RANKIN INLET - It started because his wife wanted to go on holiday in Hawaii.

"I didn't want to go," Michael Kusugak laughed, "but she really wanted to go so finally I said, 'If I have something to do there I'll go.' This conference, Healing Our Spirit, came up and I made a submission and was accepted so we went."

This is what led Kusugak, a well-known Rankin Inlet children's author and storyteller, to give a storytelling workshop at the conference, Healing Our Spirit Worldwide in Honolulu.

"I think I made quite a splash actually," he said.

There were people there from all over the world, including many Inuit from Northern Canada, and he said he was soon inundated with requests to go speak about storytelling in Nunavik, Australia and elsewhere.

"I think I touched a nerve somewhere," he said.

When Kusugak made his presentation, he focused on storytelling as a healing tool.

"I said that in my young life, we were told stories when we lived in igloos up in Repulse Bay. Every night I'd ask my grandmother to tell me stories. The stories taught us about morals and how to live your life." Storytelling runs deep in aboriginal culture, he said.

"These were the things that kept our culture alive for hundreds of years, the stories. Since the arrival of people from the outside world and the imposition of religion, (the stories) were pushed to the side and our identity was basically taken away."

Kusugak said the way for the Inuit to heal after losing their identity is healing through bringing storytelling back. He said the loss of identity is a history that native people around the world share.

"They've had the same experience that we had, religion came to them, colonization came to them and television and radio and a dominating people from other worlds came to them and they were forced to change their ways. I think I really touched a nerve when I talked about how storytelling has sustained us all these years and how maybe we should work at trying to get it back," he said.

Kusugak has been working on bringing back storytelling for many years now. The author of nine children's books, he's presently working on two sequels as well as his first adult book.

One sequel has the working title The Mean Knight, which will follow his other book, The Curse of the Shaman. The Mean Knight is a historical fiction novel based on famous Rankin Inlet history, the disappearance of the James Knight expedition.

"You can only imagine what it must have been like when he landed on Marble Island with two huge ships and then both of his ships sank and then he and his whole crew just disappeared off the face of the earth," Kusugak said.

The book is to be called The Mean Knight, "because apparently he was always warned never to trust the Eskimos so he would drive the Inuit away - the only people who could have helped them, he drove them away."

Kusugak said that book should be finished in June. The other sequel is to his latest book, The Littlest Sled Dog.

"I don't know when the adult one will come out but I'm determined to write it now," he said.

Kusugak published his first book, A Promise is a Promise, in 1989.

"As soon as TV came, it seems like overnight storytelling died and these wonderful stories are not being told anymore so I decided, well, I'm going to do it and encourage people to tell stories too. So that's what I've been doing all these years."

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