Candice Sudlovenick is Inuk, from Iqaluit, Nunavut, where she grew up and has spent most of  her life; she is currently based in Ottawa. She works at the Arctic  Eider Society, where she has been involved in developing the SIKU app — a  free mobile app and web platform by and for Indigenous Communities and  Harvesters. She grew up spending time on the land and harvesting, and in  her free time today she sews and beads. The amauti in these photographs  was made by her mother Hagar Idlout-Sudlovenick and the earrings she is wearing were made by Candice herself.

Candice  is wearing an amauti (woman’s parka with a pouch in the back for  carrying a young child). It is a deeply traditional style. A traditional  amauti of this style is called a Pukilik,  traditionally it was sewn from caribou skin: the dark areas correspond  to the brown of the caribou’s back, and the white areas to the pale  belly, so the finished piece is in effect a mosaic of the animal.  Candice’s pukilik is made from modern materials, but the pattern her mother, Hagar, used is the old one.

The  sleeves have a slight puffiness near the shoulder that is no longer  common in modern Inuit clothing — neither Candice nor her mother are  sure of its original function, though one guess is that it gave a mother  more freedom to bring a baby around to the front to breastfeed. The  waist is unusually high, partly so the skin pants underneath meet it,  and partly to allow freedom of movement — walking long distances,  running beside a dog team, or simply attending quickly to the body in cold conditions. The fringes along the bottom are not decorative: cut thinly from caribou skin, they break the wind so cold air does not blow up under the garment. The small V-shapes at the front would, in a full traditional fit-out, hold a rope around  the waist. The hood is large and flat — flatter than today’s parka hoods  — with a small opening, so a baby on the back stays warm but can still  get fresh air.

The  earrings were made by Candice herself: seal skin stretched on a small  frame — a miniature of the full traditional process. To work a seal hide, the fat and blubber are scraped from the inside of the skin with an Ulu, the skin is stretched on a frame, and left through the winter to dry,  rotated as needed and never left out in the summer sun. A sealskin  stretching on a stretcher is called an inniaq. Candice  says the scraping is precise work; it took her years to find the right  angle and motion. Traditional seal-skin earrings would normally sit in a  square frame, but she did not have square stretchers to hand and so  used a circular one.

The  Ulu is the women’s knife of the Inuit. One side of the blade is flat,  the other curved, and the handle sits above the blade so it can be held  and rocked through what is being cut. Candice  keeps a few display pieces and a few she actually uses — for meat and,  perhaps surprisingly, for vegetables, which she says they are very good  for.

Candice  has tattoos on her wrists, her fingers, and her forehead in line with  Inuit tradition. When she was in high school, she had seen women with  these tattoos only in history books and assumed they belonged to the  past. The first living women she remembers seeing with facial tattoos  were Aaju Peter (Inuk activist, lawyer and sealskin designer) and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril (Inuk filmmaker), who seemed to her teenage self immensely powerful. For a long time there was strong public backlash against tattoo’s — the older,  internalized idea that traditional markings were attention-seeking or  shameful — but more and women have started to get them, and the climate changed.

Before  getting her own tattoos, Candice spoke with her mother about what her  great-grandmother had worn. The V on her forehead is the same shape her  great-grandmother carried. Different elders read different meanings into  the forehead and chin markings — in some traditions they mark the  passage into womanhood — but for Candice the forehead tattoo means, above all, reclaiming.  Her finger tattoos are a tribute to the sea goddess who provides the  marine animals on which Inuit life has always depended; she likes to see  them when her hands are working.

Candice’s mother, Hagar Idlout-Sudlovenick,  was born in a tent. She grew up on the land, following the animals with  her family and dog team, and tells stories of the first time she saw an  airplane and the first time she ate chocolate — a life only about sixty-seven  years away from now. Through everything that followed — residential  schools, the missionary churches, the official discouragement of  throat-singing, drum-dancing, the Inuktitut language and spiritual  practice — she kept the patterns her own mother had taught her,  continued to sew, and continued to work seal and caribou skin. She also  pursued her own education and was strongly pro-education for her children: all four were pushed to finish high school and go on to post-secondary studies.

Education  itself is uneven in the north: Nunavut has no institution that can  support a PhD, so anyone pursuing one has to leave the territory, and  the school curriculum runs behind the southern Canadian one, so students  arriving at a southern university start on the back foot. Candice’s  older sister left, finished her PhD in biology, and is now moving back  north with her new baby so that her child can grow up close to the land,  harvesting, and close to family.

Iqaluit  itself, Candice says, is no longer what it was when she was growing up.  Inuit are now a minority in their own capital, housing is overcrowded,  and addiction and homelessness are more visible than before — part of  why, for the moment, she has not moved back. Candice, for her part, is  enjoying what Ottawa offers that the north cannot — jiu-jitsu, archery,  swimming, a wider grocery shelf. “Right now, I want to explore a little bit,” she says.