Tukkiapik, Sachariasie

Storyteller, elder and anthropologists’ informant born in Kangirsuk (Nunavik) in 1911 – died in 1979.

Sachariasie Tukkiapik, also known as Sakkariasi Tukkiapik was born in Kangirsuk, a village in Nunavik, near the west coast of Ungava Bay. There is very little information recorded about his life. His ujamik, the disk number that was assigned to all Inuit by federal government beginning in 1941, was E8-719. As of March 28, 1968, Sachariasie Tukkiapik started to record in notebooks all manner of information about Inuit myths, stories and culture. He shared these notebooks with visiting anthropologists. In 1968, at the request of anthropologist Bernard Saladin d’Anglure, he wrote down two Inuit legends about birds. These legends were published posthumously in 1995 (in Inuktitut, English and French) as « A Man That Was Married to a Goose » and « The Story of the Hawk and the Snow Goose » in Tumivut, the Avataq Cultural Institute’s magazine. The first of those two legends is the most famous: its French language version lives on, as it was republished in a 2011 blog post by the Inuit Art Zone, a contemporary Inuit art gallery containing works from Nunavut, Nunavik and Northwest Territories artists, located in Québec City.

Sachariasie Tukkiapik died in 1979.

This biography is based on the available written material during a collective research carried out during 2018-2021. It is possible that mistakes and facts need to be corrected. If you notice an error, or if you wish to correct something in an author's biography, please write to us at imaginairedunord@uqam.ca and we will be happy to do so. This is how we will be able to have more precise presentations, and to better promote Inuit culture.

 

(c) International Laboratory for Research on Images of the North, Winter and the Arctic, Université du Québec à Montréal, 2018-2021, Daniel Chartier and al.