“When I think about living how our grandparents did, it seems exhausting,” said Ms. Saila, heading to the freezer, where plastic bags of “country food” — caribou, seal, beluga — bumped up against frozen waffles and Cool Whip.
Ms. Saila comes from a line of artists. Her great-grandfather, Pauta Saila, was an acclaimed carver, and her grandfather, Mikisiti Saila, followed his footsteps.
Mikisiti made enough money to buy a snowmobile, and on spring evenings he would hook it up to a qamutik — a homemade sled — and take his family to nearby lakes to ice-fish. In the summer, they would set out in his boat for weeks and pitch canvas tents on a rocky island, where Ms. Saila learned to pluck sea gull eggs, pick orange cloudberries and hunt.
The Inuit call this being “on the land.” Hunting and foraging are an essential part of their identity, even for those to whom it’s a distant memory.
“It was family time,” Ms. Saila said. “When you are out on the land, it’s peaceful.”
In 2008, her grandfather died of tuberculosis, leaving no savings for his family. (There are no banks in Cape Dorset.) Every one of his valuable carvings had been sold. His boat went to an uncle, Ms. Saila said. The snowmobile broke down, then disappeared.
The trips on the land became more infrequent.
When Ms. Saila was in the 11th grade, she became pregnant. She dropped out of school and got a job working at the co-op’s late-night convenience store. Residents still recount her confrontation with a drunk customer.
“I got mad — I head-butted her,” she said, giggling at the memory. She says she quit.