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Yahoo
29-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Elisapie's Juno-nominated album: Promoting Inuktitut through music
Singer Elisapie's fourth album, Inuktitut, has been nominated for album of the year at the 2025 Juno Awards being held this weekend in Vancouver. The album features covers of 10 pop and classic rock songs, including the Rolling Stones's 'Wild Horses' and Metallica's 'The Unforgiven,' re-imagined in Inuktitut. Inuktitut is the first language of 33,790 Inuit in Canada, according to the 2021 Census. Elisapie's nomination offers a good opportunity to reflect on the situation of Inuktitut and how creative work, including music, helps promote it. Our work touches on the inter-generational transmission of Inuktitut. We share perspectives as a Qallunaaq (non-Inuk) linguist (Richard) and as an Inuk school teacher (Sarah) in Nunavik, with Sarah's personal experiences in the community highlighted. Together, we have co-taught courses for Inuit teachers in Puvirnituq and Ivujivik. We are also both affiliated with a research group focused on Indigenous education based at Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue. Sarah notes that: I was amazed that [Elsipasie] could make the long words in Inuktitut fit with the rhythm of the music; she did it so precisely. It took me back to the 1980s, when I was growing up. It would have been nice if songs like these had been interpreted back then. It's been a long time coming, but it shows that nothing is impossible. The songs sound so natural in Inuktitut. On the day we talked about this story, Sarah remembered: I was at the Snow Festival yesterday [in Puvirnituq], and some of the teenagers knew all the words to her songs and were singing along. We didn't have that when I was growing up. She remembers first seeing Elisapie sing in the early 1990s at one of the first snow festivals in Puvirnituq. Elisapie's album has also sparked interest outside of Canada, with stories in such venues as Rolling Stone, Vogue and Le Monde. Beyond how Elisapie beautifully interprets the songs, creative choices like using throat singing on the first track, 'Isumagijunnaitaungituq (The Unforgiven),' and stunning music videos showcasing life in the North brings the language to a wider audience. The album's cover art features the word Inuktitut, ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ, in syllabics — a writing system originally use for Cree and adapted to Inuktitut, where the individual symbols represent consonants and the way they point represents vowels. The word Inuktitut itself means 'like the Inuit,' and is the name for part of a wider language continuum spoken across the North American Arctic. This language continuum includes Iñupiaq in Alaska, Uummarmiutun, Sallirmiutun and Inuinnaqtun in the Western Canadian Arctic, Inuktitut in the Eastern Arctic, Inuttut in Labrador and Kalaallisut in Greenland. This abundance of names reflects a diversity of varieties, each with their own pronunciations and differences in grammar and vocabulary stretching across Inuit Nunangat, the Inuit homeland. Speakers in each community look to their Elders as models of how the language should be spoken. While this multiplicity of dialects poses challenges for translation and creating teaching materials, each variety marks local identity and links generations. This diversity also fascinates linguists, as each variety attests to a different way of organizing the unconscious rules of grammar in the human mind. For instance, Inuktitut has a rich system of tense markers on verbs, signalling events that just happened, happened earlier today, before today or long ago. Inuinnaqtun, to the west, lacks most of these tense markers, but instead allows more complex combinations of sounds. Sarah stresses the importance of Elisapie's music for the language: It's so impressive that people like Elisapie are doing such amazing things with the language. She grew up around the same time as me and when I was in school there were so few teaching materials in Inuktitut, and we focused more on speaking than reading and writing. Even if her main goal might not have been to promote the language, she's doing it, because kids listen to her. More teenagers are willing to sing in Inuktitut now because they have role models like her and Beatrice Deer. Deer is an Inuk and Mohawk musician from Quaqtaq, Nunavik, who also sings in Inuktitut, as well as English and French. In Canada, all levels of government have failed to provide adequate access to education in Indigenous languages, even in regions where Indigenous Peoples form the majority. In Nunavik, where Elisapie is from, 90 per cent of the population (12,590 out of 14,050) identifies as Inuit and 87 per cent (12,245 out of 14,050) report Inuktitut as their first language. And yet Inuktitut is only the primary language of instruction up until Grade 3. About promoting Inuktitut, Sarah says: We're lucky that in most of the villages in Nunavik, the language is still strong. But it's still concerning that some people have started speaking in English to their kids. What we really need to promote it is to have school in Inuktitut from kindergarten to the end of high school [secondary 5 in Québec]. That's why a group of Inuit teachers, including me, visited Greenland to learn more about their education system. They've had schools in their language for almost 200 years. We just started in the '50s. While bilingualism may bring economic benefits, the lack of support for Indigenous languages often results in a situation where bilingualism robs children of the chance to fully develop in their first language. In addition to violating Indigenous Peoples' inherent right to get an education in their language (see the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples), current education policies also go against recommendations of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). UNESCO recommends that Indigenous minority languages be taught as the primary language in school for the first six to eight years, as this has been shown to contribute to children's well-being and self-esteem. Unfortunately, Canada's official language laws continue to place the two colonial languages of English and French above Indigenous languages, particularly in education funding. Read more: New challenges have also emerged for maintaining and extending the domains in which Inuktitut is used. Once cut off from high-speed internet, new satellite technology has brought access to more Inuit communities, along with new economic opportunities. However, this connectivity also brings an avalanche of English content, from viral videos and streaming platforms to social networks and mobile games. It is in this changing linguistic and media landscape where Inuktitut language and cultural production, like Elisapie's album, are vital for promoting Inuktitut. Children and teenagers need content that speaks to them — things they see as new, fun, cool and representing their generation. This includes music, comic books, novels, video games and even Hockey Night in Canada in Inuktitut. So whether Elisapie's music is being played in community radio stations, featured in an episode of CBC's North of North or streamed as a music video on social media, it serves the added role of taking up a little more space for Inuktitut in people's daily lives. