Tatanniq Lucie Idlout

Tatanniq Idlout (born Tatanniq Lucie d'Argencourt) is a Canadian singer/songwriter, actor, activist and climate change advocate from Nunavut. She is the daughter of Leah Idlout-Paulson and granddaughter of Joseph Idlout. Idlout’s first full-length album (as Lucie Idlout) was released in 2004: E5-770, My Mother’s Name. The title is an homage to her mother, directed at the Canadian government’s dark history of identifying Inuit by disc numbers instead of names. Her second album, Swagger, was released in February 2009 (winning Best Rock Album plus seven nominations at the Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards; a Juno Award nomination for Aboriginal Recording of the Year; and six nominations at the Aboriginal Peoples Choice Music Awards). The album includes “Lovely Irene”, which was later reworked with a children’s choir from Iqaluit and renamed “Angel Street”. The song inspired a campaign to call attention to the issue of domestic violence in Canada by asking Canadian cities to name a city street “Angel”. To date eight cities have taken part. In fall 2009, Tatanniq recorded a new song, “Road to Nowhere”, for CBC Radio 2’s Great Canadian Song Quest. She has since written the score for renowned filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk’s film Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change, as well as music for several television shows. In 2017, she starred in Alan Zweig’s documentary film on Nunavut, There is a House Here. She recently worked as an Inuit representative on the Government of Canada’s federal panel on Climate Change, and continues to work as a transcriber for Hansard in the Nunavut legislature.