NUNAVUT
After watching and being involved in successful community programs for women, elder Quluaq Pilakapsi kept asking the same question: "What about the men?"

The research group into Northern indigenous men includes Steven Kormendy, community-based researcher, Yukon; left, Mike Nitsiza, community-based researcher, Northwest Territories; Byron Hamel, community-based researcher, Labrador; Guillaume Charon, acting co-executive director, Nunavut Literacy Council; Helen Kitekudlak, community-based researcher, Northwest Territories; Cayla Chenier, acting co-executive director, Nunavut Literacy Council; Robert Patles, community-based researcher, Yukon and Shelley Tulloch, research guide. Missing is Noel Kaludjak, community-based researcher, Nunavut. - photo courtesy of Shelley Tulloch

It was her insistence to answer that question that kicked off a large project looking into indigenous men of the North.

"She asked over and over throughout the years, 'What about the men? When are we going to start addressing the specific needs of our sons and our spouses and our brothers?'" recalled Shelley Tulloch, research guide for the Northern Men's Research Project.

She and a team involving the Nunavut Literacy Council, researchers and organizations in Labrador, Northwest Territories and the Yukon went straight to the source to find out from Northern indigenous men what experiences they had with learning, working and finding meaning in their lives.

"From the analysis of those stories, what we found is even if men across the North have a really wide range of different experiences, the organizing themes in the stories where they were going back from learning or work was the theme of oppression and the feeling of not having enough support, the feeling of kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't, that the choices in one area were leading to negative repercussions in the other," said Tulloch.

The legacy of residential schools and impact of colonization left a clear mark on men, she said.

On the flip side to the negative repercussions of colonization, said Tulloch, were the positive comments from men that their most engaged moments in life came with themes of personal freedom, having a strong sense of their identity and self-worth.

Often those feelings were correlated with connectedness to family, community or the land, as well as overcoming personal barriers such as addiction.

Sam Tutanuak from Rankin Inlet, chosen by the research team as a Northern indigenous role model and asked to share his story, wrote in the report that what drove him to seek an education was opening the cupboards at home and seeing them empty.

"I wanted to make sure that, if I want to become something, or if I want to live, I have to find a job to have food, to keep food in the cupboards," he stated. "My sister was my role model. She became a teacher. She has a bachelor of education. I thought, if she can become a teacher, I can become one too."

He went on to write that through men's meetings in Rankin Inlet, Tutanuak was surprised to find how similar his problems were to others'.

"It's mind-boggling," he wrote. "Here you think you're all alone, have bills, family problems, whatever, all building up inside of you, but here, the guy sitting across the room has the exact same issue. And we start feeding off each other, and suddenly somebody says, 'We're the same.' That's how it grows! It's just like wildfire. There's a flame within each man that wants to burst out so much, but they just don't know how, so they store it inside."

Although her research focused only on men, Tulloch speculated on the reason women have, to some extent, found more success overcoming the impacts of colonization related to gender roles during the period of settling.

Indigenous women already had a role of staying closer to home and could find their identity in making children, whereas the loss of the lifestyle emphasis on hunting and providing to the family by being out on the land impacted men strongly.

She said there are indications young boys and girls moved into communities were socialized differently. Girls were more encouraged to attend school and elements of racism in educational and employment settings might be more targeted to men than women.

What surprised Tulloch during her research was finding out how engaged men were in ways that don't necessarily show up in national statistics.

"Many talked about leaving school or work early to take care of the children so the mother of their kids could be in school or be in the workforce," said Tulloch. "Many also talked about informal kinds of learning or kinds of work that they found very meaningful or that took care of their family's needs."

Her report comes with 25 recommendations to improve the situation and reduce feelings of oppression for indigenous men.

Some of those include developing cross-cultural training programs for newcomers to the North, combating racism in the workplace and fostering respect for traditional skills and knowledge.