Olivia Grandy
Saskatoon StarPhoenix
Each time Inuk education professor Karla Jessen Williamson prepares a course for students at the University of Saskatchewan, she ensures she can also deliver her lectures in her first language, Inuktitut.
“I make absolutely certain that I can actually express that in my own language,” said the 72-year-old, who grew up in Greenland as one of nine children in a tight-knit family.
“So that, should one of my grandmothers all of a sudden appear to me, I have to be able to deliberate in my own language as to what I’m doing,” she explained.
Her office has a muted, warm red accent wall, a matching armchair and several personal items, including a pair of tiny sealskin boots made by her mother.
Along with teaching from a decolonial lens, Jessen Williamson has spent many years deeply involved in Inuit sovereignty (with an impressive list of past policy positions documented on her Wikipedia page, including serving on Greenland’s Commission for Reconciliation).
So, when she first heard about U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent threats to take control of her homeland, she was “very troubled by this very immediate and very urgent message,” she said.
As Greenland has worked to negotiate self-governance with Denmark, Jessen Williamson says there has been a sense of recent progress. That comes despite a history of Denmark imposing forced assimilation policies on the Inuit population, who now make up nearly 90 per cent of the approximately 57,000 people.
“In my thinking, we were just about there, and bang, comes Trump’s assertion that he wants to take over,” said the scholar who has contributed to work on possible constitutional paths toward Greenland’s self-governance.
For her siblings still living in Greenland and Denmark, she says the news has brought a sense of “shock” and “desperation.”
“Anxiety, desperation, not sleeping properly, not breathing properly, and not being able to cope with the stress associated with that. These are the things that I’ve heard,” she said.
A journey to Saskatchewan to cultivate ‘independent thought’
Due to Danish forced assimilation, Jessen Williamson’s family was displaced from her birthplace of Appamiut to Maniitsoq, Greenland. Eager to attend university, Jessen Williamson went to high school in Denmark, where she lived with Danish families away from her culture and language.
She then returned to Greenland to pursue teacher training, but was soon searching for a destination to attend a “proper university.”
“But I did not want to do that in Denmark because I was tired of being exposed to racism and annulment of the Inuit language, and I was not going to be defending it on my own… So I thought, ‘Well, Canada, sounds good’,” she said with a chuckle.
Jessen Williamson came to Saskatoon to attend the College of Education at the age of 24.
“I wanted to find out what the other Indigenous peoples were doing… And then (I) learned an incredible amount (from) their processes of education and processes of wanting to decolonize,” she said.
After that, she earned her PhD at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and returned to the University of Saskatchewan to teach.
Now living on an acreage near Dundurn with her Labradoodle, Kaju (meaning brown in Inuktitut), Jessen Williamson was the first Inuk to become a tenured university professor in Canada, although more have followed, she said.
After seeing forced assimilation cause mass social disruption in Greenland, Jessen Williamson views Inuit knowledge as a potential source of solutions to correct the harm done.
Like other Indigenous scholars, she says the main goal of her career has been to make her peoples’ worldview understandable to “academia and the world.”
Her daughter, Laakkuluk Williamson, an Iqaluit-based multidisciplinary artist specializing in the expressive Greenlandic mask dancing called uaajeerneq, credits her mother for encouraging creative expression from a young age and “speaking our language in Saskatoon, of all places.”
“She came to Canada in order to be able to cultivate her independent thought,” said the artist, who also has her own Wikipedia page.
“My whole life, I’ve watched my mom explain in great detail where Greenland is, who we are as Inuit, and why it matters to us …. And now everybody knows where Greenland is … but we still have to explain to everyone who we are and why we matter,” she said.
