Memoirist and elementary school teacher born in Pond Inlet (Nunavut) in the second half of the 1940s.
Esther Arnakallak, also known as Maikpainnuk Arnakallak, is an author and elementary school teacher. Probably born in the second half of the 1940s, she is originally from Nalluaq, a camp located near Pond Inlet (in Inuktitut: Mittimatalik), on Baffin Island, in present-day Nunavut. She is the daughter of Qaumayuq and Samuel Arnakallak and has several siblings. She is also a mother. Following her studies at the Arctic College in Frobisher Bay (now Iqaluit), in present-day Nunavut, Esther Arnakallak taught at the elementary school in Pond Inlet for most of her career.
In 1953, the Canadian government forced Esther Arnakallak’s family to relocate to the High Arctic. Like for many other Inuit families and communities displaced to this unfamiliar, hostile, and distant land, the experience was difficult for the Arnakallak family. In August 1957, they were allowed to return to Nalluaq. Unfortunately, Esther Arnakallak's paternal grandmother and namesake, Maikpainnuk, contracted tuberculosis in the High Arctic and died in a sanatorium in Hamilton (Ontario) before she could return to Baffin Island. Esther Arnakallak's generation was the last to grow up according to the traditional, semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life, before displacement, sedentarization, and schooling were imposed in the 1950s and 1960s.
In 1998, Esther Arnakallak published an Inuktitut-language memoir entitled Makpainnup surusiunivininga nunaliralaangullutik ilagiit. The book is unilingual, but the title has been translated into English : Makpainuk's Outpost Camp Memories. In 2007, alongside other educators and Elders, Esther Arnakallak contributed to the development of an education policy document for the Nunavut government, Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit. Education framework for Nunavut curriculum.
Several members of Esther Arnakallak’s family are also authors. Her niece, Lily Taqaugak Tongak, contributed to an article by anthropologist Nancy Wachowich, published in Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold’s Making and Growing: Anthropological Studies of Organisms and Artefacts (2014). This article focuses on the life story of Damaris, an Elder of the Arnakallak family who experienced the High Arctic relocation. Esther Arnakallak’s sister, Rhoda Arnakallak, contributed to the documentary Nallua (2015) by Christian Mathieu Fournier, and her brother Titus Arnakallak is a translator and columnist.
Today, Esther Arnakallak still lives in Pond Inlet, where she is now an Elder and a grandmother.