A Peek Inside the 'North of North' Writers' Room
By sTACY LEE KONG
Image: Courtesy of CBC
A couple of years ago, I saw an exhibit at the AGO featuring drawings of very familiar food items: tins of Carnation evaporated milk, Magic-brand baking powder, China Lily soya sauce. I’ve always thought of these pantry items as very Caribbean (though maybe it’s just what we used in my house, to be fair), so it was both lovely and somewhat surprising to see them in this context… especially because the exhibit, Tarralik Duffy’s Let’s Go Quickstop, was a funny and nostalgic reflection on her childhood in Salliq, Nunavut. It makes sense that disparate people would integrate similar food items into their diets, and while the reason for that is not great—surprise, it’s colonialism—there’s also something delightful about feeling connected to someone from a totally different culture.
I had a very similar feeling during a recent conversation with Stacey Aglok MacDonald, Alethea Arnaquq-Baril and Anna Lambe. MacDonald and Arnaquq-Baril are the creators, executive producers and writers of the APTN, CBC and Netflix series North of North, a sitcom about a young Inuk woman (Siaja, played by Lambe), who’s trying to rebuild her life while everyone in her small Arctic town watches—with varying degrees of judgement. All three are Inuk and based in Nunavut, while I’m Trini and live in Toronto, but I felt the same sense of connection during our conversation. Read on for a slightly condensed version of our chat, which touched on what exactly makes a joke Inuit, the nuances of telling a sex-positive story and making choices that might feel confrontational for your community.
Where did the concept for the show come from?
Stacey Aglok MacDonald: I come from a background in comedy, so it started there, really. I worked on seven seasons of an Inuktitut comedy series and I just fell in love with the format, the storytelling and also the joy of it. So, I knew I wanted to do something in that vein. When Alethea and I and Miranda Ponce, our producing partner, finished The Grizzlies, which Anna was also in, we knew we wanted to work together again. We took a weekend off to decompress and dream a little bit about what we wanted to do next, and a comedy about a young Inuk woman trying to find her way in her in her small Arctic community felt organic to us and like a bottomless well of stories that we could draw from our own lives, in terms of inspiration. I think anybody from the Arctic could look at our ensemble of characters in North of North and be like, ‘I know a person like that.’ It's fictional, of course, but it's very, very inspired from our real experiences
Alethea Arnaquq-Baril: When we were starting out in this industry 20 years ago, as we were, looking around us and trying to figure out who we are and what we want to do with our lives and how to improve our communities and our industry, we found shared experiences with a lot of other young Inuit trying to do similar work, whether they were in music or film or education or whatever the case may be. We just found dynamics repeating themselves. And so each of these characters, while they're fictional, are also examples of very real people. This show is definitely comedy leaning, but it's also extremely rooted in life experiences that we see playing out over and over again, that we want to give people the characters to talk about those issues in our communities.
Co-showrunners and executive producers Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril. (Image: Jasper Savage, courtesy of APTN, CBC, Netflix)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The dynamics are also very familiar to me as a Caribbean person—there's such a relatability to the stories you’re telling.
MacDonald: We definitely found that the more specific we got into our lives, in our community and whatnot, the more relatable it became.
I think that’s always how it goes! I’m really curious about the style of comedy in North of North. Are there hallmarks of Inuit comedy? Or are there jokes or tropes that you made sure to incorporate, that you knew other members of your communities would get the joke immediately?
MacDonald: There's a “you got 20 bucks?” joke which is very Native. Actually, it’s not Inuit—Natives tend to have this joke all over. It was an ad-libbed line by one of our Maori actors and I remember me and Alethea just kind of looked at each other like, What?! We went and talked to him right after, and we were like, “Did you hear that joke here?” And he said, “No, it's something we'd say back home.” So, we're like, oh my god, it's an international Native joke!
Anna, what drew you to this role? Because Siaja looks so fun to play, but I imagine it might have been a challenge to balance the parts of this story that are funny with the parts that are really real, like those feelings of disempowerment, or being overshadowed, or the idea of not having anything left for yourself after taking care of everyone, which definitely resonates with a lot of women.
Anna Lambe: What drew me to this project and to this role was Alethea and Stacey. Seeing that Alethea, Stacey and Miranda were working on a project again, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I want to do it.’ And seeing that it was a comedy! All the stuff that I've done really has been quite sad and traumatic and angry, and I think there's such an important place for that. But I was like, Oh my God, I get to smile on camera? I get to do an audition where I'm laughing? I really badly wanted to be a part of it.
