 So I'm interviewing Darlene Nukingup from Iqaluit Music Society. Darlene, the first question I'm going to ask you is to describe your program. I've lived and worked in Baffin Island for 32 years now and as an educator and I just recently retired. But my passion is music education and when I was a child going to school, in Halifax we had a wonderful public music education program at that time and that was one of the things I noticed lacking in the school system here in Nunavut. The children who are very artistic and musically inclined, there was no opportunity for music lessons. So I started in Kimerood and I did a lot of singing with my kids there because I was their first English-speaking teacher and I found music was just a natural way to learn language. And then when I came to Iqaluit, there was interest in learning to play the violin and so in 1995 the fiddle club started and it started as an after-school program at Jomi School because that's where I was teaching at the time. And then more and more parents from other schools wanted the same opportunity for their children. And then out of that, a couple parents and a community member, we were just having breakfast together. Wouldn't it be great if there was a summer music camp? And so out of that grew the summer music camp in 1996 and then the Iqaluit Music Society grew from that because to get funding, the first year we had no funding to run the music camp so it was purely volunteer, we had 40 students. But to get funding we had to become a not-for-profit so we became the Iqaluit Music Society and so 23 years later we've been going strong. We have the annual summer music camp. We have now, in addition to the Iqaluit Fiddlers, we have an accordion club and that's kind of beautiful because it's run by a former Fiddler student of mine and now she's taken up the accordion and she helps to co-lead the summer music camp. And we started the choral festival or supporting volunteer teachers in the various schools maybe about 10 years ago, we've been doing the spring music festival and then the Christmas concerts as a way to get more kids involved throughout the school year. That was a long answer to that, sorry. So in this program, who are your target audiences? Like what age group, is there a specific target for children, adults? Because most of us are working in schools, it's six years old and up but there's no upper limit. So we have adults, so if you were to come to one of our Saturday afternoon sessions there's parents of children that are learning to play the violin or the accordion and they're learning alongside, and there's also a couple adults that have no children in the program but I think it's good for the kids to see adults learning and for adults to see kids learning and then for our summer music camp, the bulk of our kids there are 6 to I would say about 10, 11 years old and so to keep some of the teenagers keen, we hire them as recreation leaders or junior instructors so they get to improve their music skills and their leadership skills and we give them some training in that and then they've gone on to become instructors several people are instructors or coordinators of the program now and our goal is to pass it on. So the aim of this program is to improve their singing or their language what is your main aim? Music education in general but also out of music education comes so many leadership opportunities too if you can perform your instrument or you can sing a song in front of people then you can be a leader, you can talk in front of groups you can motivate people because if you don't sing with passion people aren't going to listen to you but if you learn to emote then people will and they can do it in your leadership or in the way you carry out other things in your life we do try and we wish we had way more resource people but at our summer music camp there's 10 workshops so throat singing, drum dancing, accordion, fiddle in up to two songs traditional songs we teach that and choral music and so like at the high school the College Music Society was instrumental in getting a music teacher back Mary focuses a lot in her choir on traditional Inuit songs and so in the fiddle group too we take the dance tunes of the various community paying for some uni-Canadian, we play his songs on the violin and on the accordions, dance tunes from a glulik and the kids are interested in that or like a pond and lit tune we've got kids that are from pond and oh I remember that tune so it helps them to learn the tune and then they can see it if they can play it for their grandparents and one time my fiddlers were playing on CDC radio and Rosie Simon fell and they said you played that just like the accordion dance tune and then the kids felt proud because I mean there's a way to play it like a fiddle tune but then there's a different way to play it like a dance tune or an accordion dance tune that is popping here so we try to bring the music of here of the Inuit into it and it doesn't matter if the child's in or not they all seem to enjoy because this is where they're at so why not do the music of where they're at they're also interested in classical music so we do bring in some western classical but it's of equal importance or the Inuit traditional music is of equal importance or more to our kids than the other but it's good to expose into different like