The NWT influence in National Geographic’s all-Indigenous issue

“I find these interviews a little bit mortifying,” says photojournalist Pat Kane. He prefers to be the interviewer, not the interviewee.

Kane has called Yellowknife home for the past 20 years. “No one’s really kicked me out yet,” he jokes.

He is one of the people representing Canada’s North in the July issue of National Geographic, which features work exclusively from Indigenous writers, photographers and artists.

This issue is the first of its kind for the magazine.

“Nat Geo is kind-of known for the more exotic way of looking at the world through a very white perspective, so this is totally different,” said Kane.

Around this time last year, Kane received a call from the National Geographic Society, asking if he’d be interested in working with photographer Kiliii Yuyan on a feature series about Indigenous-led conservation around the world.

Yuyan was going to be shooting in Greenland, Australia, Ecuador, Palau and Mongolia. He asked Kane to join him on his last stop to assist and shoot his own story.

Last September, Kane joined Yuyan in Mongolia for a month living in a yurt, riding horses into the mountains and eating lots of goat meat.

“It was one of the best experiences of my life as a photographer,” said Kane.

He explained that while conservation efforts in Canada and the United States usually involve removing people from protected land, Mongolian conservation laws encourage those who are living in important areas to stay and steward the land.

Areas are deemed worthy of protection based of the significance and sacredness of the land to the Indigenous people.

Local herders and a shaman joined Kane and Yuyan to lead them through ceremonies and show them why these places are special and deserving of protection.

“Because you have a month and you spend so much time on these stories, you have a real opportunity to just really be part of life and engage with people on a very personal level too, so you get to know everybody really well. And our hosts were amazing – they became almost like family to us,” said Kane.

He said the pleasantness and the quietness of Mongolia felt rather familiar to him.

“It felt a lot like the North, to be honest,” said Kane.

Casey Koyczan’s full circle

Casey Koyczan is an interdisciplinary artist born in Yellowknife who also has work featured in the July issue of National Geographic.

The image of his that appears was re-rendered from an animation piece called Beadwork v2. The piece was the first in a series that showcases human-like creatures made up of different materials who walk to the beat of a Dene drum.

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The original beadwork piece was inspired by a beaded card holder that Koyczan received after doing a music workshop at the Tłı̨chǫ Annual Youth Conference years ago.

“I thought that’d be a really cool texture or material for a figure or something like that, so that’s kind-of where the idea started,” said Koyczan.

“I implemented a different physics operation within Beadwork v2, so it’d be like falling off of it and bouncing on the ground sort of thing, leaving this trail behind it, while still walking through the starfield of beads.”

Koyczan also wanted to include more sound design in this version of the animation, which he accomplished by placing beads into a jar lid, holding a microphone up to the lid and moving the lid around as he watched the animation, matching the footsteps to the swishing sound of the beads.

“It’s like beadwork ASMR,” said Koyczan.

While cycles are present in much of Koyczan’s work, the artist said that in a way, being featured in National Geographic is a full-circle moment.

He said he loved the medium of collages in art school “and one of the best resources for collage images is National Geographic.”

He said he appreciates that this issue covers Indigenous art and futures by highlighting work like his, which weaves Indigenous tradition and materials with modern formats like 3D animation.

“It’s a new way for me to represent my culture,” said Koyczan.

“It’s a huge opportunity and a really great way for us to get our artwork, and our visions, and our ideas and concepts out there to the whole world.”

Renewed love for the North

One of Kane’s biggest takeaways from his time in Mongolia is that he’s quite happy to stay in Yellowknife.

This realization stemmed from a conversation with Yuyan, who said that if Kane wanted to work at this level all the time, he’d have to leave the North because he’d find more photo stories elsewhere.

Kane politely disagrees.

“I’m content with being here in the North, and I feel like there’s still a lot of stories to be told in the North,” he said.

He has spent the past several years documenting the experience of living in the NWT and Nunavut, with photos published in the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, National Geographic and, of course, Cabin Radio.

Kane has also become what he describes as an ambassador for the North whenever he is travelling down south.

“Maybe I should wear a T-shirt that says, ‘I’m from the NWT, come talk to me,'” he joked.

Broadly speaking, he added, people down south know very little about life up here.

“Before they look at any of my work or talk, they kind-of have no idea.” said Kane.

“They’re just like, ‘Oh, it’s cold and miserable, and either dark all the time or light all the time’ – they don’t know which – ‘and it’s just like expensive and hard to get to.'”

Kane was recently in New York City, where he displayed an exhibition about food security.

He said his work and the conversations he has help dispel misconceptions about the North, for example by explaining hunting and cultural food practices to animal rights activists to build empathy and understanding.

“I’m not doing anything that’s going to change the world, but I think a little bit at a time, we can try to sway opinions here and there,” said Kane.

The photojournalist said he’s always astounded by the number of talented artists across the NWT.

“It’s kind-of mind blowing if you think about it, a territory of 45,000 people, that we have so many people doing amazing things,” he said, “and I’m just a small part of that, for sure.”