A warning: The following piece includes references to suicide.
When Elisapie thinks of her hometown of Salluit, she can almost hear the breeze.
"It's like you can always be purified," she says. "You could just go anywhere and you'll find that wind. It's quiet, but it's very loud in your head because it's the big nature. That sense of being put to your place. It's that feeling, and it all happens with the quiet."
Nestled between rugged mountains and overlooking the deep blue waters that lead to the Hudson Strait, the Inuit community of Salluit is about as far north as Quebec goes.
"It's like the roof of Nunavik," she says of name for the northern region of Quebec, "so it's very isolated."
"It's a very proud Inuit town."
Its name — Inuktitut, for "the thin ones" — suggests scarcity, but life teems here. The sky and ocean are so vast that it's impossible to turn your back to nature. Elisapie says Sallumiut, the community here, move in harmony with it. She calls it "The Big Boss."
"We feel, as Inuit, we are this tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little thing, and our Big Boss is around us," she says. "It can pretty much dictate, and it can revenge on you, if you don't stay focused on what needs to be focused and we don't live in the present moment."
Nowadays, the musician and filmmaker is based in Montreal, where her career has flourished. This year, she won her second Juno Award for Inuktitut, a covers album that reimagines 10 classic rock hits in Inuktitut, Elisapie's native language.
But long before Montreal and all of the accolades, there was simply Salluit.
"I remember my '80s being beautiful," she says. "Like, sepia. I can see the whole Polaroid. It was moody. There was joy. My mother would put a tent right in town near the beach just because it was still so easy and calm. Although, we would go camping in the summer. Go to the other summer camp, where there's belugas coming in, where there's seals, and there's fishing."
Elisapie grew up singing and making music, in church and with her uncle George Kakayuk's rock band, Sugluk. She was producing radio shows as a teenager, and later, she worked as a social worker of sorts.
But in her early 20s, something shifted.
"Music was starting to really stir something inside of me, although it was always something we see as, like, a side hobby, like my uncle's band," she says. "It's just something that you do naturally, but you never make a career out of it. But I was starting to write my song slowly and then I realized, you know what? I should go."
Montreal in the early aughts was an exciting place to be. Elisapie was going to college and living in the West Island. She has a very fond memory of wandering into this tiny basement bar, called L'Escogriffe, on her birthday.
She remembers following a musician lugging his guitar and amp down a flight of stairs.
"I go inside, and there's a band," she says. "I stayed there until 5, 6 in the morning. Because it was my birthday, they started buying me drinks ... I was, like, 'Wow, I thought this existed in my head. It actually does.' That's how, slowly, I started seeing this is where I need to be."
In 2001, she won many awards for her documentary on Inuit life in Nunavik, called If the Weather Permits. Later, she met Canadian musician Alain Auger, and together, they released the Juno Award-winning Taima.
In 2019, her solo album, The Ballad of the Runaway Girl, was shortlisted for the prestigious Polaris Music Prize. Still, through all of her success, the North was never far from Elisapie's mind.
"It's still a city," she says. "It's still not home. It's still not free, like the North. It's still hectic. I think, when spring arises, that's when I have the calling of the snow melting and the sky becomes much bigger and the energy and the people are a little bit back to being wild again."
Salluit is not easy to reach. An 8-hour flight from Montreal, the town is inaccessible by road. As time passed and Elisapie's life in the city came into focus, those sepia-toned Polaroids of her childhood in Salluit began to soften.
"I think it took me years to not feel guilty of having left my community, my family," she says. "It's been over 20 years now, and I'm finally feeling like I feel free and light. Although, you know, we still suffer from pain and a lot of healing to do as just a normal individual Indigenous person."
Like many people, the self-isolation that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic gave Elisapie ample time to reflect. She'd go on runs with the music of her childhood in her ears: Blondie, Metallica, ABBA and more.
It's during these runs that the seed for Inuktitut was planted. It was meant to be simple — just translate a few childhood favorites into her mother tongue. It would take two weeks, max.
But sifting through old memories has a way of unearthing things you'd stored away in the corners of your mind, and those old childhood songs unlocked much more than Elisapie expected, like flashbacks of a family fight.
"My cousins would run away to my home, and the next day, we'd go back, and my uncle's super sweet, as if nothing happened," she remembers. "All this love from my uncle with the most sweet voice. He would say, 'You guys wanna watch ABBA video?' "
Her uncle would slip the VHS tape into the machine, and Elisapie says all of their troubles would fade away as they escaped into ABBA's glossy, musical world.
" I also started remembering what was really going on," she says. "I started feeling all this love towards them and I started crying ... It's like my childhood, being this oversensitive kid, just came back to me a few years ago, and my whole body was kind of trying to hold on and keep it cool. Then, I just collapsed."
A door opened. Suddenly, the songs that soundtracked her childhood revealed themselves to be not just a source of comfort but healing too.
" I'm not saying everybody was suffering," she says. "I'm just saying there was a lot of hard times. There was a lot of things going on, and people just feeling, like, 'Where the hell is this coming from? Where is this deep pain that I'm feeling that I'm not able to name coming from?' ... I think that's why I think, for [Inuktitut], I really wanted to dig deep into my own personal experience."
Elisapie remembers many beautiful things about growing up in Salluit, but her childhood also coincided with a wave of suicides in her hometown and across Inuit communities.
She recalls another memory, hearing about the sudden death of a young worker at the Salluit co-op, where her father once worked.
