Felt Knowledge in Michael Kusugak’s Picture Books

The article considers the relationship between lived experience, emotion, and knowledge production embedded in Inuk author and storyteller Michael Kusugak’s picturebooks. Informed by the communities, cultures and landscape of Canada’s Arctic, Kusugak’s picturebooks are an interfusion of personal and collective memories, traditional Inuit stories, fiction, and contemporary narratives, rupturing the colonial tendency to appropriate and present aboriginality as static and removed from present time, whilst reinstating felt experience as foundational in an Indigenous-centred worldview. Drawing on the Indigenous feminist approach of Dian Million to knowledge as felt, we argue that Kusugak’s picturebooks perform political acts as they strategically engage with and challenge Canadian settler “truths,” reinscribing history in terms specific to the emotionality of lived experience, and reaffirming Inuit cultural identity as living and vital.