Unnuaq

Terry Uyarak hums all the time. Out on the sea ice with his dog team, or crossing the land by snowmobile through the long Arctic dark, he is working through melodies. "I hear music everywhere," he told CBC North in 2020. For most of his life that music stayed out on the land with him. By the time he released a song under his own name, Uyarak had spent fourteen years as a musician, actor and juggler with Artcirq, the Inuit circus collective based in his home community of Igloolik, Nunavut, and he had been hunting and travelling by dog team since boyhood. His records grew out of all of it.

Uyarak was born and raised in Igloolik, a community of strong Inuktitut language and tradition on a small island between the Canadian mainland and Baffin Island. Artcirq had been founded there in 1998 by Guillaume Saladin, a group of Montreal circus artists and Igloolik youth, and Uyarak joined in 2006. He learned his first music from friends in the collective, only the basics, he later said, enough to play and sing along with them. Artcirq blended acrobatics, juggling and clowning with Inuit games, drum dancing and throat singing, and in his years with the group it took that mix from Mexico to Greece to Timbuktu, to the opening ceremony of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics and to Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee pageant at Windsor Castle. The collective came to call Uyarak its isumataq, the thinker. His knowledge of hunting and of travel on the land shaped Artcirq's cultural expeditions, which took young performers out of the community to learn from Elders.

Between 2012 and 2013, two of the friends he had learned music with died. Uyarak stopped playing music for about five years. Andrew Morrison, frontman of the Jerry Cans and co-founder of the Iqaluit label Aakuluk Music, eventually coaxed him back to singing and kept pressing him to make an album of his own, something Uyarak said he had never had the confidence to attempt. "I thought maybe I could try," he told CBC. "Even if it's not that good, I'll still have an album to tell my children about one day."

Some of the songs were already waiting. Uyarak wrote 'Inuit Nunangat' in 2012 about the Inuit ancestors he called his heroes, and about the beauty and extremity of the land he was coming to understand as an adult. "The land has always been our trouble and our freedom," he said when the song was finally released.

While the album took shape, Uyarak was also co-artistic director and a performer in Unikkaaqtuat, a large production created by Artcirq with Montreal's The 7 Fingers and Iqaluit's Taqqut Productions. It brought Inuit oral traditions to the stage through circus, music, video projection and the drawings of Germaine Arnaktauyok, and toured across Canada, reaching the National Arts Centre in Ottawa in January 2020.

'Inuit Nunangat' became his first single in August 2020 and climbed into the CBC Music Top 20. The full album, Nunarjua Isulinginniani (Before the World Ends), followed on Aakuluk Music on October 30, 2020. Uyarak recorded it at Aakuluk's Iqaluit studio, a converted garage soundproofed from the inside with caribou, muskox, seal and polar bear skins, with Jace Lasek of The Besnard Lakes producing. Its fourteen tracks are sung entirely in Inuktitut. Between the songs, Igloolik Elder Simon Qamaniq tells stories, and Uyarak's own field recordings carry his dog team howling and the wind moving across the tundra. Riit, Celina Kalluk and Becky Han sing with him. The title spoke to the fragile moment Nunavut was living through in the pandemic, and to his own sense of standing at the edge of something. The record closes with 'Igloolik', a bright, affectionate song for home.

That same year Uyarak and a friend set out from Igloolik on a traditional polar bear hunt, ten days by dog team with no GPS and no phones.

Nearly every song on the album came out of his own life. 'Anuri', sung with Riit, was written by Solomon Uyarasuk, a fellow Artcirq member and one of Uyarak's late friends. Uyarak dedicated the recording to Uyarasuk's family, his friends and the children named after him. 'Aniqsaatuinnarit', with Becky Han, came from a hard stretch that Uyarak and his wife Tanya went through together during the season of twenty-four-hour sun; the two built the song by trading lines of encouragement, and Uyarak folded in his father's advice that people shape the direction of their own lives. 'Inuugannuk' gathered the small things his parents and late grandmother had told him, lessons that only became instructions for living as an Inuk as he grew older. In the lyric his father tells him he will never become a white man and sends him out to do greater things for his culture. Sung against howling huskies and a decaying piano, it is the album's most stark moment. Its video followed the pressures of community life in Nunavut, with long walks and feeding the dogs as the things that ease them.

In March 2021 Nunarjua Isulinginniani was nominated for the JUNO Award for Indigenous Artist or Group of the Year. Uyarak, at home in Igloolik with Tanya and their four children, could not stop smiling when his label sent him the news. "I never, ever, ever thought it would go this far with my music," he told Nunatsiaq News.