last week when the ensemble made in Canada four Asian women from Toronto came and they played muscles in the corner a dance tune with us at the cathedral and so then it's good for the kids to hear that Is there a lot of interest like is are there a lot of applicants participants in this program like how many do you do with the program Well our music camp is up to 150 kids and that's pretty much capacity I don't have enough money or we don't have enough money to hire more teachers so you get kind of too big and the fiddle club is the same and the accordion club the fiddle club has lots of instruments so it's not the instruments but then when class size gets too big but we don't have like jurisdictions across Canada where you have a music program in a college or in a university where you can draw from their students to teach or a city orchestra or a provincial orchestra we don't have those kind of resource people so we're dependent on I mean every year after music camp people crave guitar instructors but I can't find someone willing to volunteer their time week after week after week to teach so there's a couple of people in town that teach private lessons but not everyone can afford to pay $30 to $40 an hour for a lesson whereas for 23 years we've been providing the fiddle lessons for free and I mean I have the means to volunteer in life and thinking like how do we support more because it's not really if you're a private music teacher you're not really making tons of money but you need to live and so that's one of my fears that if I retire from my passion then who's going to carry it on but right now there's a couple people that are interested but so we have about I would say 50 students in the fiddle club right now in three classes and the classes are broad it would be better if I could offer a couple more so that we could have more homogeneous groups but because I'm a teacher and I know how to differentiate we can do that How do you measure the success of this program? Do you see differences in children at the end of the program? I see it in their faces when they get it because violin is not an easy instrument to play and accordion is kind of unwieldy too for the little ones but when they can play a tune and they're proud and they want to learn another tune that's immediate feedback when parents now plan their summer vacation around the music camp and so when I was asked like two months before summer to change my week I said by the DEA I said I can because parents have planned to come back this week not the week before because we've always had it the third week of August so now parents plan and then kids say I wish music camp could go all year or parents say can there be a winter music camp so those are signs of and when they come back year after year or kids ask the day before camp can I volunteer? I'm sure you can volunteer you can just come and in this program what challenges have you faced and how have you overcome them to make this program successful the success that it is in this community I'm overwhelmed by the support of parents and community members I mean there's several businesses in town like if I'm running an exchange a music exchange with a group from south they come to visit here or I'm running a weekend workshop I can get food easily and year after year like our music camp is the only one that costs us a lot of money like one week of music camp for 150 people is $70,000 that I need cash to pay the visiting instructors and when you think about it because at one point somebody said to me hockey camp they get their teachers for free and I said the salary of a hockey player versus a salary of a music educator and my husband's an artist and he used to teach drum dancing at music camp but one piece of jewelry he can get $250 for and we only pay our teachers $250 a day for camp and that's a small contract so I find it hard to get professional Inuit music educators because they can perform for five minutes and get $500 so working with kids all day so unfortunately for drum dance although last year I did have an artist teaching drum dancing but for throat singing for many years now I've had two high school or young adult Inuit adults and they do in my mind just as good as job as a professional because they know how to break it down they've just learned it recently so that's a challenge because if I'm hiring a professional violin educator I want to be able to hire a professional but in a way I'm helping those younger Inuit to get into professional jobs so in a way it's a step up but if somebody could judge me on that but might not be aware of the the challenge to get someone and the challenge to get funding because in Nunavut we have no multi-year funding I have a colleague in New Brunswick who gets a quarter million dollar commitment from the New Brunswick government for four years so he doesn't have to worry about money every year to run his program whereas every year I have to write proposals and write reports so that's the hardest part not the actual program it's just getting the funding The next question is from your perspective what is Inuit education? Well I mean last year I won the Inspire Partner in Indigenous Education Award and when I got called I said I'm not Indigenous I'm married to an Indigenous man but they said no this award is for a non-Indigenous educator who helps Indigenous