, did that make me a weak person? I know it does/did not but in that environment I felt like the weak one, peer pressure is a powerful thing. Right up until my mid-thirties I saw myself as the weak one. I completely gave in to the thinking that I was inferior, that my abilities, talent or potential were only as reliable as I was told they were, I had no basic “sense of individuality or ability” beyond that which I was told I had. My true personal journey began when I was faced with an opportunity I never dreamed I’d have and ironically it came in the form of charging my abuser. As frightening as the idea was, I knew that I had to take advantage of this and I was inadvertently set on a path of self liberation and personal discovery. Immediately, a big choice was set before me, can I go it alone? Unfortunately, in our communities (at that time at least), there were no support groups or therapists to assist in the “healing” process, there was just the choice to either file charges or not and either way  move on with your life and suffer the consequences of either choice.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the loneliness that followed, being so alone and having no place to go for direction and emotional support. Even after the court hearings and the conviction (the jail time was almost equivalent to the time it took to get the conviction) it was like being completely exposed and left absolutely vulnerable all the time, at the church, at the local store, walking down the street, I no longer felt like I belonged, nothing the community did, it was just (one of) the consequence of speaking out.

I left, I was given an opportunity to work for Indian and Northern Affairs in Ottawa on a one year contract and so I took it and moved to Ottawa in 1992. It was the best thing I could ever have done for myself. I remember the sense of freedom but there was always this underlying feeling of uncertainty. It wasn’t the kind of uncertainty that would become fear but the kind that would light a fire under my wings, I hate being afraid, I hate being in the grips of it, of being helpless, this was a chance to figure out how to use the fear for something else, it turns out that that something else was art, beading, sewing, singing/songwriting and writing in general.

The thing that could have shaped my future in a most negative way became the thing that saved me, I guess it’s about knowing when to walk away.

Junior high was a very confusing and frightening experience, most of the learning day was in the “white building”. To this day, that white building represents some very sobering moments and memories for me.

I am by nature non-confrontational and I think this was often interpreted (for most of my life) to mean weak and therefore an easy target for bullies. There were two girls in particular that frightened me, I would avoid them. Boys confused me, I was a tomboy and liked the company of boys but I guess at that age their idea of like and my idea of like were very different and so “friendship” often very quickly turned awkward, thank God for my big brother and my cousin.

I was content to be the 4th daughter, the “odd one”, easily “dis missable”, I made myself that way. I liked being alone, I liked the silence in the silence, I love (d) the land, the vastness of it, the power of it, I always felt connected to it but did not know how to translate it to something. This is about when I began poetry writing, I was 15.

Most of my inspiration came from the bible, it being the only front to back “book” I had read to that point in my life but I was beginning to feel other things too. A teacher who had the greatest influence on me (although he was only in Arviat for one year) influenced me the most when I visited his home and saw how he was with his family, making sure the daughters homework was done, making sure the pregnant wife was eating good etc… he was so involved in all aspects of the family that I left feeling like something was missing but never could put my finger on it but this was a new feeling and I wrote about it. it was only after I had my son that I put that memory into practice, between what I had learned from my own parents and these memories from the others, I knew I wanted the best for my son.
Writing became an outlet for me, I got my first diary and wrote. In hindsight, I now realized that writing became an outlet and cathartic. About a year into the writing, my (1st) diary was stolen and I stopped writing for a while but quickly realized that I loved and needed to write.

So I went on to high school and ended up in Iqaluit’s Gordon Robertson Education Centre (GREC) now the Inukshuk High School for grade 10. High school at that time was still a residential school environment, this was for the most part a good experience as residences were no longer managed by “the church” but by the Territorial (NWT) Government. We were flown to Iqaluit in August and home for Christmas for two weeks in December than back to Iqaluit til’ late May and home for the summer.

I dropped out of high school (grade 10 year) that first Christmas, I did not like the environment, I did not feel safe. I told my dad this and he and my mother agreed to keep me at home and not return to Iqaluit. I ended up that January in a bible school in Cambridge Bay for three months and in this environment I thrived. Later that year, I went to a private school in Regina for one year and again thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The most memorable (besides getting to know and to love the family that took me in) was the independence. I loved the bus ride from Winnipeg to Regina, I remember the house I stayed in, I remember most of the students and the church I was involved with/in, it was a very good experience.

The following year I attended Sir John Franklin High School in Yellowknife, it was here that I returned to my journal writing and it was this residence (Akaitcho Hall) where I once again felt safe enough to trust my thoughts and ideas. It was here that I wrote Qiniqpunga, Searching, a poem that turned into what would be my first recorded song and music video.

High School was, all in all, a very good memory, as I mentioned, I am not a natural learner, not in the conventional sense and so I struggled with school but I really enjoyed the environment. Rules and structure made all the difference for me, supervisors were all very good, I was still very much a loner but I had a couple of very good friends who are still very good friends to this day but I did enjoy my time alone. I would often settle at the rocks in the back of the building and write or day dream.

I loved walking over to Old Town to watch the planes take off and land.

