This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.
Nutaaq Doreen Simmonds is an Inupiaq actor and language teacher. She was seen by more than 12 million people playing an auntie to Jodie Foster’s step-daughter in the latest season of True Detective. She’s also appearing in a comedy set in the Arctic — North of North — debuting next year on Netflix.
She plays the grandmother, Aaka Mary, in Cold Case, a play opening at Perseverance Theater this weekend.
Content warning: This interview contains mentions of suicide and violence against Indigenous people.
Listen:
Nutaaq Doreen Simmonds: I gave you my Inupiaq name, Nutaaq. My other name is Doreen Simmonds, and I’m from a place that was known as Barrow for a hundred years, and we just got the name back, Utqiagvik, which means “a place to pick roots.”
Oh, it was a friend of mine who emailed me something about auditioning for a part in True Detective. She came over with her phone, with her phone, and she helped me do the audition, rather then and there. And they liked it, so I got the part.
Aaka Mary. I’m the grandmother to the young lady who is looking for her Auntie’s body, Aaka Mary’s daughter.
It happens to be a cold case. She’s been missing for about nine months.
And Aaka Mary doesn’t know too much — not too much about English and gets confused and takes, kind of takes it out on her granddaughter. She’s just a grumpy, grumpy old lady.
There’s still two sisters who were brutally killed. It still hasn’t been solved, and that was 20 some years ago. And also my favorite Auntie’s granddaughter, who was killed and wasn’t found all winter, until people who were walking the beach several miles down found her body.
It brought back memories, and there are others.
I had to laugh at myself the way I was before, when I finally found myself, and it was through my older sister. I was near offing myself when I called my sister at midnight. And through her suggestion, I found that myself — this skin and bone was really not the real me. There was a bigger part of me, like an iceberg.
For most of my life, I thought of myself as that part, and found there was a bigger, deeper part of me, and I began to be kinder to myself and to others. And it took a while, but I learned to be comfortable with myself and not be so judgmental toward others, because I was learning to be kind to me.
And so in that process, I learned to look back at myself how I was before I learned to forgive myself for having been that way.
I grew up very, very, very shy. My grandmother called me Nipailuktaq after a bird that would — very quietly — would swoop down and scare the heck out of us while we were in the tundra because we’re too close to her eggs.
This was an opportunity for me, because I had just finally — at my late age — finally admitted I’m an artist, and I need to work as an artist and acting is an art.
My son, he tells me, “Mom, we just don’t know what you’re going to do from one thing to the next.” But he said, “I have never heard you talk so happily about a job you’ve had before.”