How do we reimagine a modern workplace that is cohesive with Inuit ways of being?

Patricia Johnson-Castle is Nunatsiavut Inuk, as well as of German and English descent. Raised urban Inuk in St. Johns, Newfoundland, she returned to her home territory in 2019 to work for the Nunatsiavut Government, and observed a complex challenge: fitting Inuit culture into Western corporate structures.

Her policy paper, Sivumulâvugut: (Re)Making Inuit Workplaces asks: what makes for a healthy workplace in an Inuit context; what are the challenges for achieving that sort of vision; and can they be overcome? Over the course of two years, she interviewed 13 Inuit women across the four regions of Inuit Nunangat, exploring the questions above in the intersectional context of being a woman and Inuit in the workplace.

Q: Walk me through the premise of your thesis and what you were trying to find out. What were your major questions?

A: I started working for the Nunatsiavut Government in May of 2019, and before I worked there, I worked at a university in southern Canada. So I had the experience working in the South and working in my home territory of Nunatsiavut. There were some things that were different, but then there were other things that were surprisingly the same. And so I thought to myself, I wonder what it would be like to have institutions that are built just in the vision of Inuit culture?

I was experiencing things that I had read about before like Imposter syndrome, both professionally but also culturally, because I grew up as a second-generation urban Inuk in St John's, Newfoundland. So I wondered, what are the experiences of Inuit women in other land claim organizations?

A: Why Inuit women specifically, why did you choose this group?

Q: My family are Inuit from Nunatsiavut, but my grandmother was from a village called Tishialuk, which got resettled in the fifties. She was born on the land and raised my dad and his four siblings with my grandfather, who's from the UK. For me, I've been on a journey to learn how to honour my connection to my culture, my connection to my land. And part of that journey for me was physically moving back up North.

I was curious about what Inuit women were experiencing also in part because I like to read a lot. I think that, as people who have experienced white supremacy and colonialism, there's a lot we can learn from other groups of people who have also, maybe slightly different, gone through those experiences.

There's a really famous abolitionist and philosopher, Angela Davis, and she has a quote that is something long, maybe I’m going to butcher it, but something along the lines of, African-American women need to understand themselves. They need to understand white women. They need to understand African-American men and the need to understand white men. And so in her characterization, if you create something that helps African-American women, then it's probably going to help everyone. That was very informative for me, thinking about, okay, well, what if that same logic applies to Inuit women?

I chose Inuit women in managerial or supervisory roles because part of my logic was that those are people who have experience with policy implementation and development on some level, most likely. They have probably seen cases where policies are working or not working in their opinion.

Q: So take me through the process, how did you go about finding these women? What were you asking them? What was that like?

A: Since I was in a senior management position with Nunatsiavut Government (NG), I had a few ideas of people I could interview. My mentors made some suggestions as well. And then from there, I used kind of a snowballing method. Ugh, An Inuk using a snowballing method, haha.

I asked about people's experiences in terms of how they ended up in the position they were in, how do they think their culture impacts the way that they manage their staff and approach their work, if they've had experiences of discrimination, what kinds of discrimination would they describe themselves as having experienced? Also some questions that pivoted to what kind of policies exist now that reflect Inuit culture in our land claim organizations. Thinking about what it means for us to be a future ancestor. How do we create work environments, in this case, or what society do we want to create?

Q: So what are some of your takeaways from your thesis?

A: First of all, one of the things that became pretty clear was that people who can complete Western education tend to get parachuted to the top of organizations. I'm someone who does pretty well in a Western education environment, so I have a master's degree, and I got parachuted up to the top.

Speaking to women who were older than me who haven't necessarily completed high school or maybe have completed high school, but didn't do post-secondary – they tend to have to work for ten, fifteen years to be able to get into a role similar to the one that I was in. I thought that was pretty interesting because some of the older women that I spoke with were fluent Inuktitut speakers.

The NG has public information and for their language bonus, I think the top one is $5,000. I don't have my notes in front of me. But if you calculate $5,000 across a 40-hour work week, across a 365-day year, it equates to about a $ 2-an-hour raise. A master's degree from a southern institution is going to get you like a $20, $30 an hour raise. So it made me really consider how much harder people who struggle in Western education have to work and how much longer they have to work to be able to demonstrate to the bureaucracy that they have the same capabilities that I have.

Overall, there does tend to be some effort to integrate parts of Inuit culture. Different organizations have kind of different approaches, but a lot of people still felt that the Inuit pieces at work were things that could fit easily into a Western container. Part of what I am encouraging at the end of my policy paper is, how do we build a container that's Inuit and how do we create policies that are going to empower Inuit to be able to be more successful in the workplace?

Some of my interviewees spoke about the way that Inuit men are struggling to be interested or feel that a 9 to 5 desk job is something that they could do or want to do. One of my interviewees drew kind of a parallel; when Inuit men used to go off hunting, women were used to managing things in the village, and then when colonialism and contact came, Inuit women continued to run things in the village, but through parts of genocide, like the dog slaughter in particular, it really displaced the role of Inuit men.

