Ijitsoq Akesuk

Ijitsoq Akesuk is Leon Anawak’s uncle, guide, and link to a family and community history that Anawak has long experienced through anger and distance. By bringing Anawak to Pond Inlet, he does more than return him to the place of his childhood: he creates the conditions for a difficult family history to be spoken aloud and offers a cultural framework for confronting the intelligence suspected in the sea. His authority comes from lived experience, practical knowledge of the land, and a willingness to listen rather than from any claim that the past can be restored unchanged.

Identity and Return to Pond Inlet

Pond Inlet is close in size to Cape Dorset but distinct in its traditions. The region had been settled for more than four thousand years, and Ijitsoq Akesuk explains that tradition remains especially important there. He notes cautiously that some people practise shamanism while also being Christians. The detail establishes him as a guide to a place whose culture cannot be reduced to a single belief or a simple contrast between tradition and modernity.

When Leon Anawak arrives, he has lost his sense of time. Seeing the scenes of his childhood, he feels a weight lift from his chest; the narration makes Ijitsoq Akesuk’s achievement explicit: he has brought his nephew home. That return is emotionally consequential because Anawak has spent much of his life estranged from his family and people. Ijitsoq Akesuk cannot undo that history, but he gives Anawak a place from which to face it.

The next morning, Ijitsoq Akesuk takes Anawak down to the shore, assesses the weather, and expects that the hunt can go ahead. Before the expedition, he and the guides check the equipment, including sleeping bags and caribou pelts. These practical preparations make his knowledge concrete: the return is not only a conversation about identity but an entry into life on the land, where cold, clothing, supplies, and weather govern what people can do.

Kinship and Family History

During the expedition, Ijitsoq Akesuk’s pleasure in moving among the sleds contrasts with Anawak’s recollection of his father. Anawak observes that his uncle is nothing like the man who raised him. The contrast matters because Ijitsoq Akesuk is not presented as a replacement father; he is a relative through whom Anawak can begin to understand both the family rupture and the circumstances surrounding it.

Anawak recounts the damage he associates with his childhood: his father’s drinking, his mother’s death by suicide, and the broader despair and substance abuse he saw among Inuit families. He explains that, as a child, he could not separate his father’s failure from the condition of his people. Ijitsoq Akesuk listens and recognizes that Anawak’s father had not remained himself. When Anawak returns to the pain of being given up for adoption, the conversation makes clear that knowing the historical causes does not erase the personal injury.

Ijitsoq Akesuk also places the family story within the community’s displacement and political struggle. He says that he was a young man when the Inuit were driven from their way of life, and that he campaigned for compensation. The struggle for rights continued through the courts for thirty years; Anawak’s father campaigned alongside him, but the effort broke his spirit. Since 1999, Nunavut has had its own state, yet political self-government has not restored the older way of life. Ijitsoq Akesuk holds both facts together: the achievement of Inuit governance and the irreversible loss of a former social and cultural order.

Cultural Change and the Land

His account of change is neither a demand to return to the past nor a claim that adaptation has made the losses insignificant. Ijitsoq Akesuk describes a people once organized around family, moving freely as nomads, and unfamiliar with the modern concept of property. Now Inuit govern through a civil state, while industrial modernity alters daily life. Traditions are being revived—young people learn to build igloos and make fire with flints, and dog sleds are used again—but he does not mistake these practices for a reversal of history.

He also describes a new form of wandering: contemporary Inuit can travel through networks of information, connecting across the world. This image links continuity to change rather than treating them as opposites. The old freedom of movement has been limited by territory and political history, while new forms of connection create different ways to range beyond it. His response is measured: he does not present himself as satisfied with every consequence, but neither does he reduce the present to a reason for self-pity.

The expedition gives this outlook a practical counterpart. Ijitsoq Akesuk explains that survival on the land requires understanding oneself as part of a living world manifested in animals, plants, ice, and people. The group’s preparations and dependence on weather make that view operational, not merely philosophical. For Anawak, who is preoccupied with an unknown force in the sea, his uncle’s perspective offers a way to think beyond the human separation of observer and environment.

Counsel About the Beings in the Sea

Anawak eventually tells Ijitsoq Akesuk what the team has learned at Chateau Whistler about intelligent beings in the sea, despite knowing that he is breaking Judith Li’s instructions. His decision to speak is itself part of the relationship: he has been silent for much of his life, and he trusts his uncle as the family he still has. Ijitsoq Akesuk listens before offering advice, making the exchange a response to Anawak’s disclosure rather than an abstract pronouncement.

He does not claim that he personally believes in shamans. Instead, he asks whether Anawak wants to hear what a shaman might say, then presents a spiritual interpretation in which the creatures of Earth carry the spirits of the once-living. In that account, the qalhinaat have damaged life and angered the spirits, including Sedna, the spirit of the sea. The explanation does not identify the beings in scientific terms or resolve what they are; its force lies in changing the proposed response. Whatever the beings may be, Ijitsoq Akesuk warns, fighting them will achieve nothing.

That counsel brings together the strands of his role. He has helped Anawak return to family, made the costs of cultural rupture legible, and introduced a view of nature in which human beings are participants rather than masters. His answer does not offer an easy reconciliation between scientific investigation and spiritual understanding. Instead, it places a limit on the assumption that knowledge must lead to conquest, and leaves Anawak with a different possibility: approaching the crisis through attention to relationship, history, and the living world.