Biography on mochael kusugaku
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Michael Kusugak
Canadian Inuk children's writer and storyteller
Michael Arvaarluk Kusugak (Inuktitut: ᐊᕐᕚᕐᓗᒃ ᑯᓱᒐᖅ) is a Canadian Inuk storyteller and children's writer, who tells stories about Arctic and Inuit culture. He was born April 27, 1948, just north of Chesterfield Inlet, at a point of land called Qatiktalik (known as Cape Fullterton in English). That same spring of 1948, he and his family moved to Repulse Bay and in 1960 to Rankin Inlet. As of 2022, he lives in Manitoba, near Lake Winnipeg.[1]
In 1954, a plane arrived and at the age of six, Michael Kusugak and many of his friends were sent away to residential school. The teachers were strict and did not allow the children to speak their own language, Inuktitut. Kusugak remembers sitting in the back of the class crying most of the time. The following year, Michael successfully hid when the plane came to take him and his friends away again. However, he returned the following year and became one of the first Inuit in the eastern Arctic to graduate from high school. He was also educated in Yellowknife, Churchill and Saskatoon. He has later worked as an educational administrator for Nunavut Arctic College.[citation needed]
Michael Kusugak grew up living a traditional, nomadic Inuit life with h
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Q&A With Inuit Author Michael Kusugak
The eldest of 12 children, award-winning author and storyteller Michael Kusugak was born in a sod hut near Repulse Bay, Nunavut, and lived his early years in the nomadic Inuit tradition. In 1954, at the tender age of six, he was sent to a residential school in Chesterfield Inlet, Nunavut, 400 km from home. The children were not allowed to speak in their own language (Inuktitut), and as Michael says, “The only thing I remember about that year is that I sat in the back of the class and cried the whole time.”
After returning to Repulse Bay for the summer, Michael was determined to stay put, and when the plane came back in the fall, he recalls, “I ran away and hid in the hills until I saw it fly away, then I went home. I played hooky for an entire year.”
After that episode, there were more years in residential schools before Michael went to high school in Saskatoon, where he lived with Robert Williamson, an anthropologist and friend of the Kusugak family from years spent doing research in the Arctic. The late professor became Michael’s foster father and described teenage Michael as a “very bright, very charming, very lively minded young fellow.”
Weaving fantasy and reality together, Michael aims to help preser
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Michael Arvaarluk Kusugak (author/storyteller)
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