“What ceremony would you like to perform to open the exhibition?”

Inuit have created a modern ceremony that suits Western institutional special occasions and honours Inuit elders: lighting a qulliq—a traditional oil lamp, usually made from soapstone, filled with oil and lit with a long horizontal wick made from the cotton of tundra plants. The practice is soothing and teaches people about the traditional hearth of Inuit households, our source of light and warmth. That’s probably what the gallery representatives were thinking of when they asked the question—or prayers or smudging, along the lines of the practices of other Indigenous cultures.

“We would like to butcher a full seal in Walker Court,” I said. I leaned back from the boardroom table at the Art Gallery of Ontario and made eye contact with my fellow Inuit co-curators, Taqralik Partridge, Jocelyn Piirainen, and Kuzy Curley. We all nodded, and the others affirmed, “Yes, we would like to butcher a seal.”

The four of us had been brought together to create Tunirrusiangit, a retrospective exhibition in 2018 of Kenojuak Ashevak’s and Tim Pitsiulak’s work. It was the biggest Inuit art exhibition the AGO had ever hosted. We wanted everything to be grand, to be a gift, in order to honour these extraordinary artists.

I did not want to hear the details of how impossible all the rules and regulations of the gallery, the City of Toronto, and public health would make it; I am well acquainted with how white institutions abhor non-industrial food practices and, by default, Inuit food systems. Throughout my life, I have watched white people in particular show their distaste for the look, smell, and taste of inussiutit—Inuit cultural food. In the months after I made the suggestion, I know that AGO staff would have liked to have shared all the details of the bureaucratic hurdles with me, but I maintained that it was not my burden to carry, so for me, all I had to do was sharpen my ulu.

Cutting up a seal is simultaneously an elevated and a mundane activity, performed on the shores all around the Arctic every day. It is a spiritual act that connects us viscerally to our ancestors, our environment, and to the animal itself. It is also as normal as picking up milk and eggs at the grocery store. Eating inussiutit that we harvested ourselves gives us great joy, satisfaction, health, groundedness, and self-determination; it is a combination of kinetic and tactile movement, spiritual accordance, and political assertiveness. Serving a full seal on the floor of Toronto’s largest downtown art gallery would concurrently be a celebration of Inuit culture and an act of rebellion against the structural barriers that stigmatize our use of meat.

In........

© The Walrus