Isuma focuses on bringing people of multiple age ranges, cultural backgrounds, and belief systems together to support and promote Canada's indigenous community through television, the Internet and film.[5] Isuma's mission is to produce independent, community-based media aimed to preserve and enhance Inuit culture and language; to create jobs and economic development in Igloolik and Nunavut; and to tell authentic Inuit stories to Inuit and non-Inuit audiences worldwide. Isuma is connected to Arnait Video Productions.
The massive critical success of Atanarjuat led to funding from Telefilm Canada, enabling Isuma to begin development on multiple scripts. One of these, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, about the switch from shamanism to Christianity in Igloolik in the early 1920s, received the offer to open the Toronto International Film Festival in 2006.
In 2011, Isuma filed for receivership, citing $750,000 in debts, including $500,000 to Atuqtuarvik Corp. of Rankin Inlet. A Montreal-based receiver, RSM Richter, put the company’s assets—most notably its film library—up for sale.[6][7]
Since Isuma means "to have a thought", the collaborators of Isuma Productions encourage alternative and multimedia processes designed to make the world at large think not only about the Inuit and their current plight, but about indigenous peoples in general, and the future of the role of community in society. Much of the New World’s wealth today was extracted from its Aboriginal citizens, who, by every measure, are now the most destitute populations in these countries. If the Inuit of Fast Runner ended up in 1922 in church, the Inuit of The Journals ended up in today’s newspapers stories, living in Third World ghettos scattered across the wealthiest First World nations.
Historically, how a country treats its indigenous people is an excellent gauge of its social and political views on humanism in general; what happens to the indigenous peoples of any given country is a sign of what will eventually happen to the dominant culture in time. Even today the law, education, religion and media continue to efface living memories of Aboriginal cultural history. As Norman Cohn says,
Save the seals and Save the bears seems more attractive than Save the people, but unless the rights of humans to live in their habitat are more widely recognized and protected it's a little fatuous to even dream about saving birds and animals.
Isuma aims to increase awareness and focus about and for indigenous peoples of all cultures, not just Northern Canada, through encouraging multimedia approaches. Their goal is to ensure that these rights are not compartmentalized, but rather include the awareness of human rights in a larger cultural and holistic context: through exploration of spirituality, globalization, environmentalism, cinema, world media, and Native awareness.
Reception
In the 1990s, films were shown locally and then broadcast across the Arctic on Television Northern Canada (TVNC), and Aboriginal People's Television Network (APT), which began in 1999 and broadcast the series as part of its original programming shown across all parts of Canada. Eventually, the individual films, as well as the Nunavut series, achieved worldwide recognition and acclaim, winning awards in Canada, France, Peru, the United States, Spain, Taiwan, and Japan.[8]
In January 2021, Isuma launched Uvagut TV, Canada's first national Inuktut television channel, and is currently available across Canada.[9]
The collective platform for Isuma currently carries over 6000 videos in more than 80 different languages, on 800+ user-controlled channels, representing cultures and media organizations from Canada, U.S.A., Greenland, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Australia, New Zealand and all over Latin America.[10] Users register and open their own platforms and upload their own content. This way, Isuma notes, people can use their media to recover language and traditional indigenous strengths and transform them into contemporary strengths.[10]
As Canada's first Inuit independent production company, Isuma's mission claims to create a distinctive Inuit style of community-based filmmaking that preserves and enhances Inuit culture, creates needed employment, and offers a uniquely Inuit point of view to the global media audience.[10]
Isuma's goal is to delight other Inuit, and to connect with a global media audience.[10] Isuma's videos, films, and Internet projects demonstrate how a community can appropriate communication tools to serve their own cultural, aesthetic, and linguistic purposes of Inuit culture. These audiovisual representations also enable Canadians to connect more directly with the images and their Inuit creators, and to establish a distinct and authentic Inuit voice within a global media discourse.[11]
Importance of visual sovereignty in Igloolik Isuma film
Narratives in Inuit culture are largely communicated through visual and oral tradition. For this reason, many attempts to translate these Inuit stories into written language that are not done by indigenous peoples are not always a proper portrayal of indigenous people. These translations outside of indigenous cultures can often become misinterpreted, incorrect, or blinded by stereotypes created by colonialism. Ideas of visual sovereignty (a way of reimagining Native-centered articulations of self-representation and autonomy that engage the powerful ideologies of mass media),[12] however, express Indigenous filmmakers and artists' use of editing technologies that permit filmmakers to stage performances of oral narrative and Indigenous notions of time and space that are not possible through print alone.[13]
Igloolik Isuma Productions Inc. was created by Inuit to produce and distribute independent Inuit-language films and media art from an Inuit point of view, featuring local actors recreating Inuit life in the Igloolik region.[9]
Indigenous writer Michelle H. Raheja wrote that, when “Inuit performed for the camera, reviewed and criticized their performance and were able to offer suggestions for additional scenes in the film-a way of making films that, when tried today, is thought to be "innovative and original[…]” The films have had a lasting positive impact on Inuit communities, most likely because of the depth of their participation in its creation.”[14] Because Igloolik Isuma Productions Inc. has embraced “contemporary media technologies to help them tell their own stories on their own terms, it has enabled them to control their images and narratives and engage in the creative production of on-screen representations of their lives, histories, and storytelling traditions.”[13] Isuma has also amplified Indigenous Arctic voices in their knowledge of climate change and its future impact on their land through films.[11]
Isuma has allowed many Inuit ideas to take form through many films, short videos, and documentaries that lay claim to their own perspectives and viewpoints.
Television
IsumaTV logo
Isuma launched IsumaTV, an online platform, in 2008.[15] A multimedia website and online portal for Inuit and Indigenous culture, it is dedicated to Indigenous filmmakers and is a free service. The site hosts films that put forth an aboriginal view and is intended to help Native communities around the world become connected.[16]
In 2021, Isuma launched Uvagut TV, a cable television channel distributed throughout Nunavut and the Northwest Territories.[17]
Production
IsumaTV reportedly hosts over 7800 indigenous community videos in 70 languages. These videos cover several topics from an Inuit perspective, such as Arctic Issues, Indigenous Languages, and Global Community.[10]
Stories of Our Elders (28 episode web series now televised by APTN)