The dog team heard on the record is his own. Uyarak grew up travelling by dog team with his father and later raised a team of his own, learning from his father and from Elders until one of them called him a qimuksiqti, a dog team driver, and he accepted the word for himself. His hunting feeds his dogs as well as his family. In April 2022 he entered the Nunavut Quest, the territory's premier dog sled race, running for the first time since the pandemic had shut it down. Just reaching the starting line meant mushing his team from Igloolik to Arctic Bay. The race began on April 18, the coldest April 18 the area had seen in twenty years, and Uyarak crossed third on the opening leg. That first night a young musher's harnesses were chewed apart by a stray dog, ending his race. Uyarak told him his time would come. Bad weather added two days to the week-long run back to Igloolik, and Uyarak brought his team home in fourth place.

He came off the trail and into ATIILU!, a three-song EP released on National Indigenous Peoples Day, June 21, 2022. Aakuluk compared it to Bob Dylan going electric at Newport. Uyarak took 'Aniqsaatuinnarit', 'Inuit Nunangat' and 'Tasiunnga' from his debut and rebuilt them for a loud electric band as 'Aniqsaatuinnarit II', 'Inuit Nunangat II' and 'Tasiunnga II'. He dedicated the EP to his late mother, Louise Qamaniq. "Our time in life is our gift from our parents," he said. 'Tasiunnga II' went on to become the opening theme of Uvagut TV's Inuktitut series Tunnganarniq Nunagijavut.

His second album, Unnuaq, arrived exactly a year later, on June 21, 2023. The title means night, and Uyarak called its nine songs healing songs, joining memories of himself as a boy with his life as a husband, father and working artist. Musically it opened wide. Horns blaze through 'Inuuqatigi&arukki', electric guitar leads and throat singing run through the first half, and the back half returns to the hushed, wintry sound of his debut on the whispered, string-laden 'Tisijumut'. Behind it all was an early memory of hearing older Inuit songs, long discouraged by the church, beginning to be sung again in Igloolik. Their return had shown him as a child that music could carry what a people nearly lost.

'Nutaraullunga', which means 'When I was a kid', goes back to the long summers his extended family spent camped more than sixty kilometres north of Igloolik, hunting seal, Arctic char, caribou and walrus. The trips ended when his grandmother died. 'Inuuqatigi&arukki' is about friends and family, and the simple assurance that all is well as long as they are near. The title song is told in two voices. In the first verse a daughter speaks to her father, who drinks, with understanding and a love that does not give way; in the second the father answers, remorseful for the hurt he has caused and for failing to give her the protection she needed. The night of the title is the dark that has to be lived through before morning.

Artcirq has stayed at the centre of his life. When the collective marked its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2023, Uyarak was its co-artistic director alongside Guillaume Saladin, and he brought a donation of recording equipment home to Igloolik so young people could hold jam sessions and practise drumming and throat singing. He leads Artcirq's Nunaqpaa, the summer inland caribou hunt, with Saladin and the Elders Peter and Elisapi Awa. In February 2025 fire destroyed Artcirq's Black Box studio and gutted the Igloolik arena around it. By that fall the group was performing again, including a show aboard the Coast Guard icebreaker Amundsen.

His voice has also turned up across Aakuluk's growing circle. He sang on 'Tulugaq' from Aasiva's 2021 album Niriunniq and helped her translate her lyrics between English and Inuktitut. In 2024 he appeared on 'Iqanaijarumanngittunga' from Euphemisms, the debut album by Andrew Morrison's collective Echoes Of…, and in February and March of that year he joined Morrison, Artcirq members and Greenlandic musicians on a twelve-date tour of Japan running from Tokyo to Hokkaido. Later in 2024 he sang twice on Qiyuarjuk's Qanuq?, on 'Hello-raaluk' with Echoes Of… and on 'Upigivagit'.

In June 2026 his late-night set of Inuktitut songs at the Alianait Arts Festival in Iqaluit filled the dance floor. In August, Echoes Of… released Last Days, a record of Andrew Morrison's piano pieces, each heard once as an instrumental and once with Inuktitut poetry spoken over it by Uyarak or by James Ungalaq of Northern Haze. Uyarak's poems carry 'House Is Home v. II' and 'Colours II'. "They write absolutely beautiful words," Morrison said of his two poets, and the album came with English and Inuktitut guides so listeners could follow them. A new song, 'Hunting Song', is due on October 23 as Nunavut's piece of We Are Busy Bodies' Map of Canada series, thirteen square flexidiscs that fit together into a map of the country, limited to 350 copies.

In September 2026 Uyarak opened the APTN documentary series Go North by taking its crew out from Igloolik on a walrus hunt, showing the catch, the kill and the butchering the way his community has always done them. Asked why he chose walrus, he kept it simple. "We are known to be walrus people," he said, "so why not do something with walrus."

-Robert Williston