Under The Same Stars
text and photography by Acacia Johnson
Winter in the Arctic: vibrant, pulsing. The throb of club music pours from the community hall, streets alive with the roar of skidoos and the cries of dog teams. Faces illuminated by the eerie glow of iPad screens in this polar night, the ding of text messages, the glow of the moon, the buzz of televisions and sewing machines and the silent stillness of hunters waiting, waiting. Feasts of walrus, seal and Coca-Cola; everyone talking about the land, returning to the land. Dancing, praying, hunting, sewing, playing games, telling stories, passing time. Waiting for spring, for the return of life - yet everything continues, even in darkness.
The north of Baffin Island, in the Canadian territory of Nunavut, is one of the coldest inhabited regions on earth. For nearly 5,000 years, the Inuit have lived a nomadic lifestyle in this landscape, subsisting off of the land and the sea until the 1950s. Communities today navigate shifts between the lifestyles and values of elders raised in a traditional hunting society, and the young generations growing up in the wake of colonization, with social media and access to the Internet.
Photographed over four months in the community of Ikpiarjuk (Arctic Bay), Nunavut in 2014-15, Under the Same Stars celebrates the vibrancy of community life and the Arctic winter landscape during the darkest time of the year.
"The immediate environment and individual experiences as well as collective (related to the history of families and arctic communities) are the main sources of artistic inspiration, including themes represented from shamanism and imagination."
A transformation scene where the shaman merge with protector auxiliary animal spirits.
Even though many young artists have not experinced themselves these transformations, their depiction is still important in the tradition. The stories are passed on by elders through oral tradition.
