A singer with the voice of an angel and the heart of a guardian angel. That would describe Susan Aglukark, the Inuk daughter of two Pentecostal ministers who grew up in Arviat in Nunavut (the former Northwest Territories). She began to play the guitar and sing hymns at an early age. By the age of nine, she was performing on stage with church choirs.

After high school, Susan Aglukark moved to Ottawa to work as a linguist with what was then called the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs (now Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development). The daughter of a mother who “grew up in furs, with caribou against her skin,” she would walk alone in dark parks late at night until colleagues in the nation’s capital warned against it. Mastering bus schedules, writing cheques, shopping in huge grocery stores: all were new to her.

“The biggest fear for me,” Aglukark once wrote, “was always being concerned that everyone would think I am stupid, but we are not stupid. We have only that with which we grew up… home, community, environment, the conversations we have around the table, the books we read in our schools/libraries, and all of the above were often limited to small town Nunavut life and living.” Although she has spent almost three decades living in the South, Aglukark has never turned her back on that Northern life. “I still feel the pull of ‘home’ every day,” she says. “My heart will always feel the Arctic before I feel anything else.”

In a storied and vibrant musical career that has continued without pause since it began in 1990, Susan Aglukark has won three Juno Awards, MuchMusic Video Awards, the Canadian Country Music Association Vista Rising Star Award, the National Aboriginal Achievement Award in the Arts and Entertainment category, and, in 2016, a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award. She has also performed for several luminaries, including Nelson Mandela and Queen Elizabeth II.

Although the melodies of Aglukark’s songs are light and easy, the subjects are often not: suicide, sexual abuse of children, alcohol and drug addiction, and cultural loss. Her album This Child, which sold 300,000 copies, included a song called “O Siem”—a call to arms against racism and prejudice.