Seal hunting, throat singing, and fighting fair: the power and purpose of Tanya Tagaq

“What I’m doing is not linear,” says Tanya Tagaq. “It’s not everyone’s cup of tea.”

The Inuk throat singer recognises that hers is a niche genre. Throat singing started as a sort of a duel – a performance by two women, who stand close, face-to-face, gripping each other’s arms. The challenge was to see which woman could outlast the other. One usually collapsed from laughter or lack of breath, then it was game over.

The sound is powerful and otherworldly: guttural clicks and growls coupled with breathy moans. At times it calls to mind Bjork, but magnified; at others it’s more like traditional Irish keening. “I’m just so happy some people like it,” Tagaq says.

And they do. Pitchfork, for example, described Tagaq’s 2016 album, Retribution, as a work that “shifts from boisterous flashes of punk, metal, and industrial – like a heart pumping after the hunt – to places that are much more ominous.” The title track is a war cry on behalf of Mother Earth that you can also dance to. The music is not relaxing but rousing and energetic, with a faintly Celtic strain of strings.

Tagaq is hugely creative and seems to switch effortlessly between mediums including composition, performance, visual arts, activism, writing and public speaking. Her first book, a mash-up of fiction and memoir titled Split Tooth, will be published in September this year by Penguin Random House. She has also collaborated with artists such as6 Bjork, Mike Patton and Kronos Quartet.

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Her concerts can be unpredictable. “The shows are improvised gigs,” she says, speaking to Guardian Australia down the phone from Toronto. “You get who we are on the day – that’s the fun of it. The good thing about improvisation [is] it will never happen the same way again.”

Tagaq has spent much of the first half of this year touring. She reaches Australia in time for Dark Mofo, at which she will perform Retribution in its entirety, backed by a full choir, as well as provide a live score to a screening of Robert J Flaherty’s silent black-and-white film from 1922, Nanook of the North. She is also forthright and opinionated, traits she will bring to Dark Mofo’s new ideas stream, Dark and Dangerous Thoughts.

Tagaq’s music and politics are inseparable from her cultural background, and to understand one you need to understand the other. An indigenous woman whose Inuit roots stretch back to the Arctic Circle (her mum grew up in an igloo), Tagaq was raised in a settlement on Cambridge Bay, Nunavut.

Her homeland is frozen for most of the year, she says. “There’s no vegetation. People in my family hunt. The winters are very harsh – 24-hour darkness for months. It makes survival very hard. You really have to scrape a life out of that unforgiving habitat. But the best thing is being isolated and having the land in charge.”

Tagaq has been a passionate defender of indigenous land rights and customs in Canada. She faced fierce backlash for her beliefs in 2014 when she was attacked by animal rights activists for posting a “sealfie” on Twitter – essentially a picture of her baby beside a bloodied seal that had been killed to feed a group of locals at an elder’s camp. Seal meat is an essential part of an Inuk’s diet, eaten by necessity as much as tradition.

After the “sealfie”, animal rights groups called for Tagaq’s baby to be removed from her care, and talking about the furore even four years later, Tagaq is still angry about the hypocrisy of the response. “That’s what happens when you are in a minority. People feel they can put their morals on you. There are a lot of hungry people up there. The statistics are pretty dismal. If you can’t sell your wares and you can’t pay your rent – there’s a population crisis and housing crisis. Seals are our cows. Nobody has the right to tell an entire group of people that they cannot reap their resources to be economically viable,” she says.

As for her attackers: “It’s quite often the people that are well fed. They are people who put their moral standpoint on others. People who are frustrated with not being able to take down slaughterhouses or McDonald’s can get their feelings validated by picking on poor people who are just trying to live … Trophy hunting is not the same thing. We hunt to live.”