I think I had quite a winding road of trying to understand who Siaja was. When we started filming, we'd go really out there with the comedy, and then sometimes in the exact same scene, we’d go really dramatic, and we'd have to find our way to the middle ground. But I think as time went on, Siaja became less abstract to me. [I found] that middle ground was just like, okay, she's human. I think that's what makes her, and every character in this comedy, so good—that everybody's so grounded and we get to approach everything from a very real place.
Anna Lambe as Siaja and Keira Belle Cooper as Bun. (Image: Courtesy of APTN, CBC, Netflix)
Did the fact that you’ve mostly done dramatic work before make you nervous at all about leaning into humor?
Lambe: I was terrified! I've always considered myself a deeply unfunny person. Drama is my thing, I can cry on command, I can do sad stuff. With comedy, I would stay up at night, staring at the ceiling like, ‘Oh, my God, what do I do?’ But I got a lot of support. My acting coach was the same acting coach from The Grizzlies, who was the first person that taught me how to do anything ever, and she helped me find how to approach it from my own perspective and what works for me. Because some people do really well with physical comedy, some people do really well with dry comedy, some people do really well with vulgar comedy, and I just wasn't sure exactly where I landed. But I think eventually it got less scary, and then I got to a point where I would look at scenes and I'd know exactly what I wanted to do.
From a viewer’s perspective, the show walks the line between humour and heart really well. There’s the trope of what the character is like—there's a self-absorbed husband and the mom who made good, those kinds of things—while also grounding them in something real. This makes me think about a line in the press release for the show that talks about how it shines a spotlight on “Inuit Nunangat (an Inuktitut term meaning ‘homeland’; referring to the land, water and ice of the homeland of Inuit in Canada) to a worldwide audience in a joyful, funny way that isn’t rooted in trauma or history.” I think I have an instinctive understanding why you wanted to focus on joy and fun and humor, instead of just talking about the bad things that have happened to your communities. But, how did you actually do that? I’d love to hear more about the process of finding the tone and that balance between the reality of what human beings go through, while also leaning into the funny.
MacDonald: It was a balancing act, from the writing room to production to post-production. But I think that one of the reasons why it feels so grounded is that the comedy is really rooted in character, as well. There’s some situational comedy, but really, it's about how the characters react, and each character is different, so you get a different flavour of comedy. On top of all of that, it felt like the most authentic way to tell a story like this. That's certainly our experience of life in the North—crazy stuff happens, stuff that breaks our heart happens, but through it all, because we're with community there's always laughter, whether it's poking fun at the situation, poking fun at ourselves, poking fun of at each other, or just a little bit of laughing your way through it because there's nothing else you can do.
Arnaquq-Baril: I think this question is also related to the question about Inuit-style humor, and what makes North of North Inuit-style. I think in some cultures, there's lowbrow humor and highbrow humor, and being dry and witty is seen as more intelligent than lowbrow humor. But in our culture, we're generally not judgmental of lowbrow humor. People who are incredibly wise and intelligent don't avoid lowbrow humor. It's welcomed and seen as a necessary part of decompressing and coping. It's important. I've worked in documentary for a lot of years, and through that work have spent a lot of time with many different elders, and these elders that are giving the most incredible life-changing wisdom in the way they talk to the youth are the same people who crack the most ridiculous broad jokes, and that doesn't conflict. So, that's something that definitely is a strong throughline in our cultural sense of humor.
Maika Harper, Anna Lambe and Keira Belle Cooper in episode 101 of of North of North (Image: Jasper Savage, courtesy of APTN, CBC, Netflix)
This show is intended for a wide audience, including people not just outside of the North, but outside of Canada. As you were going through the whole production process, were you thinking about how the characters might be perceived, not just by people who will find them familiar, but also by people who are outside of your community entirely?
