Where are Inuit women in mass media?
Student researching how Inuk women see themselves portrayed in popular culture
Cody Punter
Northern News Services
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
RANKIN INLET
Have you ever wondered about the way Inuk women are represented in popular culture?
Cassidy Glennie is researching how Inuit women see themselves portrayed in popular culture – specifically music videos – for her undergraduate thesis. - Cody Punter/NNSL photo |
Fourth-year-sociology student Cassidy Glennie started asking herself that question while she was at university last year. However, once she started her search, she realized that Inuit women are hardly featured on popular TV channels like MTV at all.
As a result, Glennie decided to do her honours thesis about the representation, or lack thereof, of Inuit women in music videos.
"I'm interested in gender studies and I noticed that I'd never seen a music video with an Inuk woman," she said.
The Mount Allison student is from Nova Scotia but her uncle has been living in Rankin Inlet for 25 years. She has been coming up to visit in the summers for as long as she can remember.
"My cousins are Inuk and they just got to talking about how there's literally no one. You don't go on MTV and see an Inuit women in a music video," she said.
When she delved into the issue even further she realized there was hardly any literature on the issue, which is why she decided to pursue the subject.
"I found maybe one or two articles that touched on the topic but there's pretty much nothing."
As part of her research Glennie is currently in Rankin Inlet to interview young women about how they feel about the way they are portrayed.
She has been holding focus groups where she shows participants four music videos with varying depictions of aboriginal women. She then engages them with a series of 10 questions, which were approved both by the ethics board at her university and the Nunavut Research Institute, followed by a group discussion.
"I'm glad that she came here for (local women) because maybe they can share their culture and their traditions and see how Inuit women feel about being in the media," said Elena Kataluk, an addictions worker with Pulaarvik Kablu Friendship Centre, which helped organize the research sessions.
One of the videos which Glennie showed was by Gwen Stefani. The video portrayed people dressed in aboriginal clothing, with lots of guns, alcohol, violence and nudity.
"I don't want aboriginal people, especially Inuit women, to be looked at that way," said Kataluk, who was one of 11 people to take part in the research on July 21. "All those music videos and producers clearly don't know anything about aboriginal people."
"If they don't understand what we're all about then maybe they shouldn't use the culture," said one woman who took part in the study but asked to remain anonymous.
"Or maybe if they had permission from Native Americans it would be OK."
The woman, who is originally from Whale Cove, hoped Glennie's research would allow Inuit women to give input into how they want to be seen. Her one complaint was that Glennie could have made more of an effort to find videos from Inuit artists such as Tanya Tagaq or Arviat's Susan Aglukark to show participants.
Glennie said she was going to reach out to Inuit artist themselves at a later stage in her research.
She will be in Rankin Inlet until the beginning of August. She will then be heading back to university with a view to publishing her thesis sometime next spring.
