“If you talk to my children, they would say, ‘Mom, you just lay around,’” Tanya Tagaq says with a laugh. It’s a surprising admission from the prolific 50-year-old Inuk singer, author, performer and visual artist, who just wrapped filming on the second season of breakout CBC series North of North, reprising her role as the Inuit sea goddess Nuliajuk. A few days earlier, she debuted her new live performance piece Split Tooth: Saputjiji at the PuSH Festival in Vancouver, and is preparing for the March 6 release of her latest studio album, Saputjiji, and a multicity European tour.
This does not sound like the itinerary of a woman who spends all her time lying around, but Tagaq insists it’s part of her creative process. “I think that’s part of it – I’m very inert in a lot of ways. I spend a lot of time doing nothing, and then an idea will come to me.”
Saputjiji means “designated protector” in Inuktitut, and is pronounced “sa-poot-yee-yee” – as Tagaq informs me when I stumble over it. “Did you not learn how to say it?” she teases, in her gentle, mellifluous voice. Most of the time, she says, she is happy to teach people the proper pronunciation of Inuktitut words, encouraging them to “have some linguistic fortitude when it comes to pronouncing the original languages of the land.” Her own name, Tagaq, is difficult for many English speakers to say – the q in Inuktitut is uvular, spoken from the very back of the throat – but she’s not offended when people get it wrong. “I giggle about it,” she says. “And when I’m in the mood, I delightfully teach people.”
Tanya Tagaq's new album Saputjiji means “designated protector” in Inuktitut.Sebastian Buzzalino/Supplied
In conversation, Tagaq is warm, funny and genuine; it’s hard to believe how her sweet voice can transform on stage, deepening into a growl or rising to a ferocious scream. (She also curses frequently and enthusiastically, a habit that has been obscured in this profile owing to the editorial standards of The Globe and Mail.) She is best known for katajjaq, or Inuit throat singing, which is traditionally performed by two women who mirror one another’s vocalizations and rhythmic breathing in friendly competition. It’s often described as “otherworldly,” but listening to it feels like being deeply in the world, as the singers evoke the sounds of ice, wind and Arctic wildlife to summon a howling sonic landscape. But Tagaq, who performs solo, draws on many musical genres – electronica, metal, punk – to create her singular, frenetically hypnotic tracks.
Review: Tanya Tagaq gets a mesmerizing, playfully coy close-up in concert doc Ever Deadly
Growing up in Ikaluktutiak (Cambridge Bay), Nunavut, Tagaq occasionally heard throat singing on the radio. “In Cambridge, the culture is right there – you’re living it,” she says. But her mother was born in Mittimatalik (Pond Inlet), and was among the Inuit families forcibly relocated by the federal government to Resolute Bay, as part of a Cold War effort to assert Canadian sovereignty in the High Arctic. Music is in her blood – her grandmother in Resolute Bay was a beautiful singer, she recalls, who would make a kind of improvised guitar by wrapping sinew strings around a tin can.
“Music was always a part of our life, even though no one was playing an instrument,” she says. Her father’s diverse musical tastes were in tune with the era, and Tagaq grew up with Pink Floyd on the record player and “all that weird sixties and seventies acid.” After a trip to St. Lucia in the Caribbean, her parents returned to the North loaded with reggae albums, which spread through the community. “Everyone was listening to Bob Marley in Resolute Bay in the High Arctic,” Tagaq says with a laugh. For her 12th birthday, Tagaq’s father gave her a Def Leppard album, and she taught herself to sing by harmonizing to its screechy guitar licks.
When she was 15, Tagaq moved to Yellowknife for high school and lived in Akaitcho Hall, one of the last residential schools in the territory (it closed in 1994). In an Instagram post, Tagaq wrote about spending a semester living alone in the laundry room, where the echo of the cement floor created “my first singing chamber.” Later, as a homesick university student at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, she began throat singing, weaving inspiration from hair metal and acid bands that soundtracked her Arctic upbringing to develop her own distinctive style.