Arnaquq-Baril: We're definitely aiming for a global audience in the show, but it's multi-layered storytelling. I think the fact that it took a while for Stacey and I to be able to get the show sold and picked up meant that we were able to really think through the layers of storytelling and have a long-term, multi-season plan for the story. We wanted to be fun and joyful and for every episode to leave you feeling like you want to see the next one, and like you're ready to see the next one, not hesitating to watch because you're still processing, or grieving, or feeling any of those feelings that can sometimes come with stories about Indigenous folks. But we also want to push the envelope and challenge people's thinking a bit, so we're trying to do it in a really, spoonful of sugar way. In our community, why do we, for example, forgive men so easily but struggle to give women the same grace? So, we really wanted our lead character to mess up a lot, in big ways, and see our her community showing up for her.
Then there's things like showing the goddess underwater. Just representing spirit or traditional spirituality in the show is a little confrontational to our own community, because it has been so colonized and Christianized. Different communities across the Arctic have varying levels of intensity when it comes to Christianity; some are more decolonized than others, and some are still extremely religious, so just showing a little bit of discussion about our spirituality, I feel is a little confrontational—though we hope in a good way. This is also true of some of the casting choices we've made. Some of our actors are very well known in the North and have experienced all kinds of lateral violence for their own public discussions around spirituality and sexuality and all that stuff. So, I think we've made some bold, confrontational choices in our casting as well. And the outside world will never know that, but in our community, these were very conscious choices.
Lambe: From a character standpoint, I think there are parts of Siaja that are very specifically Inuk, and very specifically grew up in a small community, but she did feel like quite a universal character. So I think in the process of playing her, I always felt like she'd be deeply relatable to a wider audience, and people would find her interesting. And, I never had too much time to think about how people were going to perceive her. It was just kind of like, ‘Alright, so what do we have to do tomorrow?’
And in terms of the confrontational things, and the things that people might be a little bit surprised by, even on an international scale, one might be how sexy the show can be, and how sex-positive Stacey and Alethea have really made the show. I know it's going to be quite controversial across our communities, because Inuit women are supposed to be very pure and quiet and toned down, even though that's so not true.
That’s why I think it’ll be nice to see different generations of women in the show [own their sexuality], like Neevee (Siaja’s mother, played by Maika Harper), who's very sex positive and at times tells Siaja, ‘Show a little more skin!’ I know it's something that that I really want to see, because I've definitely been greatly objectified by men in and outside of my community. Sometimes it feels like my looks and my sexuality are not mine to dictate. I just want other young women to see that you can have fun, you can explore, you can do things and if there’s a religious elder who's telling you that you're being too skanky, then whatever.
A still from episode eight of North of North. (Image: Jasper Savage, courtesy of APTN, CBC, Netflix)
MacDonald: You know, for all of the Indigenous content out there, a lot of times sex is an act of violence. So, these are the high-level discussions that we have in the writing room. Sex is positive. It can be fun and joyful and funny and ridiculous, but also moving, and we really wanted to give Siaja a sense of sense of that. We didn't want it to be a gross subject or a subject that we avoid because of the perception the world has gotten around sex and Indigenous women. We wanted to share our perspective on that, and this is definitely the most real that it feels.
Arnaquq-Baril: There are so many layers to unpack, because Indigenous women have been so hypersexualized by outsiders and portrayed as sexual objects, or as Stacey said, as victims of sexual violence. So a first instinct might be to desexualize us, but we don't want to do that, either. It's more about owning our bodies and owning our sexuality. But also, I think our communities are more body positive, are more sex positive. We’re not a monolith—there's a lot of Christianization and residential school trauma that interferes with that. But I think at the core of it, we've had less overall shaming in our communities of our bodies and our sexuality, and we want to celebrate that. I think we have something to teach the Western world about that. At the same time, how do you show ourselves being more sexually free without entrenching stereotypes about our sexuality? It's a really nuanced line, and we're walking it very carefully—while also writing ridiculous storylines.
I’m so glad conversation went in this direction, though, because I think there are types of pop culture that we just don't take seriously, and often it’s the things that feel very funny, easy and light. It can be easy for the audience to miss how much thought and planning goes into that feeling of ease. So I think it's actually really helpful to hear about the high-level conversations and remember that these choices are all intentional. Even if it feels ridiculous and funny and like it just flowed so nicely, that didn't happen by accident.
Arnaquq-Baril: Absolutely not. It happened extremely carefully, by multiple Inuit thinking it over and finding what feels good and fun and right and helpful, and like upending tropes rather than entrenching them.
North of North is currently airing on CBC TV and streams on CBC Gem. The series will make its global debut on Netflix this spring.
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