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Arctic Teenagers

My friend Hannah grew up in Iqaluit - the capital of Nunavut - from the ages of 13-18. The insane shit she was forced to deal with on a daily basis make most teenage problems like zits and first crushes look like a joke (which they are).

My friend Hannah grew up in Iqaluit – the capital of Nunavut – from the ages of 13-18. The insane shit she was forced to deal with on a daily basis make most teenage problems like zits and first crushes look like a joke (which they are). You think you had it rough because the bus ride downtown was 45 minutes long, or because you always get carded at the depanneur (that’s a corner store to you non-Quebecers)? What if it was -50°C outside, booze and drugs are almost triple what they are in the rest of the country, and a bunch of your friends committed suicide because they got dumped? That's Nunavut teenhood, in a frozen and depressing nutshell. Nunavut was created 11 years ago and Iqaluit - the largest city and the capital - has a population of roughly 7,000 people a combination of local indigenous people (Inuits), other Canadian indigenous peoples and a few white people thrown in just for fun. Unlike bratty teenagers elsewhere, you can’t really escape or ignore your community and you can’t just write off your surroundings either. I have a feeling that this (and the fact they don’t really have the Internet up there) is why Hannah is one of the most mature, well-adjusted, and unflappable girls I know. I recently asked her for a breakdown of what it’s like to be a teen in an Arctic wasteland.

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Hangouts

In Iqaluit hangouts are few and far between. It’s not like you can just go cavorting in parks or on street corners, in the Winter months temperatures can reach -50°C. One of the main hangouts was at Inuksuk high school, which, if you look at it from an aerial view, is shaped like a chubby swastika. Kids hung out in the center, which they called tisi meaning “local meeting ground”. There was one greasy spoon hang out called The Snack which was basically a French Canadian diner. It was the only fast food place in town and it was open 24 hours so everyone went there when they were wasted to eat poutine. It was a local landmark and when it burned down everyone did skidoo jumps off it.

Hobbies

High school students have to take courses in survivalism. They learn how to make igloos, how to hunt, how to ice fish. They also take firearms courses and go camping on islands where they hunt and cook their own food. Pretty fun shit for a kid. Lots of kids play indoor sports like soccer and basketball when it’s too cold outside. This keeps them occupied and also gets some much-needed endorphins flowing in the winter months when there is roughly 6 hours of daylight. By March kids go snowboarding because there are tons of virtually untouched mountains around there. They go out to for the day in tank tops when it’s -35°C and get sunburned.

Food

As you might expect, people in Nunavut eat some pretty bizarre stuff. They eat eyeballs, seal, caribou and musk ox. They also eat muktuk, which is fermented whale blubber put under rocks during the winter and freeze-dried. Once a kid brought some to school in a Tupperware, and the whole school started screaming “put it back! close the lid!” but it was too late, he cracked it open and the entire cafeteria smelled like sweet, rotting, flesh-garbage for a week.

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Music

With the general absence of Internet there is a big delay in youth culture fads reaching Nunavut. Hip-hop resonates strongly up there because they can get with songs about drugs, drinking and poverty. Sometimes they would organize coffee houses once a month where groups of kids would play AC/DC and Led Zeppelin covers. Besides that, not much of a local music or art scene going on. Oh, The White Stripes played a concert up there once and apparently the entire town went buck wild and every single person, young and old, attended the show.

Cliques

In Iqaluit you know everyone in high school. There are no real cliques because there actually aren’t enough people to make different groups, but there were divisions between white people and Inuk people. Hannah’s nickname was “qungalukaqiqee” meaning “smiley demon”, but it was in good humour (or at least she thinks so). The notion that everyone is forced to be friends is actually kind of nice in a strange way. People connect with others they wouldn’t normally connect with because they have no choice. Still, the suicide rate of teenagers is still higher than average, which can be surprising when you realize you weren’t as close with people as you thought.

Teenage Love

Like any other place the teenagers of Iqaluit have to deal with raging hormones. Throw alcohol, isolation, absence of daylight, and cultural ennui into the mix and the shit hits the fan. Some young men who have never been out of Iqaluit lose their first girlfriend and just kill themselves. Their rational is “she’s the only girl in town I love or will ever love”– which is kind of fucked up and true because they actually do know everyone else. When you find someone you love up there that’s pretty much it, not a lot of options up there. Most of the violence and aggression (which happens a lot up there) stems from relationships.

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Youth Culture

Being in such a small and culturally isolated environment means the relative absence of teen subculture stereotypes. Some kids would “go goth” or whatever, but sooner or later they’ll be like “fuck this,” and then dye their hair back to its natural colour and stop wearing black. One day they’ll show up to school wearing a pink headband and then you know it’s over. The idea of counter-culture doesn’t really connect up when everyone is just trying to hold on to their own cultural identity.

Partying

Like most teenagers the goal on a Saturday night is to get fucked up. If you don’t have a cool older sibling who hooks you up then you’re pretty much on your own to find a way of getting wasted. A typical Saturday night in Iqaluit consists of wandering around looking for a party. It’s illegal to sell alcohol unless it’s being sold at a bar but mostly everyone just bootlegs it. The drinking laws exist but are not really enforced and as a result there is a huge black-market for alcohol and drugs. Someone will bring up a few bottles of vodka in their duffle bag, inform whoever is interested, and make a nice profit. A 60 oz bottle of vodka sells for $160. A gram of weed can cost $30 or more. The difference between Iqaluit and other cities and is that kids binge a lot more. 4 girls put in for a 60 of vodka and it’s gone in 15 minutes. An hour later, when everyone is done barfing their guts out and things are back to normal it’s like ‘now what do we do?’. The absence of alcohol seems to make them more indulgent. When they find something they do as much as they can because they never know when they’re going to come across it again. On one particularly shit-faced excursion Hannah and her friend Shelly decided to run down a big hill covered in snow drifts after drinking a 40 oz bottle of Fireball Whiskey. Shelly was wearing these incredibly slippery homemade sealskin boots. Of course, she bailed and proceeded to drag Hannah behind her. Hannah finally came to a stop when she smashed her face into a giant pile of rocks. The next day she had a nice big shiner and a knee the size of a walrus to show off at school.

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