There’s an Inuktitut word, “ajunamat,” that translates to “it cannot be helped”—a concept that embodies many Inuit people’s adaptive way of living, given the unpredictable weather conditions of their homeland and hunting grounds. The researcher Tom Artiss has written that Inuit music in the 21st century lives at the intersection of ajunamat and sappulik, a word that means to “never give up.” To pair the two ideas is to join acceptance with resilience. This is certainly true of the Inuk artist Tanya Tagaq’s work. When Moravian missionaries traveled to Canada in the late 18th century, they prohibited Inuit drumming, dancing, and throat singing. Tagaq, on the other hand, fuses them with an array of contemporary styles of music, from downtempo rap to industrial rock to contemporary classical.
The adaptability and indomitable spirit of her people are present in Tagaq’s politics, which encompass firm, assured stances on environmentalism, women’s rights, and indigenous rights. Those themes permeate Toothsayer, a companion to the “Polar Worlds” exhibit at London’s National Maritime Museum. Bearing a title that suggests both prescience and defiance—“We are going to have to get our fists up and our teeth out to carve our way to survival in this world,” Tagaq explained—Toothsayer is both a love letter to the Inuit and a call to arms for the preservation of their culture.
“Icebreaker” kicks off the EP in devastating fashion. An ominous drone is soon joined by slow, insistent drumming, suggesting something steadily chipping away at indispensable ice. Above the mechanistic beat, Tagaq’s voice oscillates between gasps and growls. It doesn't just sound like a portrait of the merciless Arctic winter, but a meditation on the ecological crisis at hand. Like “Icebreaker,” the rest of the EP’s songs communicate without lyrics. And while much of the instrumentation is thoughtful (the Iranian-British electronic musician Ash Koosha contributed to the delicate “Snowblind” and the raging “Submerged”), nothing is as potent as Tagaq’s voice.
Her virtuosity is impressive—she’s able to move between high-pitched squeaks and guttural bellows, gnarly cackling and fierce howls. What’s most affecting, though, is when we hear katajjaq—the vocal game traditionally played among Inuit women while men are away hunting. It involves two women standing face to face, exchanging repetitive vocal motifs until one fails to keep the pattern going. In older recordings of katajjaq, it’s easy to sense just how entertaining they were: Many games end with laughter.
The katajjaq we hear across Tagaq’s discography is different—it’s performed solo, and she’s not laughing. On “Icebreaker,” the technique runs through the song only to be suddenly silenced—a suggestion, perhaps, of the impending extinction of many traditional practices—and the way she executes her vocalizing on her own feels like a somber foreshadowing of a time when others won’t be present to join her. On “Submerged,” her katajjaq is delivered over simple, repetitive percussion that’s reminiscent of Inuit drumming. When the song reaches its climax, Tagaq swerves into piercing shrieks that are bolstered by electrifying guitar-like sounds. The message: Calamity is near, and the Inuit are its victims.
“Polar Worlds” is about the history of British exploration and scientific enquiry, but it is also about the effects of climate change on the region—a topic central to Tagaq’s work. The issue is serious: Winters are becoming shorter, the weather is getting harsher, the Arctic ice pack grows ever smaller. The livelihood of Inuit people is at stake, and the sustainability of their culture is in danger—the effects of climate change have meant fewer opportunities for younger generations to learn skills their forebears used. If the fury of songs like “Icebreaker” and “Submerged” is keyed directly to the impending crisis, the same is also true of the melancholy cast of the EP’s quietest songs. In “Hypothermia,” her katajjaq takes on the desperate cadence of someone panting, while the crystalline harmonies of “Snowblind” are both a vivid evocation of landscape and a bittersweet expression of pain—the pain of knowing that this could all be gone.
