Activist, lawyer, clothing designer and musician born in Arkisserniaq (Greenland) in 1960.
Aaju Peter was born in 1960 in Arkisserniaq, a village in northern Greenland, and grew up in a nomadic Inuit family. Her father was a pastor and a teacher, and the family moved along the west coast of the island following his postings. Aaju Peter's parents sent her to Denmark to attend high school when she was eleven years old. During her studies, she learned to speak Danish and read English, German, French and Latin, but lost some of her native language and culture; she was teased about this when she returned to Greenland at the age of eighteen. In the early 1980s, she married a man from the Canadian Arctic, and moved to Frobisher Bay (now Iqaluit; Nunavut) in 1981. As a mother of five, soon left to raise the children on her own, she immersed herself in Inuit culture and learned to speak Inuktitut and English. It is in her adopted homeland, which became Nunavut in 1999, that Aaju Peter settled and pursued her career and interests.
In the 1980s, Aaju Peter became an interpreter and volunteered for various cultural organizations and women’s groups, helping to establish a shelter for Inuit women who were victims of domestic violence as well as a food bank in Iqaluit. As of 2020, the Iqaluit Women’s Shelter is still one of the only shelters for Inuit women in the Canadian Arctic. Aaju Peter was also involved in the construction of the Iqaluit breakwater as a heavy equipment operator. The lack of infrastructure in the Canadian Arctic and the inadequacy of current infrastructure to modern life have been constant concerns for her.
In the late 1990s, Aaju Peter enrolled in an Inuit studies program at the Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit. Her academic background and interest in Inuit advocacy also led her to enroll at the Akitsiraq Law School, a legal education program established in Iqaluit in 1999 to address the shortage of lawyers and judges in Nunavut. At the time, there was only one Inuit lawyer in the young territory: Paul Okalik, a future premier of Nunavut. The Akitsiraq Law School allows its students, who are often heads of households, to undertake funded studies without having to travel south. During her first year of study, Aaju Peter was awarded the McCarthy Tetrault Award for academic excellence. In 2005, she received her Bachelor of Law from the University of Victoria (British Columbia), after four years of study and after having articled at a law firm in Ottawa (Ontario). She was called to the bar in 2007 and has since been an advocate for the rights of Inuit communities, from the right to hunt seal and make a living from it to the right to be involved in any political decision-making related to Arctic waters.
As a lawyer, she has written several articles on the rights of Inuit communities: “The seal: An integral part of our culture” (2002); “How do you reconcile International Sovereignty Claims within Inuit Homelands?” (2005); and “Inuit use and occupation” (2013). In 2007, accompanied by her son Aggu, Aaju Peter travelled to The Hague (Netherlands) to challenge a European bill banning the importation of seal products. She then continued to raise public awareness of the Inuit perspective on the issue, including by coordinating the “Celebration of the Seal” event in Iqaluit in March 2008. In 2009, wearing a traditional sealskin parka, or amauti, she addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg (France). The bill was nevertheless passed by a majority vote and Aaju Peter denounced the hypocrisy of such a measure, as well as the economic disaster it was set to cause for Inuit hunters. Aaju Peter’s activism has earned her recognition from the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (literally: “Inuit are united in Canada”): she received an Advancement of International Issues Award in 2008. Having already been featured in John Walker’s documentary Arctic Defenders (2013), which charts the genesis of Nunavut, Aaju Peter also appeared in Alethea Arnaquq-Baril's award-winning documentary Angry Inuk (2016), released in French (Inuk en colère) and in Spanish in 2017, which chronicles the struggle of Inuit communities against European regulations on seal products.
Aaju Peter is concerned by the European boycott of seal products both as a lawyer for her community and also as a craftswoman and designer. Her rediscovery of Inuit culture and traditions in the 1980s allowed her to learn how to work with sealskin, and she was soon designing vests, coats, slippers, mittens, and bags, blending traditional Inuit designs with a contemporary style. The most notable of her creations is the sealskin coat she designed for former Governor General of Canada Adrienne Clarkson. In September 2004, she participated as a designer in the West Nordic Arts and Crafts Symposium (Vestnorden Arts and Crafts) in Reykjavík (Iceland). In 2011, when she received the Order of Canada for her contributions to the preservation and promotion of Inuit culture and the Inuktitut language, she wore an amauti she had made herself and expressed the wish that her two-year-old granddaughter might one day wear a similar garment. In 2018, a parka made by Aaju Peter was displayed along with other traditional Inuit clothing in an exhibition organized by American explorer Matty McNair at the Nunavut Parliament. Fashion design is not the only means by which Aaju Peter defends and transmits her community’s culture. In 2008, while participating as an interpreter in the shooting of Tuuniit: Retracing the Lines of Inuit Tattoos (2010, 2011), a documentary by Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, she had traditional Inuit designs tattooed on her forehead, chin, and hands. In 2009, she lent her voice to an audiobook devoted to the diary of Abraham Ulrikab, an Inuit man from Labrador who died tragically in 1881 in a Parisian garden exhibition.
Aaju Peter is also a musician and singer. In 2007, her first album, The Third Age, was released; it brings together Inuit songs and musical classics from Greenland. In the fall of 2012, Aaju Peter was among the artists invited to give workshops as part of the National Arts Centre Orchestra’s tour of the Canadian Arctic (Iqaluit, Yellowknife, Whitehorse, Pangnirtung, Rankin Inlet). Since the 2010s, she has travelled across Canada, Greenland and Europe to perform drum dancing and recitals of traditional songs, as well as to present her clothing designs.
In addition to her work as a lawyer, activist, fashion designer and musician, Aaju Peter is involved in the development and promotion of school and university programs for Inuit communities. She teaches Inuktitut at Nunavut Sivuniksavut in Ottawa while also serving as a cultural advisor and lecturer for the Nunavut Law Program. Aaju Peter is an inter-generational cultural facilitator, regularly collecting Inuit customary law from community elders on behalf of Nunavut’s Minister of Justice. The desire to pass on Inuit culture has also prompted Aaju Peter to become involved as a guide and advisor in the Arctic tourism industry in Canada and Greenland. As an expert in Inuit culture, she has been asked to contribute to books dedicated to the subject aimed at both Inuit and non-Inuit audiences. She has for example written a preface for Arctic Kaleidoscope: The People, Wildlife and Ever-changing Landscape (2013) by Michelle Valberg and Julie Beun, and the chapter “Moon, seasons, and stars” published in Inuit Worldviews: An Introduction (2017) by Jarich Oosten and Frédéric Laugrand. In October 2019, Aaju Peter was a guest speaker at the 21st Congress of Inuit Studies in Montréal, along with Lisa Qiluqqi Koperqualuk and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, among others; she promoted the need for a university in the Canadian Arctic, which would be focused on the transmission of Inuit knowledge.
Aaju Peter currently lives in Iqaluit, where she continues her activist and artistic work. In the film Twice Colonized (2023) by Danish director Lin Alluna, she recounts the personal tragedy of her son’s suicide and the quest for justice that brought her before her colonizers, both in Canada and Greenland.
The language of the Inuit, by Aaju Peter
Report on Aaju Peter in Montréal