Nowhere Land

When Bonnie Ammaaq was a little girl, her parents packed up their essentials, bundled Bonnie and her younger brother into a long, fur-lined sled called a qamutik, and left the government-manufactured community of Igloolik to live off the land as had generations of Inuit before them. For eleven years their home was not just the small shack called “Outpost Camp,” but the whole territory, vast, wild and beautiful, that lay outside its door.

Nowhere Land is a quiet elegy for a way of life that exists now only in the memories of Bonnie, her brother and parents, and the few others still living who experienced it. For them, the wild open tundra was not just somewhere to live, it was Somewhere, and the settlement of Igloolik, their home ever since, with its dinning snowmobiles, flat and snowy landscapes and relative hustle-bustle, is strictly Nowhere.