Author, activist, and hunter born in Uugaqsiuvik (Nunavik) in 1953.
Larry Audlaluk was born in 1953 in Uugaqsiuvik, a traditional settlement located east of Inukjuak, in Nunavik. When he was just two years old, seven Inuit families, including his own, were relocated by the Canadian federal government to Canada’s northernmost island, Ellesmere, near the community of Grise Fiord. This village was established in 1953 to house newly arrived Inuit in the High Arctic and, above all, to preserve Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic. Larry Audlaluk’s family settled there in 1962, when the village school opened its doors. Life in this new environment was extremely difficult: the abundant resources that the government had promised were non-existent, and the Inuit displaced from Inukjuak lived in poverty and isolation. Larry Audlaluk’s father died of exhaustion approximately ten months after his family had settled in the region. His wife had to face grief and exile as a single mother to her children, who were profoundly affected by this difficult childhood: Larry Audlaluk has admitted he had to overcome his anger and addiction problems as he entered adulthood; his sister Minnie and brother Samwillie have also shared traumatic memories of this time.
Larry Audlaluk has remained a resident of Grise Fiord (Inuktitut: Aujuittuq or Ausuittuq), a place with which he maintains a complex relationship: on the one hand, staying in Grise Fiord as an adult meant being separated from his family, who returned to Inukjuak in the late 1980s, and he had a feeling of being robbed of the life he should have led in Nunavik; on the other hand, he is involved in this community, which he now claims as his own, for better or worse. A hunter, he became a community leader and briefly considered a political career, running in the 2004 Nunavut general election in the Quttiktuq electoral district. He was inducted into the Order of Canada in 2007 for his leadership, community involvement, and efforts to preserve and promote Grise Fiord’s cultural heritage. Since the late 1990s, he has been involved in a variety of films. In 1998, he played the role of Ahnalkah in Kevin Hooks’ film Glory and Honor, set at the North Pole. In 2007, he appeared in French director Yves Billy’s short documentary Un détroit surgi des glaces (literally: “A strait arising from ice”), which focuses on the opening of a new sea passage due to melting ice in the North. Lastly, in 2010, he was involved in Martha of the North, a film directed by Marquise Lepage, which recounts the story of the family of the young Martha Flaherty, who were also relocated near Grise Fiord by the government in the 1950s. Larry Audlaluk has been the oldest member of the Grise Fiord community since 2008 and has held a number of local positions, including president of the cooperative and member of the board of directors of the Iviq Hunters & Trappers Organization. He is also a well-known critic of the federal government: for example, he has denounced the water shortages and reservoir failures that regularly plague Grise Fiord, and in 2016, he challenged Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the issue of global warming in a video interview broadcast by the CBC.
Larry Audlaluk has devoted his life to the fight for recognition by the federal government of the human disaster of the High Arctic Relocation, but also to the transmission of this hidden and little-known part of Canadian history. In 1993, he testified about his experience before the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. His efforts, along with those of fellow High Arctic exile John Amagoalik, finally paid off in 2010, when the federal government acknowledged its wrongdoings and officially apologized to the Inuit of Grise Fiord and Resolute. Larry Audlaluk then became involved in various projects to promote the history of Ellesmere Island: in 2012, he delivered a video testimony as part of the Iqqaumavara oral history project; he also took part in the activities of the Qikiqtani Truth Commission, an Inuit initiative supported by Makivvik and charged with investigating the genocidal acts committed against the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic in the 1950s and 1960s. In 2017, the CBC devoted an article to Larry Audlaluk’s account of his childhood in the High Arctic. He is also involved in the Nirjutiqarvik Area Co-Management Committee.
Larry Audlaluk’s love for knowledge, history, and literature led him to author a book about his life, which he drafted over several years, then perfected over a two-year period in collaboration with Inhabit Media, an Inuit publishing house based in Iqaluit (Nunavut) and Toronto (Ontario). The book, entitled What I Remember, What I Know: The Life of a High Arctic Exile, was published in 2020, and earned him nominations for the Governor General’s Literary Award (in the English-language non-fiction category) and for the J. W. Dafoe Book Prize, both in 2021. For Larry Audlaluk, writing is not only therapeutic, but also fulfills two other goals of his: to nuance Canada’s official history, and to send a message of courage and resilience to young Inuit. In the wake of this publication, Larry Audlaluk continues to dedicate himself to transmitting the story of Grise Fiord through various means: in 2021, he filmed a video for the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (literally: “Inuit are united in Canada”), and in 2024, he participated in the podcast “Our stories: Indigenous book club,” produced by the National Arts Centre, in 2024.
Today, Larry Audlaluk continues to reside in Grise Fiord. He is working on a forthcoming book about explorers in the High Arctic.