It’s a chronic problem living in the North’s “arctic desert,” she says. She was recommended body butter – which she purchased from a craft market in Ottawa. But with the high price of shipping to Iqaluit, Ms. Clarke sought a better solution: to buy the ingredients wholesale and create the butter herself.
As an Inuit-owned company, Ms. Clarke and Uasau have won multiple awards, such as the Arctic lndigenous Investment Conference’s 2016 top Aboriginal business of the year, Start Up Canada’s 2019 entrepreneur choice award and third place at the 2021 Powwow Pitch. This past year, Ms. Clarke was nominated for the Canadian Small and Medium Enterprises’ Indigenous entrepreneur of the year, the winner of which will be announced in June.
“Both of us thought she was crazy,” Ms. Clarke said. The pair looked at the smelly, aged blubber and proceeded to let it sit on the porch. “It was healing for Inuit to hear that there was a bowhead oil in the product, which we lost 100 years ago due to the whalers,” Ms. Clarke said. “So [we’re] taking it back in a new and modern way.”
“If Iqaluit does not get a whale and other communities do, Uasau will be a part of that,” Mr. Clarke said. “When it’s over, we’ll be able to come home with our blubber because Inuit leave nothing. That’s the way they were taught.”
A little whale blubber saves all.