In fall of 2004, scholar, storyteller, and musician Kira Van Deusen visited ten Nunavut communities as part of a team that was doing research for a film on Kiviuq, an Inuit literary hero whose adventures comprise an epic-length narrative which was noted by ethnographers early in the twentieth century. Led by filmmaker John Houston, the team encountered some forty Inuit elders who told the entire sequence of Kiviuq’s legendary career or parts thereof. One product of Van Deusen’s month in the Canadian Arctic is the present book, a critical study of the Kiviuq epic which combines indigenous perspectives, the author’s perceptions as professional storyteller, and relevant scholarship on Inuit and Siberian literary and religious traditions.
The volume begins with Van Deusen’s retelling of the complete series of adventures undertaken by Kiviuq. She draws upon the performances she encountered in the field as her primary source for this composite text, but also involves her own experience in telling the story in settings such as storytelling festivals. After a chapter in which she provides an overview of the field experience itself, Van Deusen then gets down to the business of oral literary criticism. She organizes her treatment of the epic episodically. She devotes chapters to a single episode or set of related episodes by exploring relevant cultural background, much of which explores the role of shamanism in Kiviuq’s adventures; commentary recorded from Inuit storytellers; and insights suggested by her own experience in telling the story. She follows each of these chapters with a presentation of analogous material from the Siberian traditions on which she has focused much of her attention throughout her career. For example, a chapter which explores the cultural references and thematic implications of a narrative incident wherein Kiviuq takes a fox/beautiful woman as wife is succeeded by a chapter exploring similar stories among Siberian storytellers. By the time the book concludes, Van Deusen has taken the reader through the entire Kiviuq epic in considerable detail and shown that some of its themes are evident in the verbal arts of both American and Eurasian Arctics. Van Deusen’s careful analysis offers a powerful demonstration of the subtleties and intricacies of this oral literary material and makes a strong case that it deserves the sort of close consideration that academics have often reserved only for written literature. Moreover, Van Deusen reinforces the truism that such analysis must be culture-specific. She reads explication and interpretation out of the story of Kiviuq itself and from the historical and social contexts that produced it. She does not impose interpretive agendas from outside the material that would truncate exegesis and produce interpretations that reflected external instead of indigenous values. She remains respectful of the material as expressive culture that must be understood on its own terms.
Supplementary material appended to the end of Van Deusen’s text includes a sampling of commentary from Inuit elders from several locations in Nunavut; a glossary of terms from Inuktitut and several Siberian languages; and, reinforcing the comparative dimension of much of her interpretation, a list of motifs based on Stith Thompson’s classic folklore reference work.
Van Deusen’s approach, which uses as its primary document a composite retelling of the original material, suggests that she is exploring meaning and artistry in the general tradition rather than in individual performances—in what Paul Zolbrod, who has translated and analyzed Navajo verbal art, calls a “deep poetry” that provides foundation for specific performances. It also suggests that meaning and artistry transcend particular enactments. Other interpreters using similar ethnographically based techniques of literary criticism might prefer to work with specific performances by specific storytellers. Yet both perspectives would seem to have a place in our attempts to understand indigenous verbal arts. On one hand, the approach taken by Van Deusen affords the opportunity to perceive the power of a tradition that may endure–as the epic of Kiviuq and its individual episodes have–over many generations of storytellers and throughout a wide geographical dispersal. On the other, a more particularistic, performance-oriented perspective would allow a focus on the distinctive artistry of each individual storyteller.
Van Deusen’s book is a model study of an oral prose narrative viewed from the perspective of the tradition that informs specific tellings and re-tellings. Readers interested in the verbal arts of the Arctic should definitely consult it carefully. But those who are interested in ways to approach the analysis of oral literature will find it useful as well. They may want to supplement their reading of this book with Kiviuq (2006), the film that emerged from the 2004 field trip, and with the materials available at the website Kiviuq’s Journey (www.unipka.ca). Film and website join Van Deusen’s book to comprise an important set of resources documenting and interpreting a vital literary tradition that has been noted by ethnographers for more than a century.
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[Review length: 800 words • Review posted on May 26, 2011]