Elisapie

Salluit, Sugluk and a village band

She was born in 1977 in Moose Factory, Ontario, to an Inuk mother and a father from Newfoundland, and was adopted as a baby into an Anglican household in Salluit, a community on the Hudson Strait coast of Nunavik reachable only by air. That upbringing supplies most of the material she still works with on stage: the language, the records that arrived in the village on cassette and vinyl, and a family history she has never treated as private property.

Her first stage was the local band Sugluk, which she joined at twelve. She moved to Montreal in her early twenties and the city has been her base since. Before music became the main job she worked in radio and in documentary: her 2003 film If the Weather Permits took the Claude Jutra Award, and she has taken acting parts since, including in Pixar's Soul in 2020 and the Quebec feature Motel Paradis in 2022.

Taima, then three records under her own name

The first recorded work came with Taima, a duo with the instrumentalist Alain Auger. Their self-titled album, released in 2004, won the Juno Award for Aboriginal Recording of the Year in 2005 — a prize that arrived before she had released anything alone, and which set the pattern of being read as an Indigenous artist first and a rock singer second.

Three solo albums followed: There Will Be Stars in 2010, Travelling Love in 2012, and The Ballad of the Runaway Girl in 2018, the record that established her writing voice in English, French and Inuktitut together. Wolves Don't Live by the Rules and Arnaq both come from that album and both still sit in the live set. In 2020 she wrote the soundtrack album Eaux turbulentes for television. None of it sold at the scale of what came next.

Inuktitut, and what a cover song can be made to carry

Inuktitut, released in 2023, is ten covers of pop and rock songs translated and reworked in Inuktitut, each attached to a specific memory from Salluit. Blondie's Heart of Glass became Uummati Attanarsimat, Cyndi Lauper's Time After Time became Taimangalimaaq, Metallica's The Unforgiven became Isumagijunnaitaungituq, Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here became Qaisimalaurittuq, Leonard Cohen's Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye became Taimaa Qimatsiniungimat, and Fleetwood Mac's Dreams became Sinnatuumait. Queen, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin are in there too.

The translations are not literal and the arrangements are not karaoke. Dreams is slowed into a long crescendo and addressed to her late older brother; The Unforgiven is reframed as a story her mother recognised. The selection method she has described in interviews was blunt — the songs that made her cry went on the record.

Commercially it was the breakthrough: four weeks inside the Canadian top ten, something none of her earlier albums managed. It was shortlisted for the Polaris Music Prize in 2024, won two Juno Awards — Contemporary Indigenous Artist of the Year, then Adult Alternative Album of the Year at the 2025 ceremony — and took six Félix Awards from ADISQ. Canada Post issued a commemorative stamp in her honour in June 2024. By her label's count the album has carried her through more than ninety shows in Canada alone.

The long tail: a remix album and a winter of theatres

Rather than hurry a successor, she extended the record. On 24 September 2025 she released Inuktitut (Remixes), a full reworking of the album with the Montreal electronic producer Hologramme, which pushed the arrangements towards synthesiser and dance tempos without re-recording the vocals.

The remixes came with a Canadian tour announcement that ran from Ontario into the following spring: Flato Markham Theatre on 5 November 2025, the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto on 30 November, FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre in St Catharines on 1 December, then a western run in March 2026 taking in the Capital Ballroom in Victoria on the 11th, the Vogue Theatre in Vancouver on the 12th, Bella Concert Hall in Calgary on the 14th, the Park Theatre in Winnipeg on the 19th and the Yukon Arts Centre in Whitehorse on the 21st. The Whitehorse date mattered more than its capacity suggests: northern dates are logistically expensive and she has been consistent about playing them.

Where she is in October 2026

The most recent work is a second song called Dreams, this one by the Cranberries. Sinnatuumakka (Dreams) was produced by her long-standing collaborator Joe Grass and released on 29 September 2026, timed to the CBC and APTN broadcast of the episode it appears in. Her explanation of the choice was characteristically unsentimental about the North: the song resonates in the Inuit world because, as she put it, "In the North, it's cold, and life isn't always easy. That's why dreams take on a special place."

The song was written for the second season of North of North, the Arctic comedy made by CBC, APTN and Netflix, in which she also guest stars; her casting alongside Bruce McCulloch was announced on 20 August 2026. She performs both Sinnatuumakka and Arnaq on screen. Season two premiered on APTN+ in Canada on 1 September 2026, reached CBC Gem, CBC TV and APTN TV on 8 September, and goes out worldwide on Netflix later in the autumn — which will put the new recording in front of a far larger audience than the album ever reached.

The touring year has been a mix of large festival slots and her own theatre shows. She played the FIFA Fan Festival site in Vancouver on 5 July 2026, Ottawa Bluesfest at LeBreton Flats on 19 July, and Parc du Mont-Royal in Montreal on 5 August. The autumn run took in North Adams, Massachusetts on 7 October and a Lincoln Center debut in New York on 8 October, before Massey Hall in Toronto on 22 October supporting Allison Russell, two Paris nights on 14 and 15 November including Théâtre de la Cité Internationale, and a return to Toronto at The Carlu on 26 November.

How the set has settled

Three years of touring one album has shaped the show into something closer to a told story than a run of songs. The spine is the Inuktitut covers, and each one is introduced with the memory it was chosen for, which means the between-song talk is doing structural work rather than filling gaps. Originals from The Ballad of the Runaway Girl — Wolves Don't Live by the Rules, Arnaq, Moi, Elsie — are threaded through, and Inuuniaravit, her Inuktitut reading of Born to Be Alive, tends to close the night on something deliberately lighter than what preceded it.

Festival bookings have exposed the one real tension in the format. Reviewing a Friday dinner-hour main-stage slot at the 49th Winnipeg Folk Festival, Exclaim! argued she had earned the booking but that the scale worked against her, noting that the lack of intimacy did not complement the intensity of the material — while still concluding she was "gripping and played with more heart than anyone else at the festival". The theatre dates are where the show is designed to land.