Migratorial Embodiments, Paradox, and Entangled Gifts

Decentring Colonialist Seeing in Tungijuq (What We Eat)

Abstract

Tungijuq (What We Eat), Igloolik Isuma’s 2009 collaborative film, confounds colonialist seeing via image, sound, and a representational mobility rooted in Inuit practices and complex, non-fixed ontologies. Sealing bans imposing unprecedented poverty and simplistic ontologies on the North have ignored Inuit realities and posited the living seal over disregarded Inuit life. Sidestepping rights-based discourses and settler-state contexts, Tungijuq represents relationalities—in seal hunting, living and dying, human and animal, hunter and hunted—as normative to Inuit life yet unsettling to colonialist seeing. It offers distinct experiences to different viewer-listeners: a grounded representation of embodied Inuit being to those who recognize its ontologies and a decentring experience to settler perception. I consider this as an intersection of impasse, entanglement, and Inuit gift, an affective reminder of reciprocity, relationality, and obligation. As not fully comprehensible to settler positionality, Tungijuq might offer affective bearing for deconstructing settler phenomenology lost in Inuit Territory.