She's the first Inuk GG Performing Arts Award winner, but where was Susan Aglukark 25 years ago?

This Saturday in Ottawa, the Governor General's Performing Arts Awards will be handed out, the highest cultural honour this country can offer. Michael Bublé is a recipient, as is opera star Ben Heppner, choreographer Marie Choinard, playwright Suzanne Lebeau, producer Robert Lantos and singer-songwriter Susan Aglukark — whose win will mark the first time an Inuk artist has received the prize. 

Aglukark's music has earned her three Junos and a Canadian No. 1 ("O Siem") and she's released nine albums since 1990. But beyond the music, she regularly volunteers with Indigenous youth around the country.

This April, for example, when a suicide crisis in Attawpiskat First Nation led to a state of emergency, Aglukark travelled to the community, leading workshops in art and journalling as a means of finding hope, and motivation, in dark times. As CBC News reported at the time, she shared her own experience, and her music, with kids there.

"When I left small town Nunavut, I left for very personal, very angry reasons," Aglukark told CBC News during her trip, "and I moved away because there was no other way to really cope with what was going on in my community. I found myself being able to use my songs and sharing my story as a way to keep healing."

Back in 1991, her story was just beginning — and it was in July that year that Aglukark did her first TV interview with CBC.

Shrugging off predictions of fame from Midday reporter Ralph Benmergui, the 24-year-old from Arviat, NWT (now Nunavut) had just launched her music career — while also balancing a day-job as a translator for the Department of Indian Affairs, by the way — and her first music video ("Searching") had captured the show's attention.

She's repeatedly asked what it's like to be an Inuk woman living "down south" in Ottawa, and in the interview, Aglukark makes her pride for her culture known.

"I'm still the Inuk I was born to be. Nothing changes, it's just the atmosphere," she says. "You don't change the person inside." And love for her culture is what motivates her to create, and to learn, she says in the clip — a cause that seems to have guided her these last 25 years. "I wanted to help my people in any way that I could."

Watch the video above, the earliest interview with Susan Aglukark in the CBC Digital Archives.

The Governor General's Performing Arts Award Gala takes place at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, Saturday, June 11.