A New Generation of Inuit Throat Singers Are Shaping an Arctic Sound
17.08.2024 - 09:28
/ cntraveler.com
/ Nova Scotia
This is part of Global Sounds, a collection of stories spotlighting the music trends forging connections in 2024.
Shina Novalinga’s TikTok videos regularly rack up millions of views, but this Indigenous influencer, with her long flowing black locks and traditional facial tattoos, isn’t sharing the hottest new songs or the latest fashionable ’fits with her 4.3 million followers. Rather, over the past few years, the Montreal-based Inuk throat singer has been acquainting a broader audience with a time-honored tradition that faced extinction during Canada’s colonial era. Through throat singing, she’s not only reclaiming a sound; she’s reclaiming an ancestral identity.
“Inuktitut was my first language, but I’m slowly losing it since I don’t really have that opportunity to practice my culture as much as if I lived up north,” she recently said in a TikTok video. “That’s pretty much how I started TikTok—showing my journey reclaiming my culture while living in a big city. I feel that so many people can relate to my story, and I think it’s never too late to learn your culture.”
Known as katajjaq, this musical performance is an ancient call-and-response contest. Traditionally, two women face each other and alternate guttural sounds emulating sounds of the natural world—growling wildlife, blowing wind, flowing rivers. In Novalinga’s videos, she stands chest to chest with her mother, Caroline, both of them dressed in traditional clothing such as silapaaq tops and qauruti headbands with dangling beads. The chantlike melody of sighs and shrieks, grunts and gasps, builds in speed and intensity until one person finally runs out of breath or bursts into laughter.
Though it appears fairly free-flowing, throat singing is a skill that requires years of practice and perseverance. It originated millennia ago in the Arctic as a way for women to stay warm and entertained while men were away on extended hunting trips. Other Indigenous groups across the globe, including the Tuvan peoples of Mongolia and the Xhosa peoples of South Africa, have their own variations, both of which involve manipulating the vocal tract almost like a musical instrument to elicit deep, long tones. Now, the Inuit version is seeing a revival in broader pop culture thanks to a handful of prominent culture bearers like Novalinga.
Tanya Tagaq, another artist pushing throat singing into the ether, is self-taught almost by accident. While she was attending college in Nova Scotia, her mom mailed her a cassette recording of throat singing to ease her homesickness for her native Nunavut—Canada’s northernmost territory with the country’s largest Inuit population. Over the course of a few years, she began practicing in the shower with zero intention of doing it