Elisapie Isaac spent much of her childhood at the post office in Salluit, a tiny Inuit community in northern Quebec, nearly 2,000 kilometres north of Montreal. Every day after school, instead of playing with her friends, she visited her dad at the co-op, where he was a stock boy. Her older cousin, Alaku, worked at the nearby post office, where Elisapie mingled with the other locals waiting for their welfare checks or income tax returns.
“The post office is a hang in the north,” she says. “I was so connected to these people — who may not have been the community’s hardest working people, but they were ” Elisapie’s cousins and aunt often hung out at the post office in Salluit. From left to right: The post office was also where her biological father, who lived in Newfoundland, sent her a gift each Christmas.
“We were poor, and we didn’t have a lot — my parents weren’t into modern things.” she recalls. “That moment was a reminder that there was somebody out there who also cared for me.
” A few decades later, the Inuk singer, filmmaker and activist is one of three women being honoured by Canada Post as part of their , alongside Métis visual artist and environmentalist Christi Belcourt, and Anishinaabe elder and water defender Josephine Mandamin. — which features her portrait and her name written in Inuktitut syllabics — will be available on June 21 for National Indigenous Peoples Day. “It’s surreal, but it’s such a huge tribute,” says Elisap.
