Sanaaq Read Free

region’s events since she was born in the early 1930s, events further back are known from what the elders told her and were thus, in her memory, condensed into a shorter time-frame. Her parents told her about the establishment of the first trading post (Révillon Frères) at Kangirsujuaq, in 1910, followed by the Hudson’s Bay Company post four years later. As early as 1884, however, an ice-observing station had been established and it operated for two years on Stupart Bay. It was the first sustained contact with Qallunaat for most of the local Inuit. Only a few heads of family had previously had the opportunity to meet any while fur trading — first on the Labrador Coast, then in the Great Whale region and, finally, from the 1860s on, at Fort Chimo on Ungava Bay. When the story begins, the Inuit were already using tobacco, matches, and guns. They had old coal bags, old tin cans, and fabrics. With regard to Christianity, the first attested visits by Inuit-speaking missionaries were those of Rev. Peck, who went to Kangirsujuaq by boat from Baffin Island in the early 1920s and baptized some Inuit. So many would eventually be evangelized that when Catholic missionaries established the first permanent mission, in 1936, the Anglicans had already baptized the entire population. Mitiarjuk’s father was one of the catechists for the community. Nonetheless, Mitiarjuk enthusiastically joined the new Christian faith in the 1940s. It was a personal choice and she stuck by it. This has not been so for many other Anglican and Catholic families who have chosen to join the Pentecostal church in recent years.
    Although the last shamans passed away in the late 1920s, taking with them the great shamanistic rituals, many traditional beliefs and practices have persisted while being intermixed with Christian beliefs and practices. The belief in the invisible world’s influence on human behaviour has even been strengthened with the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the Arctic.
    The cultural context in which the first part of the manuscript was conceived and written was that of the early 1950s, when the Inuit of Kangirsujuaq spent winter in their igloos, in five or six camps, and spring and summer in their tents, in a dozen or so small hunting camps. This way of life was a false archaism, to borrow an expression from Lévi-Strauss, for it was an impoverished form of the life from before the coming of the Qallunaat . The combined effects of the Great Depression of the 1930s, the plummeting prices for Arctic fox pelts, and the Second World War had brought about the closing of the two trading posts that had operated there since 1914. The caribou, so important to the traditional economy, had gone, as had the umiat (large multi-passenger boats covered with sealskins) which were used to move families over long distances in summer and autumn. The few owners of Peterheads (wooden boats with a sail and motor) purchased when Arctic fox prices were at their height, had left the territory for other communities that still had trading posts.
    In 1950, the Inuit of Kangirsujuaq received their first family allowance and old age pension cheques. In 1961, they had their first small prefab homes, their first school, and their first motor boats. Then came snowmobiles, electricity from generators, housing developments, and the sedentarization of families around establishments (missions, stores, schools, and nursing stations). What makes this novel interesting is that it covers the pre- and early transitional period, i.e., Mitiarjuk’s childhood from the early 1930s to the aftermath of the Second World War.
Characters
    There are about thirty characters in the book, fifteen or so of whom play an active role. The active ones are those close to Sanaaq — the young widow at the centre of the story — and a few Qallunaat. In many ways, the heroine resembles the author, while differing from her in other ways. Like Mitiarjuk, she is