Ottawa's Carleton University is home to a master's student whose personal journey is reshaping what we know about Black presence in Canada's Far North — and why it still matters today.
Jaelyn Jarrett grew up in Nain, N.L., a small Inuit community on the Labrador coast, before her family relocated to Ontario when she was eight years old. It was in that new school, far from home, that she heard a word she had never thought to question: Puatugi.
The word, used by Inuit communities to describe Black people, had always been part of the fabric of daily life in Nain. But hearing it in a new context — and watching the confusion on the faces of her new Ontario classmates — made Jarrett realize that its origins had never been fully explained to her either.
A Word With Deep Roots
Decades later, Jarrett — who identifies as Black-Inuk — is now pursuing a master's degree at Carleton University, and Puatugi has become the thread she's pulling to unravel a little-known chapter of Canadian history.
Her research points to the 19th-century whaling era, when American and British whaling ships — crewed in part by Black sailors and whalers — made regular contact with Inuit communities across the Eastern Arctic and Labrador. These encounters were far more intimate and sustained than most history books acknowledge. Some whalers stayed for seasons at a time, learned Inuktitut, had children with Inuit women, and became embedded in community life.
The word Puatugi is believed to derive from those interactions — a linguistic trace of a relationship that lasted generations but has largely been forgotten in mainstream Canadian history.
Bridging History and the Present
"Understanding where this word comes from is about understanding where we come from," Jarrett told CBC. For her, the research is not merely academic. It is personal — a way of making sense of her own mixed identity and the racial tensions she has witnessed between Black and Inuit communities in the North.
She argues that excavating this shared history could help address those divisions. If communities understood that their ancestors had lived alongside one another — that the word Puatugi itself was born from intimacy rather than hostility — it might reframe how those communities see each other today.
Ottawa's Role in the Research
Carleton University's location in Ottawa, with its proximity to national archives and Indigenous studies departments, has given Jarrett access to historical shipping logs, missionary records, and oral history collections that she could not easily access from the North. The university has been a base for her to dig through primary documents and connect with scholars across Canada working on related questions of Afro-Indigenous history.
Her work joins a growing body of scholarship that is challenging the myth of Canada's North as exclusively Indigenous or European — a space where Black history simply did not exist.
Why It Matters Now
At a time when conversations about race, identity, and Canadian multiculturalism are more fraught than ever, Jarrett's research is a reminder that these conversations are not new. Black and Indigenous peoples in Canada have been navigating coexistence, tension, and kinship for centuries.
Her hope is that by naming that history — by tracing a single word back to its roots — she can offer something useful: not a simple answer, but a fuller story.
Source: CBC News