I found it really interesting to be able to talk about gender with other Inuit women. And it really reflects, I think, our core values, which are that is about holism and balance. All but one of my interviewees had experienced a form of discrimination, but that doesn't mean that Inuit men are the ones who are benefiting from the discrimination. Because whenever someone is being discriminated against, someone else is benefiting from that discrimination.

If some of my policy suggestions start being implemented there could be really interesting spin-off effects that would help fix some of the imbalance between men and women in Inuit society now. When we also look at things like the suicide crisis, for example, it is predominantly affecting young men. And so, maybe if we had a four-day workweek and people had three days to be able to go hunting, an office job might seem more appealing.

If you work in the traditional economy, you have time to go hunting, but you might not have enough money for gas or a skidoo or a gun or the safety gear or the satellite phone. People who work in the cash Western economy have the money, but then they don't have the time. How do we build institutions that fit our way of living instead of southern institutions?

I understand that's the easiest thing to do, to take something that already exists and bring it to where we are. But now we have our land claims settled and now we have the power to legislate. We have the power to create policies. How can we use the power that we gained from our land claim settlements to create institutions that are going to reflect our values and help boost the segments of society that are struggling the most?

Q: That's why I'm really curious, what are some of the suggestions that you're making in this paper?

A: The first thing I had was not specifically a recommendation, but a call to action. Call on our leaders to critically think about how we use Inuit Qaujimaningit (IQ), our traditional knowledge, and Inuktitut our language, which carries so much of our traditional knowledge, How do we use those to shape our institutions? There are IQ departments in claim organizations in some of the public governments in our our homelands. But given that the 13 women from across the north that I interviewed still see those gaps, something might also need to change in that approach.

Some of the other recommendations are looking at more flexibility and less rigidity and less hierarchy in our organizations, because for by and large, a lot of organizations have inherited or or copied the kind of hierarchical managerial model that we see in corporations.

A lot of Indigenous people who interact with government institutions are treated with a large amount of distrust. We can see that in the way that Indigenous people are discriminated against in the justice system, in the medical system. There's a lot of distrust from Indigenous people to these formal organizations. Saying that people have to work in the office is an extension of that. Because if people are able to get their work done at home, then people being in the office isn't about productivity, it's about surveillance.

Another one is we should probably just work less. The five-day workweek comes from the 1930s and the gains that unions made to fight for 8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for all of the rest. That's not a balanced way to do things. And that victory is almost 100 years old.

If we are progressing, as people like to say that we are, I think the obvious next step of progress is to decrease the amount that we are working and increase the time we have to live our lives. As I mentioned, people going hunting, yes, it gives people purpose, it's good for people's mental wellness, but also there is a food security crisis in the north, too. Having a four-day workweek is not going to fix that. But it can contribute to having people being able to access more country food.

One of them is to train Inuit for permanent jobs. There are Inuit who might be on short-term contracts for their almost whole career. You can't apply for things like a mortgage, can't apply for a line of credit. That means Inuit who are making a really honest effort to try to improve themselves, to try to own their own home or build a cabin or whatever it is, they're being made a lot more vulnerable to the more predatory side of our financial institutions.

Additionally, our seasons in the north just aren't the same as they are in the south. So as I say to everyone, spring up north is the best. I had a friend from the South say like, “Oh really? Like it's spring up there in May, so the snow is melted?”

And I said, “No, the snows not melted.” And they were like, “Oh, but you said it was spring.” Because spring for us is when it's warm enough to go ice fishing and not have to be bundled to the nines, starting to be able to go like camping and having it not be -50, etc. Why don't we build our school calendars around that?

Okay, the salmon showed up this week, everyone, take the week off. Or, maybe it's a set number of days per different kind of thing that you're harvesting. But in any case, we should organize ourselves around our calendar and not around a school calendar or a work calendar that is set by agricultural stuff in the South.

We have been able to make really big improvements in our communities in quite a small amount of time when you look at how long it's been since contact. There are people whose grandparents like mine grew up on the land, that's how close we are to that reality. We've gone from that to being able to negotiate, to having our own institutions. We have power. We have power in our land and on our land. We can use it. But there's always a bias towards the way things already are. But things haven't actually been this way for very long. We should use the power that our parents and grandparents negotiated for us to have to the betterment of all the people in our communities

Q: Is there anything I did not ask you that you want to make sure that we add?

A: I think that there is a consensus about what I think a lot of Inuit want the future to look like.

We want our children to be speaking Inuktitut. We want Inuktitut to be spoken in our institutions. We want people to be able to receive public services in our language. We want to spend more time on the land. We want to be able to honour the traditions and knowledge that has been passed down for 10,000 years through our families.

And if that is the consensus for how we want the future to look… we have the power legislatively, policy-wise, to be able to build towards that goal.

So almost all of my interviewees, when I spoke to them about the future, spoke about wanting to see strong communities and strength being rooted in our culture. So through our language, through our traditions.

And so if we have a work calendar that reflects our traditions, and if we have support to learn our language through our work, for example, if people who speak Inuktitut are financially rewarded for the knowledge that they carry by being an Inuktitut speaker, then those are things that are going to reflect our values, but are also going to get us closer to the future that I think we all want to have.