Igloolik Arnait (Women’s) Video Productions and the Making of Before Tomorrow:

Inuit Feminism, Modernism and Survival

Dianne Chisholm
Arctic Modernities Conference
The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Sept 16-18, 2014

Based in Igloolik, Nunavut, Arnait Video Productions has been documenting Inuit culture

from women’s traditional and contemporary perspectives since 1991. [1] One could describe

Arnait Video Productions– AVP for short –as a collective of dedicated female Elders and aspiring

younger women who deploy video, and more recently film, to investigate and communicate the

conditions, processes and possibilities of Inuit survival and adaptation before and after the

Canadian north was made subject to the imperial, colonial and global pressures of modernity.

AVP works autonomously and in association with Igloolik Isuma Productions, which was

founded in 1990 and is renowned internationally for its Atanarjuat (“Fast Runner”) Trilogy, the

first feature films to be written, directed and acted in Inuktitut. Both Arnait and Isuma are

committed to recovering traditional knowledge with modern digital technology before the last

nomadic Elders pass away. The primary difference between the two production companies is the

emphasis the former places on specifically women’s creative contribution to Inuit cultural life.

After briefly introducing AVP’s founding and history in the context of Nunavut’s

territorial gender politics, I will examine the making of its first feature film and third film of the

Artanajuat Trilogy. Before Tomorrow, 2009, exemplifies AVP’s style of re-enacting women’s

repertoire of traditions as an enduring event of cultural survival. Set at an epochal moment of

European contact, the film illumines a woman’s power of wisdom to adapt tradition against the

present tide of extinction.

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Arnait Video Productions has always been a collective and communal effort. [2] Initially,

a small gathering of adventurous Igloolik women, mostly Elders, met with a Montréalaise

feminist videographer to learn the art and possibilities of video auto-ethnography. Madeleine

Ivalu, Susan Avingaq, Carol Kunuk, and Atuat Akkitirq–the women who now form the core of

AVP’s film-making team–were among the first to participate in a workshop series led by Marie-

Hélène Cousineau with a view to creating women’s community video for northern broadcasting.

Often against their husbands’ wishes, and with little or no resources to purchase video equipment

of their own, the Igloolik women shared Cousineau’s personal gear and taught themselves how to

use it–focusing on each other as they commenced with their daily activities. The workshop,

which called itself “Arnait Ikajurtigiit”–“women helping each other”–was as an offshoot of the

“Tarriaksuk Video Centre” that Cousineau founded with Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn as

the video-sector of Igloolik Isuma Productions, which Kunuk and Cohn, had founded a year

earlier with Paul Apak and Pauloosie Qulitalik. But the offshoot evolved into a creative

powerhouse of its own, as its members became adept at designing, directing, and filming matters

of concern for Inuit women.

Inuit cultural sovereignty was from the start a motivating ideal for the founders of Isuma

Productions whose “mission is to produce independent community-based media–films, TV and

now Internet–to preserve and enhance Inuit culture and language; to create jobs and economic

development in Igloolik and Nunavut; and to tell authentic Inuit stories to Inuit and non-Inuit

audiences world wide.” [3] Splitting from the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation, instituted by the

Canadian Radio and Television Commission in 1981 and supported, but also overseen, by the

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Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Kunuk and Apak set out to form their own production

company with a mandate to decolonize northern audiences, and to transmit contemporary and

historic forms of local and traditional knowledge across the circumpolar north and global first

people’s networks rather than limit coverage to national news [4]. Isuma’s earliest videos are set

in the 1930's to rediscover the thinking–isuma–that is essential to nomadic culture and to protest

the evacuation and stagnation of thought brought about by forced settlement that commenced

with post-WWII nation building. Qaggiq, for instance, tracks four nomadic families as they build

a communal igloo and debate the prospects of a future marriage; Nunaqpa follows two families

as they overcome difficulties of tundra travel during a caribou hunt; Saputi shows three families

making a fish trap and speculating why the fish do not come.

Likewise, Arnait’s early videos feature traditional, nomadic thought-events as performed

by Igloolik’s female elders. Attaquttaluk features the retrospective sagacity of a woman, who was

the only person among her people to survive a season of starvation. Niquira deploys oral histories

in an experimental fiction about a grandmother and granddaughter who come to know each other

in the wake of a family tragedy. Umiak tracks a group of elders who undergo a process of re-

learning the traditional art and science of boat-building. Qullik documents the installing of a

stone lamp in an igloo by female Elders, whose traditional role is to keep alight the flame–ikuma.