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organisation bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Richard Compton, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and Sarah Angiyou, Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue (UQAT) Read more: Canada should provide Indigenous languages with constitutional protection Ancestral languages are essential to Indigenous identities in Canada Indigenous Fashion Week Toronto designers are showcasing resistance and resurgence Richard Compton receives funding in the form of research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Transmission and Knowledge of the Inuit Language. Sarah Angiyou does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
New York Times
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
An Unforgettable Style Paragon in Voice, Outlook and Image
She was a figure out of fiction, right down to her Jane Austen name. The daughter of a baroness and a British major (a spy during World War II), Marianne Faithfull — who died this week at 78 — was discovered by the Rolling Stones' manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, at a record release party in the 1960s while still in her teens. 'My first move was to get a Rolling Stone as a boyfriend,' she was often quoted as having said. 'I slept with three and decided the lead singer was the best bet.' The bet paid off for both parties. Mick Jagger and Ms. Faithfull dated from 1966-70 and during that time she recorded a series of pop songs, most memorably 'As Tears Go By.' Mr. Jagger wrote imperishable Stones hits like 'Wild Horses' under the direct inspiration of Ms. Faithfull — lovely, feckless, druggie and unfettered. She was 'a wonderful friend,' Mr. Jagger wrote on Instagram this week, 'a beautiful singer and a great actress.' She was also a style paragon from the outset. 'She seemed to touch all the moments, from Mod to rich hippie to bad girl and punk, corsets to leather to the nun outfit she wore when she performed with Bowie,' the designer Anna Sui said this week by phone. 'She was there, through all those periods — performing, participating in events, acting and singing and also in the tabloids, very much in the eyes of anybody loving those periods.' A British journalist once described Ms. Faithfull, in the late 1960s, as 'the flowing-haired, miniskirted, convention-knocking epitome' of a 'drug generation' that her elders were challenged to understand. What more accurately she epitomized was a spirit of bohemian laissez-faire better located in class than any particular era. Cultured, if not conventionally educated, Ms. Faithfull was as offhand about her looks as only a natural beauty could afford to be. And she was as indifferent to the straight-jacketing conventions of the bourgeoisie as those of her background (she spent her early years in an upscale commune her father founded in Oxfordshire) often are. Ms. Faithfull was still a young girl when her parents divorced. Her mother — a descendant of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the author of 'Venus in Furs,' that ur-text of masochism — took her to live 40 miles outside London in Reading. There she opened the Carillon, a tea shop, and sent her daughter to the local Catholic boarding school. It can seem hard to square the louche image of what the English daily The Independent once referred to as 'rock's primary horizontale' with that of a young Marianne Faithfull traipsing to St. Joseph's Catholic School in the uniform of a brown cape and a brown-and-yellow felt hat. She did, in fact, become someone whose sexual antics (along with two-thirds of the Stones, she also had liaisons with Jimi Hendrix, Chris Blackwell and both David and Angela Bowie) and descent into heroin addiction were well chronicled. Yet the hard-living Ms. Faithfull retained throughout a degree of propriety and even hauteur, an aura of willful disregard usually associated with the English upper classes. Certainly few female performers in music history have cycled through as many personas as Ms. Faithfull did, from the kittenish Mod dolly of her early career to a prim fashion plate and then an avatar of tailored ambisexual chic. She portrayed herself as a corseted diva in kink drag, a punk apparition with a Vaseline quiff, even the nun in robes and wimple, Ms. Sui cited. 'Actually, nothing says Marianne Faithfull to me like 'The Girl on a Motorcycle,'' the filmmaker Amos Poe wrote in a text message to this reporter. He was specifically referring to a poster image from the director Jack Cardiff's erotic drama of 1968, in which Ms. Faithfull starred alongside Alain Delon. On the poster, she bestrides a Harley-Davidson clad in full biker leathers, a vision of sulky sexuality. 'For years, it was the poster on my wall,' Mr. Poe wrote, 'and the image in my mind of pure pop.' Transiting a life of astonishing highs and gutter lows, Ms. Faithfull never lost an innate rock-chick brio forged in the Swinging Sixties, shared by few (Keith Richards's ex-wife, the Italian-German actress Anita Pallenberg, is a notable example) and admired by countless designers, actors, models and directors. Somehow, she managed to make even dishevelment look chic. 'I'll never forget her telling me, after my daughter was born, that I'd have to quit being a perfectionist,' the director Sofia Coppola said. Glancing at images from the recent men's wear runway shows in Europe, it is easy to detect how durable Ms. Faithfull's influence remains. Kate Moss teetering across the cobblestones of Paris en route to the Dior Men show in a scanty slip dress and what looked to be a vintage monkey fur jacket was pure Faithfull. In fact, Ms. Moss so closely modeled her style over the years that Ms. Faithfull was eventually moved to denounce her onetime pal as a style 'vampire.' No matter. In the end, Marianne Faithfull was inimitable in voice, outlook and image. 'I've been listening to her remarkable 2018 album, 'Negative Capability,' and marveling again at her passage from innocent schoolgirl thrush, via rock stars and heroin, to her reinvention as a radically honest, scar-voiced chanteuse,' the author Lucy Sante wrote to this reporter in a private Instagram message. Much like a character from one of the Kurt Weill songs Ms. Faithfull covered — in a graveled rasp that attested to every cigarette, injection and drink she had ever consumed — Ms. Faithfull was never less than compelling to observe. She commanded attention through the simplest of means, as Ms. Sante noted, 'by laying all her cards on the table.'
