Igloolik elder praised for preserving Inuit justice, law

Former students and associates of Igloolik, Nunavut, elder Lucien Ukaliannuk, who passed away more than a week ago, praised him for working tirelessly to preserve Inuit traditional law and justice.

Ukaliannuk, 67, died peacefully on Sept. 29 in Iqaluit.

He was born at Avvajja, a small Catholic mission station near Igloolik, on Jan. 18, 1940. While he worked in community politics, Ukaliannuk's main life work was preserving and recording Inuit traditional knowledge of societal values and Inuit laws. He was involved in 1982 in ensuring aboriginal rights were enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Igloolik MLA Louis Taparjuk, who is also Nunavut's minister of culture, languages, elders and youth, told CBC News that Ukaliannuk saw how quickly Inuit traditional law was disappearing, being replaced by the modern justice system that sometimes created conflict.

Such conflict has led to tragedies like suicide, he said, driving Ukaliannuk to begin recording and writing down elders' knowledge of the past.

"Even today, we are forced to live in a society that is not of our own making, and which causes a lot of social problems. And we spend millions of dollars trying to address these problems," Taparjuk said Wednesday.

"But Lucien [found] other ways that if we took control of our own problems, understanding our own culture, then we would own up to our own problems and try to solve it according to the knowledge of the elders."

Ukaliannuk's work led him to become an elder-in-residence with Nunavut's first law school, the Akitsiraq Law program offered jointly by the University of Victoria and Nunavut Arctic College. There, he taught traditional Inuit law and the Inuktitut language, as well as acting as a counsellor and a mentor.

Aiju Peter, who was one of Ukaliannuk's students, said she and her classmates learned a lot from him, such as the Inuit concept of ownership.

"How can you own land? In our Inuit knowledge, it's the land that owns us, it's the land that supports us, it's the land that feeds us and we have to respect it," Peter said.

"When you gain your own knowledge from an Inuit perspective, you have a much better understanding [of] how the world and the Western concepts function and he was tremendously helpful in helping us pull through law school."

In 2005, the University of Victoria awarded Ukaliannuk an honorary doctorate in laws, at the recommendation of his students at the Akitsiraq Law School.

Ukaliannuk, who married his wife Therese at age 16, leaves behind nine children, 16 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.