The
writer and Inuit historian Mitiarjuk Attasie Nappaaluk (1931-2007) lived in the Nunavik, Québec community of Kangiqsujuaq and wrote the first novel published
in Inuttitut, the Inuktitut dialect spoken in Nunavik. Her Sanaaq:
An Inuit Novel was first written in syllabics in 1935 but not published
until 1984. It appeared in French in
2002, translated by Bernard Saladin d’Anglure, and it has
just now been translated into English by Peter Frost and published by the
University of Manitoba Press, released on January 1, 2014. The novel concerns an Inuit family trying to
negotiate the social, technological, and spiritual changes brought into their
lives by the coming of the white people.
Nappaaluk was a member of Nunavik's Inuttitut
Language Commission and a longtime consultant with the Kativik School Board. She became a member of the Order of Canada in
2004.
Although she incorporated the
Blind Man and the Loon tale into her novel, she undoubtedly came by the tale
through oral tradition in her Native community.
In my own book I write a lot about semi-literary variants of the tale,
in which non-Natives have taken published texts from oral tradition and
redacted them to suit their own ideas of how the story should be told, usually
for a children’s audience, but Nappaaluk’s work clearly represents a true
literary adaptation aimed at adults.
Chapter 24 is titled The Legend of Lumaajuq
and contains a warning about getting ill or dying from eating certain old
belugas that carry the Lumaajuq, often seen as a dark object in the water
behind the beluga. The dark object
resembles an avataq or drag float but is believed to be the blind man’s wicked
mother. This account adds some
interesting new details to the story that may well have come out of oral
tradition, so that I wonder if this part of the novel or récit really deserves
to be classified as “fiction.” Folktales
themselves are too often regarded as fiction, when indeed they are something
else entirely.
