People & Culture
Notre Pays : Pujjuut Kusugak
Une cabane près de Rankin Inlet, au Nunavut, est un lieu de paix – et de réunions familiales
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People & Culture
Our Country: Pujjuut Kusugak
The Inuktitut-language commentator talks about his cabin near Rankin Inlet, NU., a place of peace and family gatherings
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My cabin is right along the coast, within an inlet across from my community of Rankin Inlet, Nunavut. The exact area is called I&uuqtuuq, which means “a place of lake trout.” It’s about 25 minutes away by boat in the summer or 90 minutes by ATV if it’s too windy to travel on the water. In the springtime, when we go by snowmobile, it’s maybe 45 minutes.
The smell coming off the land is always amazing. In springtime, it’s a rejuvenating smell — all the birds are coming back, the water is flowing. And there are times in the summer that you get the smell of the sea salt. Depending on the tides, we might go mussel picking or set char fish nets right in front of our cabin. Sometimes seals pop up right in front of our cabin so we might try to catch it. We also go egg picking. Snow geese, Canada geese, gulls. There are eider duck eggs.
Char fishing happens in late summer and early fall. That’s when the char start to head back upriver, so they’re swimming along the coast.
Being out on the land is relaxing. So we’re doing fishing, egg picking and berry picking. Goose hunting, caribou hunting. All of these activities are really not work. That’s our time off. That’s free time. It’s something that we really enjoy doing as a family. And in the late spring, it’s caribou-meat drying season. We have meat drying racks over at the cabin that my grandfather built probably 30 years ago, and they’re still standing.
My father built the cabin about 37 years ago and we were the first cabin in the area for our family — my parents and me and my three sisters. Then my grandparents built a cabin there, and later on my aunt and uncle built one, then another aunt and uncle built one, and then I built one. And my cousin and sister-in-law built one. Right now we have five cabins within that small area. My nephew even calls it the village!
The word we use to capture the feeling of this place is kajjaarnaq. I think the closest word to capture the feeling in English is “serene”. It’s peaceful. It’s beautiful. Kajjaarnaq has so many meanings that you put together in English but in Inuktitut it’s just one word that has all these feelings.
Starting in late April, if it’s a nice weekend, we know everybody else is going to be there. We start with day trips and then, a few weeks later, when it’s a bit warmer, we’re able to sleep at our cabins. We don’t use the cabin in the winter because it gets too cold, but we’ll go out on our snowmobiles just to check all the cabins, make sure they’re okay and there’s no snow getting inside. We might go around there to see if there’s caribou around there to go caribou hunting.
As I talk about the cabin for this story, I’m really itching to get to it. The weather has been uncooperative — rainy and foggy. It gets tough to stay in town knowing that we could be spending it at the cabin instead.
I grew up at the cabin and spent whole summers there at times. So it’s really a place of peace for me. For many of us within the family, it’s our happy place. It’s where we’re able to get away and just focus on us as a family; where we’re able to teach our traditions to our children. It helps with our language. It really helps us pass on our culture to help strengthen and preserve it, not just for us but for our children.
My kids love the cabin as well. They are away at school, but we go up there every chance we get. At the cabin we were teaching them how to be safe out on the land. It’s so important to make sure they recognize how to be safe on the land and also the responsibilities we have out on the land. There are chores we have to do, but we do them as a family and everybody has their different responsibilities. A lot of values are being shared. But, like I said, the main thing is that it’s a very much a happy place for us, where we’re also teaching our family values and language and culture. The cabin is where we focus on ourselves as a family. It’s just a healing piece. It’s amazing for our well-being.
When April comes around, till we can’t go there anymore, we live for the weekends. If you ask anybody that lives here, if you have a cabin or camping area, you just want to spend all your free time there.
Not too many people know, but my dad is buried at our cabin. He passed away January of 2011. And his plan was always to live out there if he was able to retire. His dream was always to have all his children and grandchildren there all the time. We’re trying to pass that dream on to our children as well. To love it there, to respect it, but also to really to enjoy it and share it.
I’ve taken friends and coworkers to my cabin and once they get there, they always say, “Okay, now, I understand why you keep talking about this place and why you spend all your free time here at your cabin.”
Pujjuut Kusugak provided Inuktitut-language colour commentary and analysis of basketball at the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics. He has previously covered hockey at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, the 2022 Beijing Olympics, and the 2023 Arctic Winter Games in northern Alberta.
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