Samantha Saksagiak
In loving memory of Anthony Saksagiak, who was a father to two beautiful children, a brother, son, grandchild, uncle, friend and the most humble human-being.
A girl grew up her whole life in her small Inuit community of 1200 people in Nain, Nunatsiavut, the Canadian North. She spent her years learning how to hunt animals, how to fish, whether or not the sea ice was safe to travel on and learning the history and stories of her people. This girl spent many days out on the cold, rigid, beautiful and barren land where her parents would show her their ways of life. The smell of the fresh ground and salty ocean, the crunch of the snow beneath her feet, the sting of the blizzard winds on her cheeks and the taste of fresh arctic char fried with butter. Life for her was simple, she was connected, she was surviving and she had more than enough. Her culture lived through her, and she would sing the woman’s throat song, wear her traditional clothing and beat the drum to the beat of her heart. A strong inuk woman.
This little innocent Inuk girl was blind to reality. As she grew, she would realize the horrors and trauma her people had gone through, and what went through them, would go through her too. Her grandparents on both sides had gone to residential school, where it was forbidden to speak in their Inuktitut language, where you could not wear your traditional clothing, where being Inuk was shameful and the color of brown skin was dirty. Many children got sick, died, were traumatized, broken and beaten. For generations, you would see how all of this physical, emotional, spiritual and psychological abuse would trickle through and affect this innocent little girl. How could a parent know how to nurture a child, when that parent as a child was greeted with heated angry screams and a slap to the wrist with a ruler?
This innocent little girl is me, Samantha Saksagiak. I am now 18 years old. I did not live an easy life. I have seen with my own eyes how white superiority affected me, my family and community. I remember seeing my older brother cry many times, because his friends had died from suicide. The white man’s government system made sure we would still struggle, and still, the white man holds so much power. You can tell by the way my peers don’t speak our native tongue, by the english school system, the neverending alcoholism in my community and the high suicide rate. Two years ago, I lost my dearest brother to drug addiction, the hardest loss in my life. If my brother taught me anything, he taught me how to be humble. “Tomorrow could be the best day of your life”, are words he used to say that I now live by everyday.
Samantha and her brother Anthony, hunting and learning together on the land.
Still to this day, the white man continues to be a strong force. The system is still set up to help the white man prosper, and for my Inuit to feel like a powerless minority. I was smart enough to realize that the struggles in my community are normalized, it is normal for a 15 year old to drink and smoke, it is normal to not have a hospital and it is normal to lose friends to suicide and diseases that there are cures for in this day and age. We are fighting the system, fighting to survive.
I knew I had to escape that environment, for my people need help, I need help. I moved
away from my community at the age of 18, being awarded three scholarships and going to university, something no one in my family has ever done before. My mother never finished high school and my father had to stay back and help with the children. It was up to me to reach out and make decisions for myself. I want to be a lawyer, to help my people, people who cannot help themselves.
Here I am now, in Gambia, as an intern in international development. It is my first time leaving Canada, and I am surrounded by black people. “Toubab” they call me here, which translates to “white person”. I am a white person here, but instead, it is valuable to have light skin, to come from a rich country. It infuriates me, for me and the black community went through the same traumas, struggles, the same colonization and hurt. We are still undoing the damage from the white man, but here I am as a toubab. Toubabs here are treated with utmost respect, importance and humbleness. It is a privilege to be a toubab here. I have never known what privilege feels like, for I have been seen as a minority, a dirty eskimo in Canada my whole life.
The browns, blacks and whites all have a beating heart, emotions and the same color blood. Why are we in a system that makes one color more or less than another? We are all human, can’t we just be a beautiful rainbow in unison?