Government administrator in Igloolik (Nunavut) born in the early 1970s.
Lily Taqaugak Tongak, also known as Lily Kadlutsiaq-Tongak, was probably born at the beginning of the 1970s. She is the fourth of nine children born to Josiah Kadlutsiaq and Damaris Ittukusuk Kadlutsiaq. Bobby, her younger brother, inherited the name of their maternal grandmother, Qaumayuq. Lily Taqaugak Tongak is herself a mother of two: a daughter, Jennifer Tongak, and an adopted son, to whom she gave her mother’s first name Damaris as sauniq (“homonym”). Lily Taqaugak Tongak is the niece of Morgan, Rhoda, Titus, and Esther Arnakallak and the granddaughter of Samuel Arnakallak, also known as Samuel Anukudluk.
Lily Taqaugak Tongak is best known for her testimony to Nancy Wachowich, a social anthropologist at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland) specializing in colonial history and in Inuit social movements in Pond Inlet (Inuktitut: Mittimatalik) and Igloolik, in present-day Nunavut. In Nancy Wachowich’s chapter “Stitching Lives: A Family History of Making Caribou Skin in the Canadian Arctic,” published in the book Making and Growing: Anthropological Studies of Organisms and Artefacts (2014), edited by Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold, Lily Taqaugak Tongak describes the life of her mother, Damaris. Damaris Ittukusuk Kadlutsiaq was born in 1943 in Nalluaq, near Pont Inlet; Nalluaq was one of the last traditional Inuit camps. In 1953, Damaris Ittukusuk Kadlutsiaq’s family was forcibly relocated to Craig Harbour (Ellesmere Island, in present-day Nunavut) in the High Arctic, located around 50 kilometres south-east of Grise Fiord, then, a week later, to Lindstrom Peninsula (Ellesmere Island), 64 kilometres further north. Four years later, in 1957, Damaris Ittukusuk Kadlutsiaq and her family—her mother Qaumayuq, her father Arnakallak, and some of her siblings, including Rhoda, Esther (or Maikpainnuk), Morgan, Timonie, Phoebe, and Jonathan—were allowed to return to Pond Inlet. Damaris Ittukusuk Kadlutsiaq’s family was one of many Inuit families who were forcibly relocated from the Arctic to the High Arctic by the Canadian government at the beginning of the 1950s. The government aimed to populate the High Arctic in order to secure Canadian territorial sovereignty in this region. The displaced Inuit families were unfamiliar with the extreme conditions of the High Arctic : they had to fight for their survival and remain, to this day, deeply traumatized by this experience. However, this did not seem to have been the case for Damaris Ittukusuk Kadlutsiaq, who, according to Lily Taqaugak Tongak, spoke wistfully about her memories of Ellesmere Island and wished to return. Mother and daughter had planned to visit, but Damaris Ittukusuk Kadlutsiaq died, at the age of fifty-four, before they had the opportunity to do so.
The custodian of her family’s history and of the memory of her mother Damaris Ittukusuk Kadlutsiaq, Lily Taqaugak Tongak now lives in Igloolik, where she works as a government administrator.