Better Times / De Meilleus Jours

Tumasi Quissa was an Inuk singer, songwriter, guitarist and carver from Nunavik. He was born August 28, 1948 at Niaqungnguuq, between Povungnituq and Akulivik. By 1976 his family was living in Akulivik, where hunting, fishing and carving were part of daily life.

That same year, while attending school in Moose Factory, Quissa saw the Billy Donson Band perform and started learning guitar. He was soon writing songs in Inuktitut and performing in other communities, and he went on to tour Nunavik, Nunavut, Ontario and Quebec.

His performances drew the attention of the CBC in Montreal, and his first recordings were made for the CBC Northern Service. They went out to northern radio on small 33⅓ rpm broadcast discs. QC 1235 paired him with Jopi Arnaituk of Wakeham Bay, one of the first Inuit performers featured on CBC northern radio, and the two often sang each other’s songs. QC 1411 featured his brother Henry Quissa and Joanasi Qaqutu. Both discs were also pressed on labels of La Fédération des coopératives du Nouveau-Québec.

Those recordings put him on national television. The people choosing a northern musician for a nationwide Canada Day broadcast listened through tapes of Inuit performers and kept returning to Quissa. Some of them travelled to Povungnituk to meet him and Henry in person, and the brothers’ Canada Day performance was a success.

In 1981 Boot Records released Better Times / De meilleurs jours, drawn from CBC Northern Service broadcast recordings and issued through a joint initiative of Boot and the Hudson’s Bay Company. On it Quissa takes on the voices of his characters, from an old man, an old woman and their young son in dialogue about hospital pills to a talking skull. ‘Angiyuliruma Attatagogani’ sets the French song ‘Chevaliers de la table ronde’ to Inuktitut words about the thrill of the hunt, and the title song looks at change in the North and finds reasons for hope. Better Times was one of six Inuit and First Nations albums Boot issued in the series. A January 1982 report on Boot’s northern series stated that each of the six albums had sold about 10,000 copies, with strong interest in Greenland and Germany as well as Canada.

In the summer of 1982 Quissa formed the Akulivik Band with Eli Angijuq on lead guitar, Jimmy Alaiko on drums and Timothy Aliku on bass, while he sang and played rhythm guitar. The four wrote songs together and played music festivals and the occasional community dance, sometimes with Asa Anoutak on accordion. With Quissa the band played folk and country. Without him, the others played rock.

Quissa was also a working sculptor, known in the art world as Tumasi Illuta Quissa. His stone carvings include Two Hunters and Lumaaq: The Legend of the Blind Boy, and his work was shown in the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s 2004–05 exhibition The Faye and Bert Settler Collection.

In 1996 he recorded the eleven-song Tumassi Quitsaq for Inukshuk Records at Inukshuk Studio in Inukjuak, his first CD. Producer André Brassard played harmonica and tambourine, Eric Gaudet handled acoustic and electric guitars, and Akulivik Band members Timothy Aliqu and Jimmy Alayco played bass and drums. Singing entirely in Inuktitut over his 12-string acoustic guitar, Quissa built the album on blues-rock, with turns into country and western and progressive rock.

Tumasi Quissa died in 2008. In 2015 the Montreal Inuktitut radio program Nipivut hoped to use Geronimo Inutiq’s electronic remix of his song ‘Ingutaapiga’ as its theme. In 2019 the Avataq Cultural Institute included him in its anthology of popular Nunavik songs, where compiler Nelly Duvicq-Mangiok named him among her favourites. “The lyrics are so funny,” she said. “Some are a play on words.”

-Robert Williston