At the age of 15, after attending school in Cambridge Bay, Tagaq went to Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, to attend Sir John Franklin High School where she first began to practice throat singing. During this time Tagaq, like most other students from the central Arctic lived at Akaitcho Hall, the residential facility for Sir John Franklin High School. She later studied visual arts at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and while there developed her own solo form of Inuit throat singing, which is normally done by two women.[4] Her decision to go solo was a pragmatic one: she did not have a singing partner.[5]
In 2005, her CD entitled Sinaa (Inuktitut for "edge") was nominated for five awards at the Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards. At the ceremony on 25 October 2005, the CD won awards for Best Producer/Engineer, Best Album Design and Tagaq herself won the Best Female Artist award. Sinaa was nominated for the 2006 Juno Awards as the Best Aboriginal Recording.[7]
Although primarily known for her throat singing, Tagaq is also an accomplished artist and her work was featured on the 2003 Northwestel telephone directory.[8]
Her fifth album Tongues, released in 2022, was inspired by Split Tooth and was recorded mostly before the COVID-19 pandemic with New York poet Saul Williams as producer, but the album was placed on hold for over a year. At that time, mixer Gonjasufi reworked the into a "grimier" sound.[21]
She began collaborating with the Kronos Quartet in 2005. Since then, they have performed together at venues across North America, from the January 2006 debut of the project Nunavut at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts in Vancouver, British Columbia, through to the New York's Spring for Music Festival at Carnegie Hall presentation of composer Derek Charke's 13 Inuit Throat Song Games (2014). In 2015, Tagaq was commissioned to write a piece for the Kronos Quartet's Fifty for the Future project.[25]
In 2012, Toronto International Film Festival commissioned Tagaq to create a live soundscape for Nanook of the North, as part of the festival's film retrospective First Peoples Cinema: 1500 Nations, One Tradition. Tagaq collaborated with composer Derek Charke, percussionist Jean Martin and violinist Jesse Zubot, and the work was performed at the 2012 TIFF and Under the Radar Festival at New York's Public Theater, 2016, amongst other places. Despite some of the film's more stereotyped depictions of Inuit lives in 1922, Tagaq also found the film the perfect source material: "There are moments in the movie where … my ancestors, they’re so amazing." She said to CBC news. "They lived on the land and I just still can’t believe that. Growing up in Nunavut and just the harshness of the environment itself, the ability for people to be able to survive with no vegetation, and just the harshest of environments, it’s just incredible to me."[26]
Tagaq collaborated with composer Christos Hatzis, author Joseph Boyden and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra on the score for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's Going Home Star: Truth and Reconciliation (2015), which won a 2017 Juno Award for Classical Album of the Year – Large Ensemble.
In 2017, Tagaq and fellow Polaris laureate Buffy Sainte-Marie collaborated on the single "You Got to Run (Spirit of the Wind)", which appeared on Sainte-Marie's album Medicine Songs.[27] The song was inspired by George Attla, a champion dog sled racer from Alaska.[28] Tagaq has also appeared as a guest vocalist on songs by July Talk ("Beck + Call") and Weaves ("Scream").
As part of this viral media campaign, Tagaq posted a picture of her young daughter lying beside a dead seal on Twitter. The seal had been killed to feed a group of local elders and is an essential part of an Inuk diet, eaten by necessity and tradition. The image caused backlash by animal rights activists, who directed online abuse and threats towards Tagaq.[30][31]
During her Polaris Music Prize acceptance speech, she encouraged people to wear and eat seal, and shouted, "Fuck PETA",[32] which enraged animal rights activists. Inuit have been arguing since the 1980s that any attack on the seal hunt is an attack on the Indigenous hunt, because it destroys the market for furs. Subsequently, Tagaq tweeted, "I had a scrolling screen of 1200 missing and murdered indigenous women at the Polaris gala but people are losing their minds over seals."[33][34] In 2016, Tagaq reported that she had been banned from Facebook for posting a photo of a sealskin coat.[35]
The Aboriginal Peoples Television Network named Tagaq one of the 16 Indigenous "movers and shakers to watch in 2016." The list praised Tagaq's activism against "to expose hard truths about systemic racism in governments, missing and murdered Indigenous women and proudly supporting the practices and preservation of her culture such as seal hunting."[36]
^"Going Home Star". www.musiccentre.ca. Canadian Music Centre / Centre de Musique Canadienne. Archived from the original on October 30, 2019. Retrieved June 26, 2019.
