TUCKATUCK, ALEC        

My name is  Christopher Lawson Alec Tuckatuck MacDonald.  I was born in Fort George, Quebec on March 14, 1976 and raised in Kuujjuaraapik where my family is from.  I started carving when I was seven years old.

 I am named after my uncle, Alec, whom I call ‘sounik’ and he the same.  Because we have the same name this is how we identify and call each other which means ‘bone’.   ‘Tuckatuck’, last name,  has never been determined where it came from but I believe, as well as my mother, that it came from a  small bird called tukatakiaq which is an arctic tern. 

 The nearest hospital to Kuujjuaraapik was Fort George of which where I was born.  The community of Fort George no longer exists and is now called Chisasibi located on the James Bay.  When the dam projects were in effect, the water level rose and the community had to evacuate and relocate to Chisasibi. 

 Kuujjuaraapk is an Inuit and Cree community of about 1400 people located on the Hudson Bay.  It is the first Inuit community travelling north and is only accessible by plane.  It is distinct in that it has four names in four languages.   Whapmagoostui, which means ‘where there are whales’, is the Cree name, Great Whale River in English, Poste de la Baleine in French and of course Kuujjuaraapik which means little-big river.  It is also rare in the fact that there are two different cultures living and cohabitating in the same community with completely separate and different governments operating within.  When the Inuit were a nomadic people moving from place to place following the caribou and travelling with the season, Kuujjuaraapik was an excellent spot to situate as it was  plentiful of beluga.  There ‘the people’ could fill and build their reserves up on muqtuq (whale blubber) and prepare for the cold winters.  In the 1940’s the Americans set up a military base there as post for radar surveilance and watch.  The army is no longer there, only remnants of buildings, equipment, oil barrels etc.   Kuujjuaraapik is one of the larger communities of Nunavik and is one of the more beautiful ones as it has white sandy beaches, large sand dunes, large islands and incredible atsanik (northern lights). 

When I was five my uncle started taking me out on the land and water.  I started hunting and learning the traditional ways of survival.  My mother and her brothers and sisters lived on the land their first years before the missionaries and the federal government changed living and schooling arrangements.   It was then that the nomadic way of the inuit were really affected and their traditional ways of living were changed into small houses and going to school .  It was fortunate for me that I still had the opportunity to learn first hand of the traditional methods of living and survival.  My uncle, Alec, being the oldest child was traditionally raised by his grandparents (as it was traditional for the first child to be raised by the grandparents) and my mother being the next oldest was given the traditional role and responsibilities of being the oldest child being raised by her parents.   As I am the oldest male child of the next generation I was taught early of the ways of inuit living and support so that I could be a provider and leader of the family and the community.    It is\was the responsibility of the oldest male child of the next generation to carry out certain duties and to have certain knowledge, although I believe I am one of the last generations to have this knowledge and upbringing. 

I started watching my grandfather, Sarowilly Ammittuk, carve when I was very young.   I would sit with him as he carved and he would give me some tools to play with and I would immitate him.  He would ask me what I see in the stone and tell me to look for an animal in the stone.  He would encourage me to vision animals, as I would see them when I went on the land, ice, water, in their natural setting and movement in the stone.  When  I was seven he started teaching me how to use the tools.  He died shortly after beginning to show me how to carve so my uncle started to teach me.  I made my first carving when I was seven.  It was of a seal lying down on its side.  I still have it.  I continued to watch and observe my uncle carving and I would often work beside him making my own.  

 I remember there were times, before my grandfather died, that he would be gone.  I remember asking my mom where he was and she would explain that he was carving sikkuq (ice) for people far away with my great aunt and uncle Lucy and Noah Meeko.  They were often invited to places like Quebec City, Japan, and places in Europe to carve ice sculptures during festivals.  At that time I did not understand how important it was but I remember it was a big deal for our family.  And it is a ‘big deal’ still as my grandfather, Sarowilly, and my great aunt and uncle, Lucy and Noah, are very well known artists today as well as some of my other relatives like Charlie Tooktoo.   

I continued carving as a child until our family moved to Chatham, in support of my grandmother as my grandfather passed away, when I was eleven in 1987 where my father, Peter MacDonald,  is from  Because I did not have the tools or materials as I did with my uncle and family in Kuujjuaraapik I stopped carving.  I started getting involved in other activities such as hockey and baseball of which too I excelled at.  At one point CBC North did a documentary on me because of my successes in hockey.  I also played Junior Hockey at a Tier 2 level in Saskatchewan for an all native hockey team in Saskatchewan called the Lebret Eagles.  I graduated high school in Chatham and went on to graduate university with a Bachelor of Physical Education from the University of NewBrunswick.  With always feeling that I wanted to go back ‘home’, I was finally able to return to the north after completing my degree.  I moved to Kuujjuaq in 2000 which is the largest community of Nunavik having a population of about 2200. It was then, in Kuujjuaq, that I was able to get back to my traditional culture, pass on what I have learned traditionally to other inuit youth, and begin carving again.  I began teaching there and giving back to my people as they have always supported me in my journeys.  I gave back by teaching physical education but more importantly I gave back by teaching the next generation of inuit who did not have the opportunity to go out on the land and learn our traditions as I was taught, the ways of the land and survival, and carving.   I was then able to provide for my family again also through hunting and fishing and pass this knowledge on of how important it is to take care of your family and community.   

As I was teaching full time I would carve in the evenings in my shack after work and on the weekends when I wasn’t on the land.  When I was on the land I began seeing the animals as I once did when I was young with my grandfather and my uncle.  I began seeing not only the animals but our people, our traditions, our culture, our land and how beautiful and strong  it all is and how important it is to pass on, maintain, and preserve our inevitably ever changing culture.  I began realizing even more how fast our traditions and language are getting lost and forgotten, like myself having lost a lot of my language.  As I began to see more I needed to carve more.  I needed to express what it is that we need to keep and remember, what we need to preserve and practice, what is important to our culture and what people need to see of it.  Not only do our own people need to appreciate and acknowledge the changes we have and are going through and remember also what traditions we have lived but people outside of our culture need to see it too in order to understand how we lived and how we survived and continue to survive.  Although I enjoyed teaching in a school, my passion is with my expression through carving.   Since my discovery I have stopped teaching physical education and began my passion of expression of inuit art to preserve, maintain, and educate people of our culture.  As we have survived for thousands of years through the cold and challenging conditions we now have a new challenge that we must accept in order for our language and culture to survive for thousands of more years.  Every single one of us are important in how we survive, protect, and preserve our culture, I have accepted this challenge and carving is how I am doing it.      

~~ Alec Tuckatuck ~~