Yellowknife, Akaitcho Hall and Sir John Franklin High School were a good experience. This was also the place and time where lines were drawn, I had to chose between setting myself down the path of personal self destruction or staying true to my (non-confrontational) self and keeping myself busy enough so as not to give in to the temptations of drugs and alcohol. I was certainly surrounded by it but the regret and self recrimination displayed by my friends following the nights of partying was enough of a deterrent for me, I did not want to create any more “personal confusion” than what I was already experiencing, I had enough to deal with. So I always walked away and I wrote…

…so I was about 13-14 when my dad showed those 3 guitar chords and I that was it, I was hooked. I’d had one piano lesson sometime before at the than big orange school where they had an upright piano in the home economics room and I’d play at it every now and again. It was not tuned but it was such a nice instrument to me. I had no clue how to make any sense of it but I liked plunking away at it.

One day, a teacher, Sheila Hoo, offered to teach me and I remember that one lesson and I remember loving it!!! Aside from that one piano lesson and those three guitar chords, there was no “music” per se. As a preachers kid, we got involved in church services but that was the extent of the musical or creative experience.
As I say, my childhood was a pleasant one, I am the 4th of 7 children, right in the middle, 4 beautiful sisters and 2 wonky brothers and for the most part it was a safe home and childhood. We had three meals a day, we had warm beds to sleep in, we had clean cloths, we camped every summer, hunted and fished in the winter, we cleaned geese, cleaned fish, raced ATV’s down the two main roads, ski doo’s down the bay, frost bite on our faces, walked miles along the water away from town most days in the summer, it was a good childhood. I loved living in small town Nunavut but… I love (d) traveling.

I remember my first trip “south”. My dad took some of us to Winnipeg and I recall vividly the feel of concrete beneath my feet, fenced yards and trees, I couldn’t get over the size of trees. My sister Barbara and I thought it would be fun to climb a tree which happened to be on someone’s personal property but we ran and as we began climbing heard our dad yelling to get off the private property and I’m looking around trying to fathom this new concept, private property. Someone owns the tree, this land, that house, thought about it for all of a minute and moved on but it stayed with me all these years.

It wasn’t for another 4 or 5 years before I was in the “South” again. I had dropped out of grade 10 in Iqaluit, couldn’t get to the High School in Yellowknife NWT for another year so the only option was a private school in Regina, Maranatha Christian Academy, a christian school that my parents had some affiliation with. I loved it!!!I spent a year in Regina and as scary as the whole new experience was for me, it was a very good experience. I knew then that I would travel.

I spent one year in Regina and from there went on to finish high school in Yellowknife. Learning in school (or an institution) never came easy to me. I struggled with my grades but I was never deterred, I really enjoyed the environment, I liked seeing and doing new things, I was determined to graduate and move on.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the last 20 years of my life. I moved to Ontario from Arviat (and Rankin Inlet) in late 1991, it is now April of 2011 and all I can think is OMG!!!! How incredible that life can change so much in 20 years! And the more I think about it, I realize I have no regrets except that it took me so long to reach this place in my life, a place where I am (finally) good with my career. I have thought long and hard about whether or not to tell my story and should I decide to, how would I tell it.  Blogging makes the most sense because it allows me to write at my pace and entirely in my own words.I’ve decided to share my story in a biography format to give you the full picture from beginning to now, so…here go’s…

I’ll start from the very beginning. I was born in Ft. Churchill, Manitoba  the 4th of 7 children. I think we we’re living in Arviat around the time my mother was due to have me, she flew to Churchill to have me and my dad later joined us with the other three siblings and we ended up living in Churchill for a brief time (I think). After a short stint in Churchill where my father worked, we moved back to the Kivalliq, travelling around between Rankin Inlet, Whale Cove, Baker Lake and Arviat and back to Rankin until we finally moved to Arviat in the late 70’s and my parents are still there to this day, hence, I (and all my siblings) consider ourselves Arviarmiut. Inuktitut is our first language.
I loved elementary school in Arviat so have fond memories of my early life.  Junior High was a whole other galaxy however, it was the first time I truly experienced bullying and the brutal nature of pre-teen and teenage girls. Having never been confrontational by nature, I walked away (or ran away as the case most likely often was) from a confrontation rather than fight. I never saw myself as weak (in terms of being bullied or bullying), I just never could comprehend that brutal kind of emotion and emotional re-activeness (I know, not a word). I understand it now and ironically it was about 5 years ago, at a music festival where I was performing, a teacher (Bill Belsey) of my younger twin siblings happen to come out to the show and he and I talked briefly about his site bullying.org. We all hear about bullying, most of us have been bullied but it takes the Bill Belseys to bring it to a place where we pay attention and I started to. All those junior high school memories came back in a rush, the fear, the desperation, the aloneness and for most of us no one to talk to about it. I never did talk about it until much later in my years. Don’t get me wrong,  the bullying did force me inward but it was already in my nature to be a bit of an introvert, I had two really good friends in Arviat but I was always abit of a loner,  I’ve never been afraid to be alone, in this place of isolation, I began to sense something bigger, I loved sunrises, I loved sunsets, I loved horizons, I loved the rain, the sound of water, the smell of the ocean, still do to this day! I loved to write and especially to write outdoors.  I loved the sound of geese, of streams, of tundra. I loved watching caribou run across the tundra, sometimes a loner and sometime’s a small herd and only one time, my mother (who love’s hunting and the land) showed me the “big herd”. I  remember her telling me, don’t look for the herd, they merge with the tundra, look above the herd and sure enough, all I could see was like a floating sea of beautiful black and brown just on the edge of the horizon, like brown velvet moving, and than you begin to feel a slight tremble in the earth and you realize, that’s a herd!!! I loved going to our summer camp, Isatik, the cabin is on small river, a few miles further is a hill, on the way to that hill are geese eggs. I love these memories, these places were always stronger than the fear of the overly emotional young girls I would have to face when school started up in the fall, these memories have always been like a warm blanket, shelter from the “not quite an artist and never quite belonging” feeling.