Just as Isuma Productions takes isuma as its cultural imperative and company insignia, Arnait

takes ikuma for its icon–the idea being that video will recover, recreate and perpetuate women’s

isuma in a luminous and enlightening medium. [5]

Arnait Ikajurtigiit evolved from a home-made workshop to a full production company at

the historic moment when the eastern Arctic acquired provincial status and a major advancement

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in Inuit self-governance. The forming of Nunavut and its government in 1993 provided a political

context and impetus for the company’s own aspiring autonomy. A ground-breaking proposal to

mandate that the Legislature be half-male/half-female was put forward but defeated, reportedly in

part, because women voters had been threatened with violence by men who rejected the mandate.

Arnait proceeded to give women full representation within the territory of Isuma Productions,

though it was not until after helping make Atanarjuat and The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, the

first two films of Isuma’s trilogy which kept much of Igloolik’s population employed for five

years, that Arnait began work on longer, medium-length videos and full-length films, including:

Queen of the Quest a video-documentary on female musher, winner of the 2010 Nunavut Quest

and champion of Inuit culture; The Iluit, a five-part television series about a female hockey team

from Inukuak, Nunavik and its supportive community of women; Ungava, a cinematic drama

about the testy reunion of a Montreal woman’s son and his father’s Inuit family in a far-northern

community; and Sol, a feature film-in-progress about a young Inuit man found mysteriously dead

in the RCMP detachment of a remote Inuit settlement. Heading this surge of creative industry is

Before Tomorrow–the film that completes Isuma’s trilogy by assembling and elaborating the

nomadic themes and auto-ethnographic techniques of Arnait’s early productions.

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Before Tomorrow tells the story of how an elderly grandmother shelters, encourages and

guides her grandson as, together and alone, they navigate the severe existential exigencies of

surviving arctic wilderness. By placing their nomadic trajectory in the moment of first contact

with Europeans, the film complicates and heightens the case for isuma, together with a host of

specific forms of traditional knowledge, notably: the knowledge of how to keep alight the ikuma;

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the knowledge of how to read the complex flux of landscape, climate and weather–or silatuniq;

and the knowledge of old stories or unikkaaqtuat and how to tell them the right way in differing

situations. The film’s screenplay is itself an adaptation of Danish novelist Jørn Riel’s Før

Morgendaggen, a fictive chronicling of events that led up to the death of an old woman and a

young man whose solitary skulls Riel discovered in an island cave off the coast of Greenland in

the 1960s. Ivalu, Avingaq and Cousineau (the film’s directors and scriptwriters) relocate the

story in the 1840s when the first European ships landed on the shores of what is now Nunavik,

thus situating their characters in a time and space of epochal uncertainty and climatic extremity.

Uncannily, the characters do not survive even as the film resurrects and illuminates the

adaptive timelessness of traditional Inuit culture. The plot is simple. Two families are reunited

after having been lost to each other for many years. As the one family arrives by sea to where the

other family has been camping for the summer, Maniq, a twelve-year old boy of the host family,

finds a carved wooden boat on the beach. This boat, along with various items and stories the sea-

faring family bring with them, are the first contact that these Inuit have with Europeans. Though

contact is minimal it is fatal, for the sea-faring family has come into the possession of steel

knives and needles that their women exchanged with the strangers for sex, an exchange that has

allowed the transmission of a disease against which they have no immunity. Ningiuq, Maniq’s

grandmother, regards these stories and things with prescient apprehension, sensing eerie alarm

amidst the joy of reunion. But nomadic life continues as usual, and when Ningiuq leaves for the

island to where she customarily takes the meat and fish of summer’s hunt and catch to dry for

winter, Maniq goes along to help her. When the hunters fail to collect them by the first snows,

she and Maniq return to the settlement to discover that their people have all died. Gathering what

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provisions she can glean from the debris, including the foreigners’ accursed needles and knives,

Ningiuk retreats with Maniq to the island where the first winter storms have ruined their camp.

They take refuge in a cave that serves as their makeshift home, hearth and eventually their grave.

If the story is simple, it concerns aspects of Inuit culture most crucial to nomadic survival.

Grandmother and grandson in real life, Madeleine Ivalu and Paul-Dylan Ivalu cast expressive

versions of communal archetypes. “Ningiuk” is the Inuit name for female elders, sage-femmes,

who oversee birth and death and other rites of passage, and whose reach of experience extends

beyond this life. Ivalu’s “Ningiuk” closely attends the passing of her old female friend Kutuujuk,

who accompanies Ningiuk and Manik to the island and who dies before late summer’s end. She

conducts Maniq’s metamorphosis from untested fledgling to capable hunter. At critical moments

of their journey-ordeal, she consults the spirit of her long dead husband. Cousineau imagines the

entire host of characters as dead souls returned from the grave to tell their saga to we, the living,

the film being the medium for making their past presence felt and Ningiuq, the primary channeler

of communicative affect and intelligence.

