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OTTAWA – As somewhat woman within the early ‘80s, Lucy Tulugarjuk mentioned she would spend most of her time enjoying outdoors as a substitute of in entrance of a display screen.

Her household and associates in Igloolik, Nvt., didn’t personal televisions, she mentioned, with most households selecting to maintain tv out as a technique to shield Inuit tradition.

However she recalled that when she was 5 years previous, she heard individuals within the close by neighborhood of Corridor Seashore had been watching TV, and the medium piqued her curiosity.

“It was attention-grabbing to see what TV needed to carry. And we heard that it was simply in English and French, no Inuktitut,” Tulugarjuk mentioned.

“On the time, I didn’t perceive why.”

Now, Tulugarjuk is the chief director of an unbiased broadcaster whose mission is to carry Inuit language and tradition to the small display screen not simply in Nunavut, however throughout the nation.

Preserving Inuit storytelling has turn out to be basic, she mentioned, since she described witnessing an erosion of tradition when native youngsters watched TV in English and French: “It did influence our youngsters.”

In 2021, Tulugarjuk’s Nunavut Impartial Tv Community launched Uvagut TV, which means “our TV,” changing into Canada’s first nationwide Indigenous-language tv channel.

It delivers 90 per cent of its 24/7 broadcast in Inuktitut, together with nationwide and regional information and kids’s programming.

And it’s dreaming even larger. The community is making use of to the federal broadcast regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Fee, to be a compulsory a part of the protection in primary TV packages.

If their software is accepted at a listening to, which is predicted someday this yr, it might require broadcasters throughout Canada to hold Uvagut TV.

“It might be such a present for all Canadians to have entry, and to have the ability to see and find out about Inuit with Inuit,” mentioned Qajaq Robinson, who’s the secretary treasurer of the NITV’s board of administrators and in addition served as one of many commissioners of the Nationwide Inquiry into Lacking and Murdered Indigenous Ladies and Women.

“To have entry to the language and content material that displays them and speaks to them — that helps the promotion and safety of life.”

Robinson pointed to Inuit broadcaster Rosemarie Kuptana’s 1982 “neutron bomb” speech at a CRTC listening to. Kuptana described the arrival of southern mainstream media in Inuit communities as “the bomb that kills the individuals, however leaves the buildings standings” due to the influence the media had on languages.

She mentioned it was “the form of tv that destroys the soul of a individuals however leaves the shell of a individuals strolling round.”

One yr after her speech, the federal Liberal authorities established a northern broadcasting coverage.

Tv could be an necessary medium to reintroduce Indigenous languages to individuals, simply because it launched mainstream English and French to these within the north within the ‘80s, Robinson mentioned.

“The dream of Canada has to have genuine area for Indigenous individuals, Inuit particularly,” she mentioned.

“Indigenous individuals aren’t a monolith. They’re not all the identical.”

Whereas Uvagut TV gives nearly all of its content material in Inuktitut, CBC TV’s providing of Indigenous-language programming amounted to about 367 hours from April 2021 to March 2022, based on the nationwide broadcaster.

About 227 of these hours had been in Inuktitut, CBC mentioned, which works out to about nine-and-a-half days’ value of content material.

Ought to Uvagut TV be granted necessary inclusion in primary TV packages, it’d be a step towards reconciliation, mentioned Robinson.

The corporate has till Feb. 9 to submit an software, and it says it believes its pitch is in step with the federal authorities’s mandate, although the CRTC is an arm’s-length physique.

In 2019, Parliament handed the Indigenous Languages Act, which states in its preamble that it goals to implement the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The doc affirms that Indigenous Peoples have the appropriate to determine their very own media in their very own languages.

Whereas Uvagut TV broadcasts primarily in Inuktitut, English subtitles can be found for a lot of of its packages, making it accessible to a broader viewers.

The community’s 610,000 subscribers presently watch by means of Shaw Direct satellite tv for pc TV, Arctic Co-operatives Restricted cable in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories and Federation des Cooperatives du Nouveau-Quebec cable in Nunavik.

“Broadcasting is pure storytelling,” Tulugarjuk mentioned, including that Inuit communication is “extra verbal than written” and oral tales are how the neighborhood shares its previous and its desires for the long run.

“So it’s a method of utilizing our voice and expressions to (attain out to) the world. Not simply to Inuit, however to everybody.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first printed Jan. 14, 2023.

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