Susan Aglukark performs at the UpFRONT Festival of Indigenous Arts, Music and Culture in Toronto, Aug. 17, 2025.Emma Forhan/TO Live/Supplied
There’s a line in Susan Aglukark’s new book, Kihiani: A Memoir of Healing, that encapsulates something she’s tried to communicate to the public since her poem Searching was transformed into a song, got heavy rotation on MuchMusic and, in turn, transformed her into the first Inuk artist to take home a Juno Award and a Governor-General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement.
“The hardest work of my life has been dealing with the fear of knowing that I absolutely deserve everything I have,” she writes.
This specific brand of imposter syndrome is woven throughout Kihiani, co-authored with Andrea Warner and out Sept. 2. It still exists today, peeking out even when Aglukark welcomes well-earned opportunities. Discussing the book over coffee before performing at Toronto’s UpFRONT Festival of Indigenous Arts, Music and Culture in August, she gestured across the street to the stage. “I’m headlining tonight,” she said. “How did that happen?”
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She shares this inner dialogue with a sense of wonder and awe. This is a positive interpretation of what took the form, she writes, of debilitating self-doubt that plagued much of her life – even during the commercial height of her career in the 1990s, when the albums Arctic Rose and This Child, and singles such as Searching, O Siem and Hina Na Ho (Celebration), made her a household name.
There’s a reason the work has been so difficult. You can feel it in the addendum to that above line from her book: “The hardest part of healing I’ve done is believing that I deserve to heal.”
The title Kihiani, or ᑭhᐃᐊᓂ, translated from the Arviat dialect of Inuktitut, means “(because) we must.” It’s a guiding principle, Aglukark writes, about putting in the necessary work for a better future – be it for basic survival, to help others through their circumstances or, as Aglukark explains in the book, “colonial consequence.”
Perhaps the starkest form the latter takes, she writes, is the intergenerational trauma that followed her parents’ and grandparents’ generations being forced into settlements after their ancestors spent thousands of years on the land.
Government officials convinced them life would be better, then didn’t follow through in making it so, leaving people in a “state of suspended anticipation,” Aglukark said over coffee. That’s where the work, in the form of advocacy and storytelling, comes in.
She’s also had to spend her lifetime healing from the sexual abuse inflicted on her at the age of 9 by a family friend – who served only a short sentence and was welcomed back into their community in Rankin Inlet, all but forcing her to leave. “All of this stuff in my body – anger, resentment, hate – had nowhere to go until I was introduced to expression through songwriting in the company of other artists in the recording studio,” she writes.
The traumatic forces, foisted upon Aglukark without her consent, have shaped how she interacts with the world, resulting in a lifetime loaded with loneliness and featuring points of severe burnout, depression and anxiety. Her time in the studio, and her songwriting, have helped her heal.
Aglukark stumbled into her musical career after fleeing Rankin Inlet for Ottawa, where she spent a few years as a bureaucrat typing and translating documents for the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. Despite a period of fame and critical acclaim, however, life as a professional musician has, at times, been bleak. After leaving her major label, she writes, she struggled to afford recording, yet was held back from getting artistic grants because of her previous commercial success. She went nearly 10 years without a release before putting out 2022’s The Crossing.
“Had I stayed with my government job in Ottawa,” she writes of a bleak joke she shares with her husband, “I could have retired with a really good pension a number of years ago.”
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The first glimpses of Kihiani emerged in Aglukark’s mind last decade, sometime between the 2015 release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s calls to action and the celebrations – and criticisms – that surrounded Canada’s 150th anniversary in 2017.
“The massive national organizing of Indigenous communities,” she said in the coffee interview, meant “it was time to share whatever had kept us – I’ll speak for myself – whatever had kept me from really being comfortable to share. It’s time to share. You’re not alone.”
She began mapping out a book, using some of the narrative points she’d used in speaking engagements, then partnered with a literary agent, connected with HarperCollins and began working with Warner to shape the manuscript.
Warner, whose own books have focused on women and activism in music, had been a fan of Aglukark’s since first hearing O Siem and Breaking Down many years earlier.
“When I read her sample pages, I just loved the poetry of how she spoke and how she wrote,” Warner says.
This is how Aglukark’s work has always tended to resonate: a welcoming voice in song, on stage and, now, on page. Though her life’s story has held moments of fear, and loneliness and deference, there’s a through line of confidence, and of reclaiming.
After performing O Siem at her mid-August Toronto concert, she told the crowd of several hundred, many of whom were Inuit, First Nations and Métis, that “we’re not being told what our history was; we’re participating in its discovery.”
And, a few songs later: “There is no way to be an Indigenous artist, in this day and age, without being an advocate.”
