Ella Nathanael Alkiewicz: A Storyteller for Her Culture
By Melissa Karen Sances
Photos by Nikki Gardner Photography
Published In Northampton Living | November 2025
Ella Nathanael Alkiewicz grew up without words. The writer and founder of Ella Alk Inuk LLC in Northampton was born into the Inuit community in Labrador, Canada, where doctors found tumors in her throat that compromised her breathing. The remedy was to remove them and get a tracheostomy, or a surgical incision in her windpipe, which left her speechless at the age of six.
When she could go to school, she traveled alone in a taxicab, and a teacher’s aide was her private nurse. For years, the tumors persisted, and lying in her hospital bed, she entertained herself by doodling—even though her family told her, “Don’t be an artist. Don’t be a poet. You’ll never make money.” It was freeing, the drawing, and it sustained her until at 13, the hole in her throat was closed, leaving her with a voice hoarse from all the scarring. At 15, she was finally tumor-free.
“I’ve always wondered why I had to get them and nobody else did,” says Alkiewicz. “But I am grateful I lived and can do what I do because I lived.”
Her experience informed her love of education—“because now I can talk, so now I want to teach other people”—and after moving to the United States she graduated from Salem State University in 1994. After working as a teacher and having her child, Reggi, she moved to western Massachusetts, where she wrote for the Montague Reporter under a pseudonym, Bridget Sweet, whose “Sweet Talk on the Ave” earned her $25 a column. Her love of journalism inspired her to study at UMass Amherst, where she earned another bachelor’s degree and a certificate in Native studies, while connecting with the local Native community. She earned a master's in fine arts in creative nonfiction at Lesley University in 2018.
All her creative outlets came together during the pandemic. While stuck at home, she transformed her dining room into a studio and started painting acrylics that teach people about Inuit culture. “I made art and I submitted it, and people liked it, which was amazing,” she says with some surprise, “and I was able to show it with other Indigenous folks.” She opened her Northampton space, Ella Alk Inuk LLC, in 2024, and one of her paintings was published this summer in You Were Made for This World: Celebrated Indigenous Voices Speak to Young People, a book to celebrate potential. Currently, her artwork and poetry are on display at the North American Indian Center of Boston.
As she emerges as a storyteller for her culture, she is still learning about her history. “I’m a beneficiary of the Nunatsiavut Government of Labrador, Canada,” she explains, noting that she is part of the only self-governing Inuit community in the country. “It took 33 years for my relatives to advocate for the Newfoundland Labrador government to make us independent.” On December 1, she notes proudly, the government will be 20 years old.
Because of the ongoing wildfires in Canada, Alkiewicz hasn’t been able to return home, so she teaches poetry online to her fellows and stays up on the local gossip through Facebook. But she takes her advocacy seriously, explaining that both her parents survived residential boarding schools, and as a result of the trauma they experienced, were not afforded their own childhoods. In her essay “Orange Shirt Day,” she honors Phyllis Webstad, a First Nations survivor who showed up to school in an orange shirt and expected it would be returned to her upon her release. She also describes her mother’s experience:
“…at four years old, she was taken… She had to learn to speak English, read only English, and write English in cursive. Mom had a short haircut and wore the same uniform as her other sweet brown Inuit peers… By the time Mom was thirteen, she left the institution forever altered.”
In November 2017, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivered an official apology to former students of residential schools in Newfoundland and Labrador. The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation became a federal holiday in Canada in 2021. Before her death at 74, Alkiewicz’s mother told her daughter that her art helped her heal.
Today Alkiewicz is still learning the language of her childhood. Her teachers are young people ensuring that the community’s elders don’t lose their voices. She has been married for almost 13 years to Chris, “her half,” who wooed her when he got into her clunker and began postulating about the state of her serpentine belt. “He told me, ‘You can do this art career,’” she says. “Tomorrow he’ll help me get to the powwow and vend: He can tell you all about my work and what it means. I can get in the circle and dance and he’s over there holding it down.”
If she could tell her story in an image—the way she does with her paintings—you would see her among family on a sunny day at the beach. You could imagine the sound of the waves approaching and receding, and her laughter, louder, carrying all the way to the horizon.
Other Articles from this Issue…
