Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk will gather in the weeks ahead to remember Rory Voudrach, an artist and community leader who passed away earlier this month.
Rory, chair of the Inuvik Community Corporation and a maker of ulus and knives, was 50 years old when he passed away on January 5, surrounded at home by almost all of his family.
Family motivated most of what Rory did in the last 10 years of his life, daughter Tamara Voudrach told Cabin Radio.
She described how he found the strength to make big changes in his life, and how those changes paid off in transformed relationships with his family and success both as an artist and a leader.
A memorial service for Rory will be held at Inuvik’s Midnight Sun Complex on Saturday, January 20. A service in Tuktoyaktuk will be held on Saturday, February 3.
On this page, Tamara remembers her father’s journey over the past decade. These are her words.
My dad grew up in Tuktoyaktuk. He was an Inuvialuk and his parents were Norma and Paul. He was an artist and a craftsman, educated and very knowledgeable about our people, our history, our land claim.
He was a visionary and a true leader of our people, an example of what a community leader should be.
He cared about our future and he based his decisions, his work and his purpose around that. For me, if you’re able to look into the future, see where we want our people to go and what we need to do to get there, that’s true leadership.
He communicated that very well in all areas of his life, not just community work but even at home with his wife, with his children, his grandchildren. He led us as a family, especially in the last 10 years.
Rory has been on his own healing journey and he really promoted healing for our people by going back to the land, using our land. “We have a land claim,” he said, “we need to be using our land” – occupying it fully, building camps, hunting, trapping and being on the land for healing.
He promoted that so much because for him, it worked.
Our dad got sober eight or nine years ago, around the time he started building our family cabin. That whole process transformed our family. It brought us so much closer and we spent so much more time together.
He started to heal in a lot of different ways. He returned to traditional practices that he hadn’t done since he was a child – he hadn’t felt comfortable doing them.
For him, that model worked and he wanted to see other young men leading their families into that and other young people doing the same.
At that time, he was starting a career transition and had a lot of life changes going on. It wasn’t long after he started building the cabin that he had his first heart attack, in late 2016. It was a massive one.
We always knew that his heart wasn’t the strongest, but he made these really big changes: he quit smoking, he was not drinking, he was going out on the land, he was keeping his physical activity up.
He was also teaching us how to be on the land, skills I didn’t even know my dad had.
We learned a lot about him through that process and learned a lot about his childhood, a lot about the relationships he had with his father, his grandfather and other Elders who helped to raise him, his mother. Things he learned from them that we didn’t know he had.
It was almost like getting to know this new version of our dad. It made us very, very proud and we were able to see him in a different way. It ushered us into a new era of our lives together.
Shortly after, I had my son and that was it – we were complete.
He was passing a lot of teachings and skills down to our younger sister, Trenyce, who sings, so she’s got his musical talent. Now she can drive us out to the cabin and back, no issue with that boat. She can start up the generator, set up the wood stove. There’s been a lot of knowledge transfer and we’ve felt so thankful and blessed, especially in these last 10 years, to make all these really beautiful memories with him.
What’s really getting us through is knowing that these last years with him, we all put in 100 percent.
He prepared us well for this because he was always truthful about his health. We knew the operation that he first had on his heart, after his first attack, wasn’t going to last forever. So we really tried to make the most out of everything with him.
We’ve heard it from so many people, but for me – knowing the people he worked with on so many levels in the community – I think his biggest legacy is how he made people feel.
He really validated people. He was able to recognize a person’s strengths and almost pull it out of them and say, “Here, look what you can do. I know you can do this.”
If Rory told you you’re good at something, you believed him. If Rory said you could do it, you believed him. People believed in him and in that way, they were able to feel confident. They were able to rise to where they were meant to be.
He helped a lot of people in that way, right down to when he used to work for the college. Trades students would come in and spend time with him in his office, or he would go out and bring mobile trades units around the communities.
He really, really wanted to see young men in trades. There are a lot of men out there today that have careers in trades because of him. He just wanted to see our people succeed, and he led with that.
I hope people learn about him and see all the good he has done in people’s lives, and how much he really, truly loved our community, our region.
I hope that inspires them to come into their own in that way, too.
Tamara Voudrach was speaking with Cabin Radio’s Ollie Williams.