Her professional career began in 2000 with a legendary stroke of luck. Tagaq, who trained as a painter, travelled to the annual Great Northern Arts Festival in Inuvik to exhibit her work, and ended up doing some impromptu throat singing. One of these spontaneous performances was recorded by a festival attendee, who sent it to his friend Björk; she invited Tagaq to join the world tour for her album Vespertine. Tagaq released her first album, Sinaa, in 2005, accruing a global audience and critical acclaim; her third album, Animism, released in 2014, won a Juno Award and the Polaris Music Prize.
Over the past two decades, Tagaq has extended her creative reach into diffuse cultural realms while remaining refreshingly, uncompromisingly unique. It’s hard to imagine another member of the Order of Canada listed on a Mission Impossible soundtrack, or any other Canadian performer who can plausibly go from the set of a wholesome CBC comedy to the stage of the notoriously exclusive Berlin techno club Berghain in a matter of days. She has collaborated with punk band Fucked Up, co-created the 2022 music documentary Ever Deadly with director Chelsea McMullan and authored two picture books for children; she appeared in the fourth season of True Detective and is working on a new documentary about the forced relocation of Inuit families.
But there are enduring themes that unify her eclectic, genre-blending body of work. Saputjiji, her sixth studio album, extends and deepens Tagaq’s abiding critiques of capitalism and its environmental harms, which are felt acutely in the Arctic as it warms nearly four times faster than the rest of the world.
“You can’t breathe money, you can’t drink money, you can’t eat money. It’s unbelievable what’s happening on the planet,” she says. “Being Inuk and watching it from a distance, it’s like this farcical clown show – but a really dangerous clown show.” The album is a “kaleidoscope of perspectives, looking at this capitalist machine.”
The album opens with strident anti-militarization tracks featuring the fearsome, powerful vocalizations that Tagaq is best known for. But Saputjiji opens up into moody, ambient terrain, with songs like Exit Wound that showcase the range and beauty of her singing voice, while others – such as Razorblades and Lichens – deploy the spoken-word style of her last album, Tongues.
Tongues borrowed lyrics from her 2018 novel Split Tooth, itself a genre-spanning work encompassing poetry, memoir and Inuit cosmology in a supernatural coming-of-age story. “My Grade 7 teacher, Donna Hakongak, had us keep a journal,” she says, of the writing practice and personal experiences that spawned her novel. “But when I started doing music, I wanted it to just be the feeling – I didn’t want to guide anyone into it, so I didn’t use any lyrics.” On Saputjiji, she doesn’t just speak – she sings. Her new performance, Split Tooth: Saputjiji, is likewise a new form, marrying her writing and music on stage. Her elder daughter, Naia, is part of the show; she plays the txalaparta, an instrument from the Basque region of Spain, where she was born. Tagaq’s younger daughter, Inuuja, is 14; like most teenagers, she is not interested in performing with her mother. “I’m a giant loser to her right now,” she says with genuine delight. “It’s so cute, I love it!”
I grew up on the land, understanding that’s where peace lies,” says Tagaq.Sebastian Buzzalino/Supplied
Recently, Tagaq was diagnosed with autism-ADHD. Though it was explained to her as a disability, she believes her artistic practice is “the byproduct of taking in so much information, and being able to feel things so deeply.” There is no shame in her diagnosis, but she’s still learning how to take care of herself in light of it. “I’m like a baby, just learning to walk,” she says. “But I feel very, very happy. It’s not a thing that’s wrong with me. I’m just trying to move through the world with the heart that I have, and the spirit I have, and communicate in a way where I’m understood.”
CBC’s North of North in heated rivalry with Crave hit at 2026 Canadian Screen Awards
She knows many people don’t understand her way of communicating; there’s a lot of screaming in her music, she acknowledges, which can be scary. But on a trip to Australia, she saw people performing a haka – a fearsome Maori ceremonial dance – and something clicked. “I started to understand you can scare away evil,” she says, by being “scarier than whatever ... comes for you.” People have asked her why she doesn’t make pretty music. “I can make pretty things,” she says. “But that’s not a priority when it comes to expressing what is happening.” She would rather use her voice to fight – for truth and beauty, for people and the Earth.
“I grew up on the land, understanding that’s where peace lies,” she says. “There are so many wonderful things about humanity, so much wondrous untapped potential. And it’s very, very unfortunate to be watching the people in power right now just [mess] it up. So what can you do? You make an album. I try to use art, to the best of my capabilities.”