Reader of seven languages, speaker of four. Singer/songwriter/musician. Writer. Activist. Designer and maker of traditional sealskin garments. Lawyer. Translator. Heavy equipment operator. And that’s the abridged version of Aaju Peter’s remarkable life journey.

Born in the northern Greenland community of Arkisserniaq in 1960, Aaju Peter was the daughter of itinerant Inuit parents who sent her to school in Denmark when she was just eleven. When she returned at eighteen, she was teased for having lost her Greenlandic language and culture. “I was the perfect product of three hundred years of assimilation,” Peter says of that time. “I couldn’t even fit in with my own people.” But she would find another people to embrace — in the Canadian Arctic.

In her early twenties, she met and married a man from Nunavut, and they moved to Iqaluit, where she immersed herself in the Inuit language and culture while raising her five children. The youngest was still a toddler when the marriage failed and she became a single mother, a circumstance that led to her working with heavy machinery while helping to build Iqaluit’s breakwater.

A tireless activist who travelled widely in the Arctic, Peter soon realized that a lack of infrastructure — airports, roads, docks, and satellite broadband — plagued northern communities. “What opportunity is there,” Peter asks, “for anyone in the community, aside from being a carver, or aside from making handicrafts?”

When Nunavut became a territory in 1999, it had just one Inuit lawyer (Paul Okalik, who later became the premier). A one-time law school program was created to address this problem, and Peter — though she had expressed no previous interest in the law — decided to become part of a group of ten people who entered. She did it because she believed that Northerners needed to be empowered by having legal experts who could speak with their own voices. Peter’s studies required enormous persistence: four years of hard work, including displacing herself to article in Ottawa (at Nelligan O’Brien Payne) because there were no northern law firms to foster her skills.

In 2008, Peter was in a film-making workshop with Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, who was then making a film about ancient Inuit body art. That led to Peter having traditional designs tattooed on her forehead, chin, and hands. A year later, she cut a striking figure at the European Union parliament in Strasbourg, France, where she had gone to speak as the EU prepared to vote on whether to ban the import of seal hides into Europe. Dressed in a traditional amauti (parka), she angrily denounced the ban. “We are one of the world’s last traditional hunting cultures,” she told reporters, “and seals have been essential to our survival for thousands of years. Should 600 people in [Europe] be allowed to define the terms of our existence?”

Politicians who oppose the seal hunt on grounds of animal cruelty, she pointed out, have no issue with force-feeding ducks for foie gras or confining calves to make veal. Meanwhile, the seal product ban continues.

Peter’s list of favourite foods reveals her deep connection to the Inuit culture: “Crow berries, blackberries, mixed with seal brain, seal blood, and seal fat (akusimajuq)… This is my reality.”

To her Order of Canada investiture ceremony, Peter wore a sealskin vest as a point of pride. “It depicts the amauti tail on the back and the amauti front,” she said, describing her design. “It shows the long heritage we have and the ingenious invention the Inuit have of carrying a baby that made it possible for them to keep moving and not have their babies freeze to death. I want my granddaughter, who is two, to wear the same.”