Baker Lake, Nunavut woman retraces her family’s traditional 200-km migration route

Comfortably seated inside her parents’ home in Baker Lake, Nunavut, Gayle Uyagaqi Kabloona is finally able to rest her feet after completing a 23-day trek where she retraced her family’s traditional migration route. 

In the past, Kabloona’s family would spend their summers at Kitikkat and Kanngujaqtalik, close to where the Back River meets the Hermann River.

From there, they’d move south toward winter caribou hunting grounds close to the Meadowbank Mine — and that’s what Kabloona sought to do this past summer. 

“I wanted to recreate this hike. That or the track that my family members did before colonization and before kids were starting to be taken away for residential school,” she said. 

Kabloona, an artist who now lives in Ottawa, was part of a group of five who set out on the 200-kilometre journey on Sept. 1.

Near the beginning of the trek, Kabloona found her great-grandfather’s old boat and some of her family’s graves. 

Also lying there all these years later was a toy airplane built out of tin cans. Kabloona said her 76-year-old father and his friends used to play with that toy as children.

“It was so ingenious and it gives you such a good idea of how innovative and competent people were back then, to be able to survive and to have fun and just live their entire lives out there with the things that they had,” she said.

Of course, with an expedition of that length, there were bound to be some hair-raising moments. The group had to scare off wolves and make some dodgy river crossings.

A muskox also charged at Kabloona’s sister — not exactly the type of conditions a father wants to hear about. 

“He said that he wasn’t sleeping very well because he knows exactly what can go wrong and how easily things can go wrong,” Kabloona said. “But yeah, he was really proud.”

Kabloona’s father and a few of her cousins also joined the flight to the starting point of the trek, before they sent the group of five hikers off on their journey. 

But even that short moment there sparked joy in her father.

“He was giddy. He was like a little kid again and he was scampering around on the rocks and fishing and we caught some fish for dinner … I haven’t seen him that happy in a long time,” she said.

Her father was born next to a lake near the end of the route, which was his home for part of his childhood before he was sent to Baker Lake for residential school. 

“Most people that went to residential school, I think, had a really hard time, and I knew that going into this,” Kabloona said.

“But it was nice to hear the stories from before all of that, when you can see how much his parents loved him [and] what people were up to, the parenting styles, and the love that everyone had for one another.”

One of her fellow hikers is a videographer who filmed many moments across their 23-day trip, which they’re now using for an art project. 

“We’re hoping to make it just like a beautiful journey through the Back River area and to be able to share that with people.”