Conversations: Challenges to Inuit Art Sovereignty

Writer, throat-singer and curator Taqralik Partridge was born in 1975 in Montréal, to an Inuk father and a Scottish mother. She has fond childhood memories of living in Arctic villages and has made Kuujjuaq her home. Taqralik returned to Montréal to study and to work for the Avataq Cultural Institute, as its director of communications in the 2000s until launching full-time into an artistic career.

Taqralik’s performance art focuses on poetry describing Inuit life experiences in northern and southern Québec. She is a spoken word poet, performing live and incorporating throat-singing into her performances and YouTube recordings. In 2008, she co founded Montréal’s Tusarniq, a festival of words, music and images showcasing indigenous artists. Taqralik was a featured artist onstage at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia and narrator for the 2015 audiobook edition of Minnie Aodla Freeman’s Life Among the Qallunaat (1978).

Taqralik Partridge’s writing has appeared in Inuktitut, Makivik Magazine, Makivik News, Inuit Art Quarterly and Maisonneuve, where her short story Igloolik won first prize in the 2010 Quebec Writing Competition. In 2014, she was invited to be guest editor of Canada’s prestigious literary magazine Arc Poetry Magazine. A former member of the Inuit Art Quarterly’s editorial advisory council, she was selected Editor-at-Large in 2019, the first Inuk to be hired in this position. In 2020, her collection of poetry curved against the hull of a peterhead was launched at the ArtsEverywhere festival in Guelph, Ontario.

Another Inuk first was Taqralik’s co-curation of an Inuit artists’ exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in 2018 called Tunirrusiangit, meaning “the gifts they gave us.” Her visual art was part of the 2019 exhibition, Among All These Tundras at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University, Montréal. In 2020 she was selected to be part of the Sydney Biennale (Australia) and curated Qautamaat | Every day / everyday, a photography exhibition at the Art Gallery of Guelph. Taqralik became the first director of the new cultural center Nordic Lab, which opened in 2021 at the SAW Centre, an artist-run centre focusing on performance and media arts based in Ottawa. Nordic Lab, founded in partnership with the Canada Council for the Arts, promotes collaboration and exchange between Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists.

Sven Haakanson is a leader in the documentation, preservation, and revival of Indigenous cultures, including his own Alaska Native Sugpiaq traditions. He is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (2007), the Museums Alaska Award for Excellence (2008), the ATALM Guardians of Culture and Lifeways Leadership Award (2012), and his work on the Angyaaq led it to be inducted into the Alaska Innovators Hall of Fame (2020). He was Executive Director of the Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological Repository (2000-2013 Kodiak, AK), and joined the University of Washington as an associate professor of Anthropology and curator of Native American collections at the Burke Museum in 2013. He played a central role in the design of the new Burke "Culture is Living" Gallery (2016-19). Dr. Haakanson engages communities in cultural revitalization using material reconstruction as a form of scholarship and teaching. His projects have included the reconstruction of full-sized angyaaq boats from archaeological models, as well as halibut hooks, masks, paddles, and traditional processing of bear gut into waterproof material for clothing. He continues to collaborate with the community of Akhiok at their Akhiok Kids camp since 2000. Through such hands-on collaborations Dr. Haakanson brings traditions alive and engages students through active learning methods. Dr. Haakanson serves as a board member of the First Alaskan Institute (since 2006), the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (from 2009-2020, Chair 2016-20), and Koniag Inc. (since 2015). He is also an accomplished carver and photographer.

Artist / Doctoral candidate, Cultural Studies, Queen's University / Artist mentor, MFA in Studio Arts, Institute of American Indian Arts

Tanya Lukin Linklater’s performances, works for camera, installations, and writings centre histories of Indigenous peoples’ lives, lands, and structures of sustenance. Her performances in relation to objects in exhibition, scores, and ancestral belongings generate what she has come to call felt structures. She investigates insistence in both concept and application. Tanya has shown at SFMOMA, Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019, EFA Project Space + Performa, Art Gallery of Ontario, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Remai Modern, Winnipeg Art Gallery, and elsewhere. She will participate in Soft Water Hard Stone, the 2021 New Museum Triennial. Her collection of poetry, Slow Scrape, was published by The Centre for Expanded Poetics and Anteism in 2020 with a second printing in 2021. Tanya studied at University of Alberta (M.Ed.) and Stanford University (A.B. Honours). In 2021 Tanya received the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Visual Art and was long listed for the Sobey Art Award. She is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen's University with supervision by Dylan Robinson. Her Alutiiq homelands are in southwestern Alaska where much of her family continues to live. She is a member of the Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions in the Kodiak archipelago.