Summary

A deeply personal film from award-winning filmmaker Jobie Weetaluktuk about the Inuit experience of residential school. The purpose of the early educational system in the Arctic, as with other aboriginal populations, was assimilation – “to take the Eskimo out of the child”. In 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper made an official apology in the House of Commons to former students of aboriginal residential schools – but can the pain ever be erased? Drawing upon archival footage, old photographs, and songs, Kakalakkuvik recounts the vivid memories of students from Port Harrison (now Inukjuak, Québec), the first group of Inuit to sue the federal government for compensation.