students to move forward so Inuit education means it has to be focused on the Inuit way of being, knowing and doing and so even though I'm teaching English here at the college right now I still focus on IQ principles we started every week doing an IQ principle and that leads our discussion and our writing and then now I'm into value so today's was perseverance and we started off by talking what does that mean traditionally and what does it mean now and so the same thing when I work with Inuit children or children in Nunavut the class could be mixed culture but because we're in Nunavut Inuit land then we focus on the perspective of Inuit and because Inuit are open and welcoming it's not that I don't recognize a little Filipino child in my class or an Italian kid we celebrate their culture too but because we're on Inuit land we celebrate and recognize Inuit ways of being and knowing first and then see how it works in the world too The third question I'm going to ask you is in this program that Includes Inuit Music Society what is your vision for them like in the next 10 years like what is your vision for Inuit education over the next 10 years like what improvements would you want to see in the future I would like to see the arts as a strong component of every school program I would like to see us not being just focused on the Caliwet and over the years we we haven't been just to Caliwet like two summers ago we had the Pang Fiddlers come down to our camp and I would like to broaden it and next year we're looking at bringing in some because on Baffin Island alone there's five communities that have fiddle programs now so bringing in some musicians older musicians having them work at our camp as junior instructors and then go back with a professional music educator that's already here and lead a workshop in their community so we expand out more one of my colleagues about five years ago we planned the first Kikitani Kathy Lee from Pang she was the co-principal of Pang a Kikitani music and dance summit and that was amazing because we had kids from five different communities Fiddlers, dancers, guitar players accordion players, singers that came together and at that point it was 25 years of teaching that was the first time there was an inter music exchange there's sports exchanges but kids connect in a different way through the arts and I had two white kids that went to Pang and they were afraid but after Pang we did an exchange with Ottawa we did an exchange with Hollywood and they kept saying to me let's go back to Pang because that made and last year one way I travel and I think a lot of teachers in the north if they want to expose their kids to the world is with Experiences Canada or YMCA Youth Exchange because they pay the airfare all you have to do is fundraise to host and last year Kathy Lee and I were thinking about a way to get us together again so we put in an application to do an exchange and Experiences Canada said to me if a child can only go on one exchange is going to Pangerton their best option when they could go anywhere else in Canada and I said you're believing that it's more beneficial to go south than to go north and they said you're right and so they okayed it but then we had to postpone it because Kathy's mother got sick but I thought because that's the perception out there that it's better to go south to explore communities in your own region So have you done that? I'm hoping we're hoping to plan it again Okay, so you're planning on that? Yeah, we just postponed it for a year So do you know how many kids would be or have you discussed how many kids would go on that exchange? Usually for those kind of exchanges you can have groups of 10 to 30 but they have to be within the ages of 12 and 17, 12 and 18 So it depends on how many teens you have Well, I know first hand from many anecdotal stories being able to play an instrument being able to play the violin has saved lives I also know that I wouldn't have learned as a classroom teacher but I've learned from teaching violin for the past 23 years and leading school choirs too that and I don't audition like there's groups down south where you have to be at a certain level to be in So anybody that wants to come we let come and even one year our precision percussion teacher there was a kid with cerebral policy and at the final concert music camp concert kind of like military drum routine and so the percussion teacher gave the little boy with cerebral policy a pillow so that his beat wouldn't interfere with the beat of the others but he was spot on at the concert and then the percussion teacher who was from Toronto he said I learned a lesson from you because I told him I wouldn't give him a pillow it doesn't matter to us whether he's offbeat he knows that he's up on the stage and he's proud it can be that he's doing it right and he said I learned a lesson because he was spot on he wouldn't have messed up in my mind and I've seen fiddle players that have gone on trips with me that at the time like 12 years ago I thought they couldn't play the pieces now when we get together they laugh at me because I forget the tunes they can play them without the music so and then a couple of people have said that when a friend has committed suicide they take out their violin or they take out their guitar so I think we need more arts as a big plug more arts time up