Ningiug is the story-teller within the story, and the filming of Before Tomorrow is a

contemporary occasion for Ivalu’s reenactment of adaptive story-telling. The film does not

merely represent a critical moment of Inuit history; rather, it places actors and audiences on site

of a cosmic event whose “climate change,” in effect, continues to be lived out today and whose

story is constantly evolving. To create the animistic aura of traditional story telling, Arnait film-

makers had to reconstruct a stone-age world. Delays in funding from Nunavut forced production

to move to the more accommodating Nunavik, Quebec, specifically to a location near Puvinirtuq,

a small settlement on the northwest coast whose population supplied many of the film’s cast and

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crew but whose knowledge of nomadic traditions was mostly lost. As in the making of

Atanarjuat and The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, the making of Before Tomorrow engaged

people from the local community in the work of staging traditional knowledge. In the latter case

however, the Igloolik Inuit had to re-cultivate Puvinirtuq Inuit in the arts of designing and sewing

clothing out of caribou hides and seal skins, of building and paddling the seal-skin kayak and the

open-framed umiak, of constructing fish traps and fishing with the double-pronged kakivak, of

drawing and applying women’s facial tattoos, of carving meat with an ulu, of lighting the qulliq

and keeping it alight. The making of the film could not be achieved without this “field of

making” and the active re-cultivation of knowledge.

Having played a key role in reviving pre-contact culture behind the scenes, Ivalu was set

to perform Ningiuk’s story-telling before the camera with spirited realism. Her screen role begins

with her listening to stories that Kutuuk, the male Elder of the sea-faring family, tells, including

those of how his people’s women traded sex for the foreigners’ needles and knives. Ningiuk

worries, not in judgment of her female kin for indulging in promiscuous exchange–she and

Kutujuuk later laugh at the strangers’ sexual desperation–but rather, from not knowing how to

make sense of Kutuuk’s stories within a traditional frame. She finds no stories among her

repertoire of old stories–or unipkaaqtuat–to use for gaining insight into this matter, a matter, it

turns out, of ultimate concern, as it is the sexual transmission of European disease that destroys

Ningiuk’s family and that will plague the Inuit with pandemic illness. But if Ningiuk finds

Kutuuk’s stories to be alarmingly nonsensical, she also finds those narrative refrains that help to

sustain the two lone survivors through a dark and solitary winter.

The film itself does not begin with Kutuuk’s story telling. Rather it opens in media res on

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a mid-winter scene where Maniq asks Ningiuq for “another story.” The two seem very isolated

and exposed as they cross the tundra’s vast, snow-drifted, sun-glazed plains after a day’s hunting

and, as Ningiuq obliges Maniq, the scene shifts from the harsh outer world to the cave’s warm

interior where they are enveloped and illumined by the glow of Ningiuq’s qulliq. The story she

selects to tell features a raven and a girl, whose vigil over her own qulliq keeps the two alive in

the black belly of a whale until the raven neglectfully causes the flame to go out. With her story,

Ningiuq gently impresses upon Maniq their mortal imperative and shared responsibility to

safeguard the ikuma, their primary source of light, heat and solace [6: film clip 4:14-5:19].

Ningiuq’s large repertoire of stories and Maniq’s limitless desire to learn will, she assures

him, sustain their spirits as they course this lonesome earth. Whenever they settle into the cave’s

lamp-lit theater, she watches him for cues to proceed with a story. Attending to the flame as she

attends to Maniq, she transforms their rough dwelling into a communal and ceremonial qaggik

for story-telling and singing, as well as for recalling their shared memories of summer. Moving

between the recent past and the lore of antiquity, the film complicates and enriches the time they

spend in the present. When the present threatens to dampen their spirits with existential gloom,

Ningiuk shifts into story-mode. For instance, on seeing Maniq mime the hopping-movements of

a ptarmigan with a ptarmigan-shaped rock flake, she proceeds to perform the “ptarmigan story,”

an unipkaaqtuat that the Igloolik Inuit use for putting children to sleep or for playfully spooking

them. Ninquiq’s version features a grandmother and grandson as the transformed subjects of the

elder’s metamorphic story-telling. Ningiuk tells Maniq how the grandson, while listening to his

grandmother embark upon a story about baby lemmings, turns into a snow-bunting and flies out

the tent and how, after putting away her needles and extinguishing the lamp, the grandmother

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flies after him in the form of a ptarmigan. “It must have been alright as long as they were together

again,” Ningiuq reassures Maniq, as she foreshadows their own future flight from this earth.