"This was a big news because it was still very rare," she says. "Then, all of a sudden, things just started — like, a lot of suicide. Everyone. Not just my town, of course, Inuit communities ... I think when you go through something like that, it's such a shock and you have no more control. The town doesn't really know how to, because they're still trying to figure out what happened to our lives here."
Like many Indigenous communities in Canada's far north, Salluit has suffered from a disproportionate and increasingly high rate of deaths by suicide since the '80s.
People in their 20s and younger are especially at risk.
"It wasn't easy because we lost so many cousins to suicide, and people were just kind of not knowing where this suffering is coming from," she says. "So that's kind of my childhood, and I think that's why Inuktitut became what it became, because I needed to remember things, and I started remembering things differently."
Research into the high suicide rate among Indigenous communities in Canada points to factors like a lack of appropriate mental health resources, but Elisapie sees the bigger picture.
She points to the colonization of Inuit land and the profound and destabilizing effect its had on her community as the root of the issue.
"When you don't have answers? When you have no education of what was done to you was not fair? How you were treated? How you were seen in your own land, in your hometown?" she says. "I think that does something to your brain."
From forced relocations to the slaughter of thousands of sled dogs, the rapid colonization of Nunavik in the 20th century completely disrupted the Inuit way of life. Elisapie says musical traditions like Inuit throat singing were almost extinguished.
" Actually, it died a lot in communities because it was badly seen, making these animal sounds," she says. "I think when Anglican Church arrived in the North and they were hearing these two women making very exciting music — exciting, I mean, for the body and for the imagination — they were, like, 'Whoa, we have to ban anything that is from that spiritual animalistic world.' "
Even the most fundamental parts of Inuit culture were disrupted, like the circadian rhythm so finely attuned to life up in northern Canada.
" Imagine: We have 24 hours daylight in the spring for three months, where we have daylight. We can't go to bed at 10, 11," she says. "And yet, you have to go to school at 9. In the afternoon, kids skip school because the geese have arrived. This is our traditional physical, spiritual calling, and you're stuck there? It's daylight, and you have to close the blinds. It's so bright, you know? It's just to show you how it was not meant to be like that. I think things were not meant to be that harsh and that hard and that violent."
This history and the hurt still felt in Salluit courses through the songs on Inuktitut.
On her version of The Rolling Stones' "Wild Horses," Elisapie recalls a teenage friend quietly struggling with his relationship with his father.
"I remember just him sitting down and listening to this song, and I can feel the heaviness," she says. "He doesn't say much. He's having a hard time with his dad ... But it's like he's finding that love in the song. It's connecting him to his dad in a way."
On Inuktitut, she covers Metallica, Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin. She nearly skipped Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here," fearing it could be a potentially "cheesy" addition.
But when she tried singing it, the song just clicked.
" It's like a true Inuit song," she says. "It's like we had already processed these songs. It's like there was already a translation in my mind, and this is how the translation was made much easier for me: Because these [songs] were probably already processed in our brain, in our heart, and they were so meaningful."
At the heart of Elisapie's covers album is a song that immediately brings back memories of her late cousin. She remembers when Queen's "I Want to Break Free" would come on the radio: She and her cousin, Tayara, would dance endlessly.
Elisapie also remembers losing her cousin to suicide, and as she considered these songs and the memories tethered to them, she wasn't sure this was a song she could cover.
"I was trying to see, 'Can I possibly talk about him? Because nobody talks about him'," she says. "We were forced to forget our cousin's suicide, or mourn very quickly and not talk about suicide anymore when we were young. I remember saying, 'I want to remember him. Am I allowed to talk about him? Am I allowed to talk about how, when he went to Montreal for the first time, how he loved it? How he wore pink and purple, and he felt free? Am I allowed? Is he my memory?' "
Every song on Inuktitut takes Elisapie back. Sometimes, it's into moments of pain, but she says there's also beauty in making those memories whole again.
"It's a lot of sad things, but it's also very beautiful, because these people were beautiful," she says. "We were all beautiful. The North is beautiful. And I think music makes it even more beautiful. It's able to make things much softer, when things are hard. I think these songs — these big hits that I chose — were not just because they were big hits, but because they really meant a lot, and they were our friends during hard times."
Letting go is not easy. For Elisapie, it's a spiritual practice. She still looks to the natural world, or the "Big Boss," for guidance.
" It's not a dead thing," she says. "It's a very real, alive thing that is your boss. It's the nature. It's the wind. It's the mountains. It's the water. It's the animals."
There's another cover song from her 2019 record that exemplifies this idea. "Qanniuguma," featuring Canadian Inuk-Mohawk musician Beatrice Deer, was originally performed by Inuit folk duo Etulu & Susan Aningmiuq.
"They were just amazing harmony duo," she says. "They played an instrument so well, and they just had the most pure, beautiful voices ever. They made this song, 'Quanniuguma,' which means 'if I was snow' or 'if I was a snowflake.' It's talking about wanting to be free like a snowflake that falls lightly and transforms out in the nature. That moves and travels without heartache, without heaviness."
That desire to be free, like a snowflake, is at the heart of Inuktitut too. Really, it's in everything Elisapie does as an Inuit artist.
" If we were to write a love song, we would probably do that to the nature," she says. "Although it's hard and it's harsh sometimes, we're so connected because, again, it's the Big Boss ... It can really put you to the place where you need to be. It's like you're purified again."
If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 9 8 8 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Miguel Perez. Our senior producer is Kimberly Junod and our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.
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