The real “need to feel it all” was awakened when I was 12 or 13. My parents are ministers, my father was the pastor of the Pentecostal church in Arviat and shortly after moving to Arviat they hosted some kind of gathering and a missionary pilot flew all the guests to Arviat. It was because of this pilot that I fell in love with the idea of flying, of being able to leave whenever I needed to. It was the ultimate freedom, I recognized then that all of it, loving the outdoors, the animals, it all represented freedom, I did not know it or foresee it or even have the language to describe it (english is a second language) as what it came to be, a free spirit and that this free spirit would later manifest itself through writing in general and song writing specifically.
My writing began in earnest through journal writing shortly after this gathering. I wish I had that diary now, I can’t even imagine what I would have written about considering what my world was like at that time. A 12 years old inuk girl in a small Arctic town of about 700, might have been a big life at that time but set it against the last 20 years, definitely a whole other world. That journal was later stolen and I stopped writing for a long time. When I did start writing again, I wrote a very short song after my dad taught me three chords on a guitar, D-G & C, I was 15 and the song was scripture.

Hello,

It’s been 5 months since my last blog entry, it feels like 1 month. I’ve been to Alberta and back 6 times, (love my job with the University of Alberta!), I’ve been up to Nunavut twice, Berlin in March, New Mexico in April and we (The Arctic Children and Youth Foundation) are getting set to launch our first Pilot Project-Kamajiit (acyf.ca) in Nunavut, oh yeah, I’ve also just finished up my latest album, should be released in September so…

I am still taking some pictures so am attaching (attempting to) a favorite. This one was taken while flying into Pangnirtung in February, it is a picture of the Pang Pass,  I hope this works.

I am heading home to Arviat for a few days this month so will be sure to take some pictures and share.

Have a good summer.

S.

Hello,

I can’t believe it’s been a couple of years since my last post. I had to deal with personal crisis but as it has passed (all is good), I feel ready to get back on line again. I’ve been working with the University of Alberta in my capacity as Distinguished Scholar in Residence. It has been a truly rewarding experience as it has allowed me to step back and function as a “normal” person, walking amongst staff and students with an office and everything, I feel regrounded again. I’ve also had a chance to really get to know some of the issues our Aboriginal Students face in post secondary schools, I’ve met some incredible students who inspite of life’s hardships, stay on the path of learning, this has been a great source of inspiration for me.

I’ve also recently gotten more involved with charity work having become Chair of Arctic Children and Youth Foundation. We begin our first series of community consultations in early February traveling to Iqaluit and to Pangnirtung, I am so looking forward to this trip.

I am also working on another album, more of a compilation with new songs but this is a project that has been percolating for some time, I still have very vivid memories of some of the people in some of the songs and so have always felt close to those songs, the compilation CD will be of those songs, I am hoping to release a short story booklet with the CD so that people can read the history of the songs.

My son and I went to Rankin Inlet last summer to visit my sister, we got to spend a day and a night out on the land, Diane River, it was absolutely beautiful (except for the mosquitoes) so I’ve attached a picture I took of the sun setting along the river, hope you like it.

Thanks to everyone for your patience, please check out the acyf.ca site for information on our foundation work.

Qujannamiik.

Picture of myself and Melody.

Hello Again;
Just wanted to share a photo and a really great story. It is of a young girl with a lot of potential. Her name is Melody. I met Melody in Merritt, BC. Like many Aboriginal youth, Melody has dreams, goals and aspirations. Like many Aboriginal youth, Melody spent the better part of her young teen age years failing in terms of direction and, most importantly, not knowing who to trust with her dreams and aspirations. Consequently, she did not come to believe in her goals and aspirations until recently. She has spent the last couple of years in an arts program in Merritt, BC that has nurtured her enough to begin trusting again. I believe this is one of the areas we need to focus on: re-building that faith inside so that our youth believe once again in their goals and dreams, and in themselves. Here is a picture of Melody and myself after the show in Merrit. I want to thank a wonderful woman named Heather Thompson who had the courage to ask me if I could spend some time with Melody and also for believing in Melody. There are enough women like Heather out there that together, we can make a difference for many more Melodys. Hugs to both Heather and Melody.