Victoria Okpik has a sure fire way of relieving the pressures of work at the end of the day – she takes a moment to stare up into the night sky.
“It’s kind of a nice thing to know that, this thing is in the space…somewhere!” she said with a laugh.
The thing that Okpik is talking about is a bracelet…
A sealskin bracelet to be exact, one that she crafted recently in her Montreal studio and is now on the International Space Station.
“I’m proud that this bracelet is somewhere in the space, and Inuit should be proud of that as well,” said the 50 year old Okpik, who is originally from the small Nunavik community of Quaqtaq, QC.
Earlier this month, Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques rode a Soyuz booster rocket all the way from a launch pad in Kazakhstan to the International Space Station.
But before he was blasting off into space, Saint-Jacques was a physician in Puvirnituq, QC, an Inuit community of about 1,700 people in the subarctic Nunavik region.
(The bracelet that Canadian Astronaut David Saint-Jacques took into space. Photo courtesy: Victoria Okpik)
Okpik said Saint-Jacques reached out to her this past summer on the recommendation of a mutual friend.
“David wanted to bring something that was meaningful to Inuit,” recalled Okpik, “I think because he was a doctor up north, so I think that he feels he has a connection.”
Saint-Jacques will spend about six and half months in space conducting science experiments and operating robotics on the space station.
In a press conference held remotely from the space station, he emphasized that he wants to share his experiences with the world as much as possible.
“It was nighttime, and then there was our first sunrise, on orbit and that was quite an emotional moment as I looked out the window and a little blue crescent started to get brighter and brighter, and I was like, ‘wow, this is actually the curve of the Earth.’ So that first sunrise in orbit I will never forget,” said a floating Saint-Jacques, approximately 400 kilometers above the Earth’s surface.
But these days Okpik is a little too preoccupied to keep track of Saint-Jacques’s exploits in space.
The holidays are a busy time of year when her hand crafted Inuit style mittens are in the most demand.
Now, along with balancing her usual orders and a full time day job, she finds herself with a plethora of requests for seal skin bracelets ever since she posted about Saint-Jacques’s purchase on social media.
“I hope I can finish them all before Christmas,” she said, a hint of worry creeping into her voice.