Ningiuq adapts the stories she selects for Maniq, thereby highlighting the innovative

nature of traditional story-telling and the eternal contemporariness of the unipkaatuat. When

Maniq asks her to sing her favorite song to calm his panic at the thought of what in the future he

might discover about the people who hurt their family, she sings an ajaja song, a story sung with

ajaja refrains. As Keavy Martin explains, the “ajaja” refrain, meaning “it is only I who sings,”

underscores the isolation of the singer as the only elder left to remember such things. Ningiuk

begins her song-story by singing a customary trope–“Let me sing a song slowly . . . Let me find a

song to sing”–to invoke from communal memory a form of thinking that has the power to search

and see beyond the present. She then chants her adapted lines “Let me go traveling to that island

far away/ I will be happy when I see you coming/ Will you come when you hear my song” until,

comforted, Maniq falls asleep. Tending to her qullik as she sings, she composes her thoughts,

words and actions to create an atmosphere of hope within a climate of doom.

Ningiuk sings this song once again in the climactic last scene, a scene that plays out so

slowly, subtly and unheroically that inattentive viewers may miss its affective crux of visionary

wisdom. It begins with Maniq tending to Ningiuk after she has been seriously wounded by a wolf

attack on the ice. Back in the cave, he applies seal fat to her bitten flesh and to the qullik to keep

it aflame. Eventually, Ningiuk conjures forth all her strength to take over the work of care giving.

She calls his attention to how well they have survived so far and she praises his ready mastery of

many hunting skills, all the while reiterating her deep love for him. As he drifts off to sleep, she

invokes the spirit of her husband who replies that “no child can live alone!” amidst specters of

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Maniq facing the tundra without her. The remainder of the scene is drawn out at considerable

length to stress the agony with which Ningiuq resolutely proceeds to put away her needles, pull

back the skins that cover the boy and the mouth of the cave, extinguish the flame and open their

refuge-hearth to winter’s bone-chilling, gale-force winds.

But the film does not end here. In the final scene and a strange twist of time, Maniq and

Ningiuk reappear among their people with whom they resume the nomadic activities of summer.

Together they present a community of ghosts, victims of a fatal contact they never had the chance

to negotiate. But their traditions live on in film where they are reenacted for perpetuity, or as long

as the film survives. Before Tomorrow enacts Inuit time, not the temporality of modernity that

conceives the past as dead and gone, history as a mere archive of distanced and detached details

and dates, and the present as a hurling arrow singularly aimed at future progress. In contrast, the

Inuit forever adapt past traditions to the demands of contemporary life and the uncertainties of

possible futurities. By minimizing the moment of contact, the film does not bypass colonialism’s

devastating history so much as reduce it to a point of intensity–literally, to a needle’s point. “So

sharp!” Ivalu has Ningiuq exclaim with irony, for while she intuits the needles to be harbingers

of danger she recovers them from the remains of the dead and uses their steely strength to stitch

tough hides into clothing for the coming winter. She does not shy from this exchange which she

so presciently associates with disaster, nor does she concede it any power over her own culture.

Rather, she appropriates from it what she can to serve the life of her people.

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 References

Arnait Video Productions. Official Website. http://www.isuma.tv/en/arnaitvideo

—. Ikuma: carnet de tournage. 2008.

—. Interview with Jørn Riel.

http://www.isuma.tv/en/arnaitvideo/interview-jorn-riel-author-morgendagen-tomorrow

Bennett, John and Susan Rowley. Eds. Uqalurait: An Oral History of Nunavut. Montreal and

Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004.

Cousineau, Marie-Hélène and Madeleine Ivalu. Dir. Before Tomorrow. [Film] 2009.

Elder, Beth. “Aboriginal Self-Government in Nunavut.” Sovereignty and Intervention: Public

Policy & Government Review 3.2 (Spring 2012): 21-33.

Evans, Michael Robert. Isuma: Inuit Video Art. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s

University Press, 2008.

Isuma Productions website. http://www.isuma.tv/en/isuma-productions

Jansen, Sylvie. “The Archive and Reenactment: Performing Knowledge in the Making of The

Journals of Knud Rasmussen.” The Velvet Light Trap 71 (Spring 2013): 3-14.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1993.

Leduc, Timothy B. Climate, Culture, Change: Inuit and Western Dialogues with a Warming

North. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2010.

Martin, Keavy. Stories in a New Skin: Approaches to Inuit Literature. Winnipeg: University of

Manitoba Press, 2012.

Riel, Jørn. Før Morgendagen. 1975. Rpt. Lindhardt og Ringhof, 2001.

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To Screen from on-line web sites (call up both AVP and IIP websites simultaneously):

[1] Arnait Video Productions – Home

[2] Arnait Video Productions – About

[3] Isuma Productions – Home

[4] Isuma Productions – More About Isuma

[5] Arnait Video Productions – Projects: Feature / Medium / Short – scroll down and up!

[6] Before Tomorrow – Film clip (4:14-5:19)

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