The Inuit Punk Throat Singer Fighting To Protect Indigenous Women

''Western history is littered with familiar tales of men, intoxicated with power, hungry to dominate and control. Sometimes their desire is enacted upon natural land, which is then colonized, ruled, and sucked of its resources. Many times, women bear the brunt of these violent urges and are policed and oppressed as a result.

For singer Tanya Tagaq, these longstanding human traditions are very much intertwined ― two distinct manifestations of the same poisonous impulse. Through her music, Tagaq wages war on them both, embodying the power of woman and nature in her aural monsoon of growls, gasps, pants, belches and moans.

Tagaq, who was born in 1975, grew up in the predominately Inuit town of Cambridge Bay. The arctic village, located in Nunavut, Canada, is home to around 1,500 citizens, most of whom are indigenous to the land. Summers are illuminated by hours of constant sunlight; winters, cloaked in unending darkness, reach as low as -40°F...''

by Priscilla Frank