Charlie Panigoniak
Pied Piper of the Arctic
by Catherine Pigott
HighGrader Magazine Summer 2000
You can't spend much time in Nunavut or the Northwest Territories without hearing the soft strains of Charlie Panigoniak, probably the most loved Inuk singer and songwriter there is.
"I once introduced him as the Bob Dylan of the Inuit," recalls his friend and fellow musician William Tagoona, "just to let people know how we see him in our world."
William's voice crackles down the line from Kuujjuaq in Northern Quebec to where I sit in Yellowknife. The vast stretches between us are Charlie's domain, the land from which he draws his stories and his strength.
"Dylan," William continues, warming to the subject, "did something that was so new with the guitar. He was just such a great story-teller. I'd put Charlie Panigoniak in that league in our world."
Charlie was the first Inuk to record in a commercial studio, nearly thirty years ago.
"The CN Tower was half way up (being built)," Charlie remembers of his first trip to Toronto. He had a terrible cold.
"That's why my voice was so nasal on my first 45," he says, shaking his head at the memory.
The producers loved it. They thought that's the way traditional Inuit singing is supposed to be. It set the standard for commercial Inuit sound.

Singing in the Sanitorium
Charlie was born "somewhere" near Chesterfield Inlet on the treeless, windswept western coastline of Hudson Bay. He started singing in the tuberculosis sanitorium where they sent him after he got sick. He'd watch the Indian patients playing guitar and followed their fingers with his eyes. The nuns helped him order his first acoustic guitar from Winnipeg. He paid for it with money he earned carving.
"It was fourteen dollars, but it looked like a million-dollar guitar to me," he said.
"I wanted to sing in English. I thought maybe I could sing cowboy songs. I didn't know you could sing in Inuktitut."
The truth is Charlie's never felt comfortable singing - or speaking - in English. He somehow missed the residential school years that would have ground it into his head. He uses English when he has to, but tends to lapse into Inuktitut whenever the matter is close to his heart. So while other young Inuit were doing country music cover songs, he was singing his own songs in his own language.
"In the sanitorium we always watched Ed Sullivan and Johnny Cash. Ed Sullivan taught me. He helped me. I wanted to do that too, for an audience. I wanted to make them happy like that," he explained, closing his hands over his heart - a typical Charlie gesture.
He's a small man with an elfish face, gifted with the ability to convey deep emotion but also a sense of comedic timing. This sense of timing has made him a master of the live performance. I've seen him pull visiting premiers up on stage to sing duets with him in Inuktitut. I've seen children rush him at gatherings and follow him about like the Pied Piper.
Two generations of Inuit have grown up with his songs and can sing them word for word.
Charlie is a cornerstone of an evolving body of contemporary Inuktitut recording. He started working with CBC North producer Les McLaughlin back in the 1970s in Ottawa. Dougie Trineer, who's still discovering and recording fresh Inuit talent, was lead guitarist on those early LPs.
CBC North hosts Jonah Kelly and Elijah Menarik, themselves legends in the early days of Arctic radio, played Charlie's records all the time. These voices were a lifeline into settlements and camps sprinkled over thousands of miles of Arctic coastline.
"He was the most unassuming guy - no nerves," Dougie Trineer recalls. "All the other northern artists coming south were almost traumatized. Charlie would get to the door, kick off his boots - he was usually wearing socks with red toes - and he'd just come in and make himself at home."
He remembers one song where Charlie sang the same verse over and over, getting quieter each time until he was just mouthing the words. Then each verse got louder and louder again, until the song stopped.
"I said, `Charlie, what's it about?' He told me, `a ski-doo ride,' and collapsed into laughter."
Between gigs, Charlie is a radio broadcaster at CBC Kivalliq in Rankin Inlet. He hates interviewing politicians ("What do I ask them?") but loves talking to musicians, artists and old-timers.
Around the station you can still find a few quarter-inch reels of Jonah Kelly's old show "Frobisher Calling," with the unlikely theme song "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head."
One day last winter Charlie dug one of them out for me and spooled it onto a dusty Studer editing machine. "Listen," he said. The tape, nearly 30 years old, was bone-dry and brittle. I feared it would break in my hands. I pressed play. There was Charlie's unmistakable voice performing a ten-minute ballad, the longest song he's done. It's about the starvation, he said.
Forty years ago on the land somewhere near Arviat, Charlie's family was starving. The caribou didn't come, and by the time they did the men were too blind with hunger to know it and too weak to shoot. Charlie was eleven at the time, lying on caribou skins in a flimsy tent, eating the snow crystals formed by his breath.
"I was so thirsty. We were waiting for death. I remember my dad starting to walk. I watched him. He was walking zig-zag. He carried only a rifle. They say he crawled into Magroose River. The only thing he said saved him. `My family. My family.'"
The next day a man came from the village, built igloos for them and fed them caribou broth. They had eaten almost nothing for two months. Charlie's little body was frozen to his caribou skin.
"About ten years ago Joe Manik took me back to that place. He said this is where you starved. I started to cry."
It's experience like this that is the base of Charlie's body of work. If there's humour, it's linked to survival.
"He has the innocence of Inuit of long ago," says William Tagoona, trying to summarize the paradox of Charlie's self-effacing shyness and his showmanship. "He's very Eskimo," he adds, borrowing a phrase from Nunavik leader Zebedee Nungak that hearkens back to the idea of a traditional Inuk - modest, but resolutely capable.
Charlie says his songs come to him in his head. His favourite is "My Father's Country."
"I wrote it in my mind while I was out on the land he used to walk," Charlie said. "I was out hunting at the time. When I got back I wrote it down."
It is a love song to his father. "My dad taught me everything. It's hard for me to do things by myself, and then my tears come out."
Another time, he dreamed he was singing an Inuktitut song at a dance. "I sang it perfect in my dream. I woke up and thought, oh, I missed it. Then I picked up my guitar and sang it. After, I went back to sleep."
Charlie is 54 now. He's lost two of his five children to illness. He has a wife who sings with him sometimes and a little daughter to look after. He can't wait to leave work so he can check his fish nets and get out on the land.
No pan-Northern music-fest is complete without Charlie Panigoniak. He was one of the headliners in Iqaluit on April 1st, 1999, when the Inuit territory of Nunavut came into being. If there was ever a moment of sheer Inuk pride shared right across the Arctic, that was it. Even Susan Aglukark came back. Charlie shared the stage with old crooners like William Tagoona and young up and comers such as Madeleine Allakariallak and Lucy Idlout, who are forging contemporary cross-overs of pop, rock and throat-singing.
"I'm proud of them all and there will be more coming up, I'm sure," says Charlie. "I'm really proud of Susan Aglukark. I'm really proud. She's leading us forward."
As for his own career, things look as promising as ever. Inuktitut is making a comeback and the Arctic is hip. "I'm gonna sing `til my voice is still good and after that, I'm going to retire."

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