Makerspace Magic With Inuit Art
In a brightly coloured building on Sikituuq Crescent in Iqaluit, a group of teen gamers are working to combine Inuit Art with a passion of theirs. The passion? Magic: The Gathering.
Magic: The Gathering is a trading card game, where players summon creatures and cast spells to defeat their opponent. Think Pokémon with Dungeons and Dragons characters. There are thousands of Magic: The Gathering cards, but none of them have Inuit mythological creatures. That is about to change.
The gamers of Teen Game Night at the Ampere Iqaluit Makerspace play a little of everything, but of late, they have become fixated on Magic: The Gathering. A dedicated group of teens come to the Makerspace every Wednesday night to flip cards and take their chances. Over 80 percent of the kids are Inuk, so when they started thinking about making their own cards, their thoughts turned to their culture.
Inuit culture is teeming with legends that would hold their own in Magic: The Gathering combat. The long-limbed Mahaha tickles its victims to death. The Qallupilluit waits at the cracks in the sea ice, to seize anyone who gets too close. The Ijiraq is a dangerous shape- shifter who can take any form, but its haunting red eyes remain in any form.
Thematically, these figures hold their own with the mages, dragons, and necromancers of Magic: The Gathering. How do a group of mostly Inuit teen gamers create Magic: The Gathering cards on their own? With a little help from the Ampere Innovation Club. The Innovation Club funding will provide up to $5,000 for a project led by 15 to 30 year olds, for materials and supplies. At a recent teen game night, the card-flipping stopped for an hour, while the youth filled out a simple online application.
Teen Game Night is a popular one at the Ampere Iqaluit Makerspace. Here, Iqaluit teens can gather to play whatever game they want to, and lately they have been choosing Magic the Gathering.
Their plan? Use the funding to have Inuit artists create 10 Inuit Mythological Figure cards that will follow the standard Magic: The Gathering rules. Paid Inuit artists make the images, and the teens will figure out what rules and powers the Inuit-specific cards will have. They’ll test the new cards and figure out just how they fit in the greater Magic mythology.
A plan was set in motion. First, have the cards designed, then printed and distributed. After that, a big Magic Tournament to celebrate the release of the cards. They still got to play Magic that Wednesday night, but the room was alive with speculation about how their own cards could fit the greater game.
Not only will they end up with a cultural product they can be proud of, these youngsters now also have a memorable line for their first resume. It is hard to write a resume before you have a job. Now, they can write, “Applied for and received a grant to promote Inuit culture.”
By combining their own culture with a modern game they love, these gamers are proving that culture is not static or fixed. Culture evolves in the space where it resides. Storytelling is storytelling, and they are bringing those stories to a format they enjoy. That’s dynamic culture in action.
