Tagaq is soft today, but it’s a hard-fought choice to remain vulnerable. In an intimate conversation, she talked about what retribution looks like in the face of rape, missing and murdered Indigenous women, environmental destruction, and decolonization. From that conversation came what you read below, in Tagaq’s own words.

If the treaties had been respected, Indigenous people would have vast amounts of money. Like, people would be going to the res to get the better doctor. There wouldn’t be this impoverished state. The government cornered us, and a lot of people don’t get that. They go, ‘Oh, you’re living off taxes,’ but no, no, no. That’s not how the whole thing works, and that’s a stereotype that’s spread in order to make sure the oppression stays in place. People never seem to ask why. They would prefer to see Indigenous people as drunks and lazy and incapable. If they see a drunk, homeless, Indigenous man, they blame that man. Addiction comes from trauma, and the trauma has been intergenerational for a couple hundred years now.

There’s such a revolution brewing everywhere. More and more people are beginning to understand the atrocities inflicted on Indigenous people. It’s just amazing that we’re still around, and it’s a blessing. There’s a positive light to retribution, too. Decolonization isn’t about going back to the way things were—it’s about stitching together the knowledge that we still have from the past and applying it to today.

What do you do with all those years of residential schools? Well, the equal and opposite reaction is building schools where people learn the languages. Rehabilitation facilities and proper mental health services are desperately needed in all the Indigenous communities. And, yeah, how ‘bout paying all that you owe to the Indigenous populations? It’s our constitutional right, and people don’t understand why we’re upset. Of course the system wants to keep the wool over everyone’s eyes—to keep the country running in the way that it’s been running, which is to eat, eat, eat, eat the resources.

I grew up in a small town in the middle of nowhere, I know the land. I know what we were supposed to be before. And sometimes that gets woken up. I hadn’t been hunting in a long time, and I went with some elders who were hunting seal. I hadn’t had raw seal meat for a long time and they were eating the liver and this elder offered me some. In my mind, I’m like, ‘Oh, I have to do this because I’m Inuk and it’ll be weird if I don’t.’ I put it in my mouth and my whole spine, one by one, got taller. A gushing warmth came into my whole body. Something woke up in me that remembered hundreds of years ago—that [reminded me] we are animals, and that hundreds of years ago, that’s what we did. Technology isn’t who we are. It just made me taste what’s missing out of this life experience.

There’s an alarming similarity in homelessness, addiction, and suicide between the military and the Indigenous population with regards to PTSD. People just don’t seem to understand the magnitude of the Canadian residential school system. I went to residential school for high school, it’s not that long ago. It’s so presumptuous to think that proper parents could have come out of the residential school system. All that trauma is given forth to the next generation, but the next generation doesn’t understand why that happened. It just keeps trickling down and in certain cases, exacerbating itself. At home, we’ve all lost family and friends to suicide. I myself tend to have thoughts like that. People look at mental health issues like, ‘That’s for crazy people!’ But it’s not. It’s such a day-to-day thing in certain circles, like in military or certain racial demographics. So many people I talk to on a day-to-day basis, I know they want to commit suicide.