Ukkusiksalik: The People's Story
Author to promote book in Naujaat, Rankin Inlet
Darrell Greer
Northern News Services
Wednesday, April 6, 2016
NAUJAAT
A new book on the area that is the Ukkusiksalik (Wager Bay) National Park is written from a distinctly Inuit perspective.
Elizabeth Aglukka points to a map while talking with a group of Naujaat elders taking part in a field camp at Wager Bay (Ukkusiksalik) in 1996. - photo courtesy of David Pelly |
Ukkusiksalik: The People's Story is written by David F. Pelly, an explorer of the North's cultural landscape and the author of The Old Way North, Sacred Hunt and Thelon: A River Sanctuary, among others.
He was awarded the Queen's Diamond Jubilee medal in 2012 for his long-standing efforts to preserve Inuit oral history and traditional knowledge.
Pelly will be in Rankin Inlet to promote his book from April 17 to 19, and in Naujaat from April 19 to 21.
He will also stop in Iqaluit and Yellowknife.
Pelly took on the task of gathering an exhaustive oral history of the park's proposed area in the early 1990s.
The Land Claim requirement afforded him the chance to interview elders in numerous communities from 1991 to 1993.
Pelly said he spoke with elders who had a personal or family connection to Wager Bay in every community he visited.
He said while not all the elders had stories to tell, many did.
"My job at the time was to document whatever they had to tell, then go back and give them a chance to change things, confirm what they said earlier and make additions or deletions," said Pelly.
"The initial project was delivered to Parks Canada as a massive volume of pure oral-history transcript in 1993.
"It was a three-inch-thick book of single-spaced, double-sided pages that wasn't a very engaging read, although it contained lots of substance.
"It lay fallow in their archives for many years until about five years ago, the idea came up again of trying to do something that would pull together the story of life around Ukkusiksalik, and that was the genesis of this book project."
Pelly said Dundurn released the book a couple of months ago.
He said the 218-page, hardcover book - which has a lot of black and white archival imagery and a fair amount of colour imagery - is a challenging read for non-Inuit because it tries to stick to the Inuit perspective.
"The book moves rapidly from deglaciation to the arrival of the first peoples, the direct ancestors of today's Inuit and the first British explorers.
"The heart and soul of the book follows ... is the first-person account of each elder I interviewed in the 1990s, all of whom have passed away.
"My sense is there's a special feeling for the Ukkusiksalik region because there was always food around the area.
"It had a great diversity and abundance of wildlife, so there was always food available and with early Inuit history being an era of survival, that's really all that mattered."
Pelly said Inuit knew they would find food if they got to Ukkusiksalik, so they moved there from up and down the coast.
He said he wanted the first-person accounts to stand as the front part of the book so readers are forced to read them as such.
"It can be a challenging read because older Inuit had a certain way of telling stories and I wanted to preserve that.
"There's a lot of information and it's easy to miss the subtleties and depth of their message if you're reading it like a P. D. James novel.
"It's important for the modern reader to realize these storytellers didn't have any reason to have the historical perspective we naturally bring to it.
"It doesn't all happen in the context of the British exploration of the Northwest Passage, for example, because that's a passing feature of Inuit history, not a central theme."
Pelly said he didn't want to apply the cultural lens of non-Inuit. Instead, he wanted to preserve the Inuit cultural lens to the full extent he could.
"I tried to stay true to the Inuit perspective on the various elements that came into their lives.
"So yes, the whalers, missionaries and Mounties are all there but they're like passing phenomena through the lives of the people living around the Ukkusiksalik area.
"I wanted to look at them in that light, rather than what I would suggest would be the more typical white man's context of a book about the history of the North."
Pelly said he will be very interested to hear what the hundreds of people in the Kivalliq who read the book will say to him about it.
He said there are a number of people descended from the elders in the book - as well as previous generations referred to in the book - who are excited about its release.
"I'm confident those family members are going to read the book and it's their reaction that matters to me.
"What kind of reaction the book gets in the U.S.A. or southern Canada is of secondary importance to me.
"I've tried to put this book together for the people of the Kivalliq region. So in that respect, it's their book."
