Canada’s vast northern area, little known outside specialist circles, comprises the Yukon, Northwest Territories, and the Arctic lands above the treeline. The largest, and longest self-governing area, Nunavut, is marked by Baffin Island in the east, the Yukon in the west, and extends northward over the Northwest Passage through Ellesmere Island to within a few hundred miles of the North Pole, and southward to Hudson Bay and James Bay Island and coastal areas. Nunavut’s nearest neighbor to the east, across the stomach-turningly rough Davis Strait, is Greenland.
At first glance, the lands inhabited by Inuit are forbiddingly barren, but since their arrival across the Bering Strait thousands of years ago, Inuit hunters evolved generally effective survival tactics, surviving on seals and caribou, and had contact with European visitors and settlers from at least the ninth century onward. We do not know whether those early contacts were as perilous as those of nineteenth- and twentieth-century visiting whaleships, whose alien pathogens often wiped out entire communities.
Over time, Inuit animist practices and beliefs were slowly displaced, first by Christianizing missionaries, particularly in the twentieth century, and later by the frequent forcible removal of children to boarding schools which was intended both to replace indigenous habits with Canadian ones and to protect the young from endemic tuberculosis. In the 1950s, the central Canadian government secured claims to national sovereignty of the far north by resettling scores of Inuit from southerly regions like northern Quebec and from the then-northern limit of habitation on Baffin Island to territories north of the Northwest Passage. In the 1990s the inhabitants of Nunavut, which comprises about twenty percent of Canada’s landmass, negotiated a nuanced partnership with and autonomy from Ottawa, the Canadian capital. As inaccessible as Canada’s Far North remains to so many, The Fast Runner trilogy from Isuma Productions in Igloolik (Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner, and Before Tomorrow) nonetheless provide an introduction.
Keavy Martin’s Silattuqsarvik (A Place [and Time] to Become Wise) examines the “stories, songs, life writing, oral history, poetry, fiction, and film” (3) that have been generated within Nunavut. She has tried to “locate interpretive strategies within these texts” and to consider them within Inuit experience and values in order to develop “principles that can guide students and scholars of Inuit literature” (3) “to seek Inuit methods of interpretation, as embodied by the texts themselves” (11).
Chapter 1 examines the Inuit perception of an Arctic nationhood, drawing on the 1977 Inuit Circumpolar Conference group statement of unity based on common descent with its associated legal, political, and cultural distinctions. This defining principle excluded Iqquilli (Dene), Allait (Cree), and Qallunaat (white people), as well as Tuniit (earlier arrivals in the Arctic, whom archeologists designate as Dorset people). Tuniit otherness shows itself in Inuit oral tradition as a difference in size (with Tuniit either very large or short and squat) accompanied by extraordinary physical strength and developmental deficiency, with most accounts agreeing that Inuit drove out Tuniit over time (22-3). Accompanying this description is a strange and widespread sentiment that an Inuit encounter with a Tuniit can be neither remembered nor articulated: “It is said that the person will start to say, ‘Look, I met this ...’ then right away the person will start to cry’” (25). A literary treatment of Tuniit—in Rachel Qitsualik’s short story “Skraeling”—illustrates Martin’s points, but precipitates the view that “national self-definition based on a shared difference from Others might even allow for more flexible internal definitions of national identity: Inuit can maintain all kinds of regional differences while still agreeing on their shared distinctness from Tuniit, Allait, and Qallunaat. This, therefore, has the potential to be a nationhood, and a national unity, that does not necessarily demand homogeneity” (37).
Chapter 2 examines traditional tales called unipkaaqtuat, legends that “are from another time, at another place” (43) and that “contain important lessons about ways to live a good life” (45). Told in 1950 by a Nassilingmiut named Thomas Kusugaq who had moved to Repulse Bay, the stories’ listener and recorder was Alex Spalding, a young Hudson’s Bay Company clerk. There is a wife who is a bear, and there are vengeful spirits and challenges the hero must face. The point of the stories singly and collectively is to communicate the preconditions for maturity known as isuma (“consciousness, thought, reason, memory, will” [55]). Thomas Kusugaq’s son Michael has emerged as a contemporary Canadian writer in English, whose works embrace and recontextualize the traditional tales his father told half a century earlier, preserving them from an oblivion that the intrusion of southern media might have brought in their wake.
Chapter 3 turns to song traditions that Knud Rasmussen characterized as having “flowered like rough, weather-beaten saxifrage which has taken root on rock” (64). Rasmussen’s metaphorical rock stands for daily hardship in traditional Arctic life, suffering from cold and hunger, often dying from this twin scourge. When Christianity arrived, its success sometimes resting on southern-supplied stores of sugar, flour, and tea, the traditional songs noted down in Igloolik during Knud Rasmussen, Peter Freuchen, and Therkel Mathiassen’s Fifth Thule Expedition (1921-1924) began to die out. They were anathema to missionaries, who drove a hard bargain: give up ajaja songs, and “sing only Jesoosie’s songs. Do not sing the old songs that bring Satanasi to tempt Inuit through the drum, to burn forever in Hell” (65), as Zacharias Kunuk put it in his 2006 Journals film. Because the religious campaign was largely successful, Rasmussen’s record of Inuit poetry has become an invaluable record.
Rasmussen, like other early twentieth-century observers, regarded his Inuit hosts as natural primitives who freely accessed poetry as a natural art, viewing it as a gift that everyone should possess in some degree, rather than as a skill. And yet Rasmussen’s own comments leave no doubt about the “intentional artistry” (67) of the Inuit songs he recorded. Chapter 3 concludes with a sensitive analysis of Isuma Productions’ 2006 film, whose poetry passages—translated from Danish into English and back into Inuktitut—return this treasure to today’s Inuit.
Chapter 4 opens with a discussion of Inuit Qaujimajatuqungit (IQ), a complex concept that boils down to “what Inuit have known for a very long time” (98). One literary form consists of stories heard from other tellers, things beyond the teller’s personal experience (unikkaaqtuat). The sometimes fantastic content (animal-human transformations, little people) is held to be true, or having been true, before “the world changed its rules” (111). In contrast, accounts of personal experience (inuusirmingnik unikkaaq) are vouched for by their tellers. Although elders seem willing to tell personally experienced narratives, they often refuse to tell unikkaaqtuat, claiming to be a bad storyteller. “Perhaps the caveats indicate a fear of not doing justice to the tradition, or perhaps they constitute a rhetorical gesture: an expression of humility” (113), Martin concludes.
In an afterword entitled “Inuuqtigiittiarniq. Living Together in a Good Way,” Keavey Martin demonstrates humility in the face of an alien material that is so difficult to “know” in a personal sense. Articulating lessons for life that her studies have taught her, Stories in a New Skin is a remarkably mature work, informative as well as wise.
My own interest in Inuit literature grows out of twenty years of visiting Greenland and the Canadian Arctic, in the course of which I’ve followed Igloolik’s Isuma Productions’s films and have read books like Jean Briggs’s classic study of a nomadic Utku family living west and north of the Hudson Bay in the 1960s. In that oral culture, however, Briggs was unable to elicit stories from the small band with whom she spent a year and a half, a reminder, perhaps of the fragility and tenuousness of oral narrative.
Works Cited
Briggs, Jean L. 1970. Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Qitsualik, Rachel. 2004. “Skraeling.” In: Our Story. Aboriginal Voices on Canada’s Past, 36-66. Toronto: Doubleday Canada.
Rasmussen, Knud. 1976. Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos. Translated by W. Worster. New York: AMS Press.
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[Review length: 1327 words • Review posted on August 27, 2014]