Interview: Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq
What is throat singing? It is the question Tanya Tagaq, probably the world's most famous Inuk throat singer, is tired of being asked.
A Google search might teach you throat singing in six steps (curl that tongue!), but if you watch one of Tagaq's hauntingly powerful performances you realise there's no simple answer to the question that has plagued her throughout her career.
"It is travelling into the sound. It is really focusing on that one sense and almost broadening horizons that way. It's kind of ... you're opening. Almost like feeling around for what's happening and responding," Tagaq says of how it feels when she performs. Her shows, which she will take to experimental arts festival Dark Mofo in Tasmania this month, are always improvised.
"I will hear something and it becomes an idea in my mind or a feeling or a concept and it comes out of my mouth almost involuntarily."
Tagaq was born in Cambridge Bay, a remote community of about 1500 people, in what is now called Nunavut in far northern Canada. Her mother was Inuk, her father of Polish and English heritage, and Tagaq was schooled in Canada's residential system, which was designed to brutally assimilate indigenous people into Euro-Canadian culture (the last school closed in 1996).
It was while Tagaq was studying visual arts at university in Nova Scotia that she started familiarising herself with throat singing after her mother sent her cassette tapes of recordings. Throat singing has an ancient history in Innuit cultures, and was traditionally a friendly competition between women to occupy time while the men were hunting.
"I would listen to throat singing while I was doing art work and started messing around with it. Every one sings in the shower. I would just do it in the shower or walking down the street. It was never an idea that it was going to be a career," Tagaq, 43, says.
So she returned to her home town to teach, but started performing on the side, attracting the attention of Icelandic superstar Bjork. Tagaq joined Bjork's tour – it was the first time she had left Canada – and featured on her 2004 album Medulla.
Ten years later Tagaq became the first indigenous person to win the prestigious $30,000 Polaris Prize for best Canadian Album for her third album Animism in 2014, ahead of Drake, Owen Pallett and Arcade Fire. In her fierce acceptance speech, Tagaq urged people to "wear and eat seal as much as possible".
"Because if you imagine an indigenous culture thriving and surviving on a sustainable resource, wearing seal and eating it … It's delicious and there's lots of them. And f--- PETA," she finished in reference to the lobby group People for Ethical Treatment of Animals, which has campaigned against seal hunting in Canada.
The same year Tagaq posted a "sealfie" of her baby daughter next to a dead seal, which widespread attention and generated a torrent of vile abuse, with one troll Photoshopping an image of Tagaq's baby being clubbed.
But Tagaq has maintained her strong stance on the seal hunt; the subject ignites her passion. She decries the "hypocrisy" of "vegans in California", saying that seal hunting is a sustainable way for Innuit people to earn money and feed their families. As a substitute teacher, Tagaq says she meets children whose families can not afford to buy the expensive groceries that are freighted into the remote community.
Being against the seal hunt is very immoral in my eyes
"It makes me really sad. It really hurts my heart to think of people who don't have enough food. Seals are not endangered and that's our renewable natural resource. There isn't enough of a population that even if we all went and harvested as many as we could it still wouldn't dent the seal population," she says.
"We are a small group of people who are in dire need and who technically are in a socioeconomic crisis. So, really, being against the seal hunt is very immoral in my eyes. I understand, though I don't blame people, because there is so much misinformation and propaganda that has been spread."
Tagaq prioritises returning to Nunavut with her daughter, 14, and son, 6, at least once or twice a year, and they stay a month so the children have a chance to learn their culture and be part of the wider family.
"I like how isolated it is and how the land owns the people not the other way around, because it is just tiny communities, with no roads. You can't drive to these communities. They are placed very far away from each other so it is just the land and I love that."
Retribution, Tagaq's latest album, continues to push musical boundaries and covers themes including the destruction of the environment, violence against women and the erasure of indigenous culture. The final track is a cover of Nirvana's Rape Me. The ancient tradition of throat singing is given rap, electronic, folk and rock twists.
It is a sound which, like the definition of throat singing, is hard to pin down. While her music has now received popular and critical success, Tagaq said she never feels pressure to change her unique sound.
"There were so many years when sometimes there would be three people at the shows and everyone was telling me not to be so strange, saying I would never get anywhere with music. It was the same then as it is now. The music is whatever it wants to be," she says.
"I never really felt like I fitted in anyway and maybe I still feel like that but maybe that is just my own self. It's all right. It's all right to be whatever we're supposed to be. All my ancestors didn't survive just for me to be ashamed of who I am."
Tanya Tagaq will perform at Dark Mofo, Hobart, on June 8, 9 and 14.