Words Melt Away Like Hills in Fog: Putting Inuit Legends Into Print

Inuit myths and legends, which explain everything from how the world was created to why the raven is black, are wonderful stories for children, incorporating as they do both the real and the fantastic, the natural and the spiritual. However, Inuit stories, like those translated into English from other cultures, vary greatly in both their quality and authenticity. An examination of the processes by which these legends make their way into print can help us to identify what is best and what is to be avoided in oral literature in the written tradition.

Inuit myths and legends do not fall neatly into strictly defined categories, but can be loosely divided into the five classifications which Knud Rasmussen identified in the 1920's: creation myths or stories which embody religious belief; stories of fabulous beings such as trolls, giants or ghosts; tales of epic heroes; stories of murder and revenge; and beast fables (McGrath, Canadian Inuit Literature, Chapter VI). We can add one other type of story to this list: the personal memoir. An increased interest in Inuit art has made these memoirs more readily available to children and adults in both the north and the south than they have been in the past, and they are a substantial addition to the corpus.

Inuit literature has been available to non-Inuit readers for many years, primarily through the published reports of ethnographers and anthropologists. Franz Boas's innovative The Central Eskimo (1888), Diamond Jenness's Report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition (1913-1918), and Knud Rasmussen's Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition (1929-1932) have all been excavated again and again by writers and editors looking for good, sound (uncopyrighted) material for children's books. Old anthropological reports are often very dry reading, but as a source of legends they are far more reliable than many modern collections. The early ethnographers often immersed themselves in the Inuit culture for many years, they spoke the language, and they tended to publish the stories in a number of variants. Rasmussen, and Jenness, give the original text in Inuktitut using the International Phonetic Alphabet, as well as an interlinear translation into English. Rasmussen, who was part Inuk himself, also includes his own looser, more literary interpretations of the stories. The resulting popular publications can be excellent.

I have dealt elsewhere with the problem of how dishonest collectors and ignorant editors change and damage Inuit stories (McGrath, "Editing Inuit Literature"); more profitable here is a consideration of the honest efforts made to produce books that correctly reflect the Inuit culture while retaining the interest of English speaking children. Inuit editors are at an advantage here not only because they can judge the quality of translations more accurately than non-Inuit editors, but because they are more willing to recognize that children reared on American television are not going to be distressed by a certain amount of blood and guts and are insatiably curious about monsters and frightening figures. Mark Kalluak's How Kabioonat Became and Other Inuit Legends contains 42 stories, 26 of which involve acts of considerable violence including murder, starvation, cannibalism, human-dismemberment, and incest. Non-Inuit collectors do not tolerate such a ratio of violence. A comparison of collections edited by Inuit with collections made by non-Inuit (McGrath, "Monster Figures") shows that non-Inuit choose far more stories about benign magic, and happy, talking animals than do their Inuit counterparts who prefer stories about murderous dwarfs and malevolent monsters. Laundered legends are often boring and children simply won't read them.

Poor translation is the one element most often responsible for making Inuit legends inaccessible, and when a poor translation is teamed with a bowdlerizing editor, the results can be catatonic. Maurice Metayer's Tales From the Igloo is a rather tame book compared to his academic work Unipkat, from which Tales was taken; eighty of Unipkat's 109 stories contain monsters and violence. However Metayer was a careful and meticulous translator and Tales From the Igloo is an excellent example of oral literature in print. The same cannot be said for the follow-up...