Follow Humans of SWY son Instagram – an initiative of SWY 29 Ex-JPY Yuki Yamamoto.

https://www.instagram.com/humansofswy

Here’s a taste:

“I’ve spent my whole life sort of in this limbo where on the one hand I really resented being indigenous because my mother’s Inuk but my father’s not; he’s white. As a kid, a lot of Inuit would bully me and say you’re not allowed to speak Inuktitut, that’s our language it’s not yours. Now I look back and I think wow that’s stupid but it really affected me as a kid and it’s one of the reasons that I did lose a lot of my Inuktitut. I grew to be afraid to speak it because I knew if I spoke it these kids would beat me up. And even in my house it was really hard for me to communicate because I felt like I was never Inuk enough for my family. They always saw me more as white than anything else. That really made it hard for me to form relationships with my family. But then I guess around 15 I was sort of like “that’s really stupid” because I have this amazing culture and these people, my people, have been so oppressed for so long, why would I push that on us even more? My mother’s always been very proud and very active in the Inuit community and I remember spending months on the land camping and learning how to hunt and fish and all these really traditional things that a lot of people are losing now. When my parents separated I didn’t go out on the land as much to practice these traditions and that’s when I realized just how much it had shaped me and how important it is to allow this culture to grow and continue shaping everyone else.”

A post shared by Humans of SWY (@humansofswy) on Jun 29, 2017 at 1:43pm PDT