Review — Uqalurait: An Oral History of Nunavut

Uqalurait: An Oral History of Nunavut
compiled and edited by John Bennett and Susan Rowley
McGill-Queen’s UP (2004), 473 pp.

“Inuit Quajimajatuqangit” is a form of knowledge passed down from generation to generation — how to build an igloo, how to navigate across the ice in the dead of winter, how to make a parka out of caribou hide, how to thwart evil spirits. In a way, it is the thread that holds together Inuit culture and history. The result of five years of intensive research, combing through archives and interviewing elders, Uqalurait: An Oral History of Nunavut is not the history of a territory so much as a portrait of a way of life that has largely ceased to exist, told from the point of view of the people who lived it. It is Inuit Quajimajatuqangit.

Uqalurait is divided into two parts, “Inuit Identity” and “Regional Identity,” with individual chapters consisting of quotes on subjects such as naming, hunting, shamanism, and architecture. “An Inuk believes that when you name your child after the dead one, then the dead one lives again in the name, and the spirit of the dead one has a body again,” Armand Tagoona said in 1975. “I was held up solely by names,” a certain Maniilaq told Knud Rasmussen in 1931. “Through all these names I have grown old. I have withstood the attacks of shamans and all the dangers that would otherwise have uprooted me from the dwelling places of men.” But most of Uqalurait is more pragmatic than this — how to properly stab a polar bear (reach around and stab it from behind so the bear turns away from you) or what kind of snow is best for an igloo (snow from a single storm, since blocks made from layered snow tend to fracture).

Uqalurait: An Oral History of Inuit is above all a project that recuperates and preserves the dwindling knowledge of how the Inuit lived prior to moving into permanent settlements. The purpose of the project, according to the editors, is to offer part of “the answer to the question, so crucial to young Inuit today, of what it means to be Inuit.” The project aims also to provide Southerners with an inside perspective on the history and culture of Nunavut. Perhaps the book’s greatest achievement is in the cumulative force of its voices, which are by turns profound and remarkably humorous.