The Moravian Beginnings Of Canadian Inuit Literature

Catalog for an exhibition held at McGill University, February to April 2009, exploring the extensive holdings from its Rare Books Special Collections.

A study of the development of contemporary Inuit literature, in both Inuktitut and English, including a discussion of its themes, structures and roots in oral tradition. The author concludes that a strong continuity persists between the two narrative forms despite apparent differences in subject matter and language.

Documents and briefly examines how Canada's Inuit moved from an oral tradition of literature in Inuktitut to a written tradition in their second language, English.

Inuit of northern Canada have a rich oral tradition in their ancient languages and a more recent tradition of written English. Penny Petrone traces the two paths that link the cultural past of arctic peoples with its expression in the present day. The book's first section includes traditional legends, myths, folk history told by native story-tellers, and poetry sung by Inuit composers. The second presents statements and observations by some of the first Inuit to come into contact with European newcomers, including official reports, interviews, letters, and diaries. Next are early poetry and prose in translation, much of it autobiographical. The final section includes contemporary Inuit writing, from essays and speeches to fiction, poetry, and other genres of imaginative literature. The editor has provided an introduction for each item and arranged the material chronologically to give historical perspective and continuity to the whole.

In Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture Renée Hulan disputes the notion that the north is a source of distinct collective identity for Canadians. Through a synthesis of critical, historical, and theoretical approaches to northern subjects in literary studies, she challenges the epistemology used to support this idea. By investigating mutually dependent categories of identity in literature that depicts northern peoples and places, Hulan provides a descriptive account of representative genres in which the north figures as a central theme - including autobiography, adventure narrative, ethnography, fiction, poetry, and travel writing. She considers each of these diverse genres in terms of the way it explains the cultural identity of a nation formed from the settlement of immigrant peoples on the lands of dispossessed, indigenous peoples. Reading against the background of contemporary ethnographic, literary, and cultural theory, Hulan maintains that the collective Canadian identity idealized in many works representing the north does not occur naturally but is artificially constructed in terms of characteristics inflected by historically contingent ideas of gender and race, such as self-sufficiency, independence, and endurance, and that these characteristics are evoked to justify the nationhood of the Canadian state.

Mitchell demonstrates the transformation of relationships -- both between the Inuit and Europeans and among the Inuit themselves -- that has occurred since contact with the West, focusing on the intersection of class and nation. This intersection provides a unifying framework to order the history of Inuit-European contact. At the heart of the book is a detailed and original presentation of the Inuit cooperative movement. Mitchell's skilful blending of primary sources with personal experience and secondary literature provides a compelling analysis of the Inuit co-op as a development tool used by the state. In the final chapters, she provides an astute evaluation of contemporary Inuit land claims, concluding that the Inuit have been unequally incorporated into the Canadian class system because of their ethnic status and lack of capital. Growing nationalism among the Inuit and demands for self-government make From Talking Chiefs to a Native Corporate Elite a timely and important addition to the field of Native studies. It will be of great interest to both scholars and general readers.