Sanaaq: An Inuit Novel

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Sanaaq is an atypical novel. Atypical like its author Mitiarjuk, an Inuk1 from Nunavik (Arctic Quebec) who was illiterate in the sense of being unable to read or write the Roman letters that European languages use and that have recently been adopted for her language. Yet she is deservedly called a writer. She wrote over a thousand pages in syllabics — a kind of shorthand that Wesleyan missionaries created in the late nineteenth century to advance the conversion of the Canadian Cree Indians, who had no writing system of their own. The syllabic alphabet was then adapted by other missionaries to the Inuit language of present-day Nunavik and Nunavut. As new prayer books came into use, it spread quickly through imitation and learning.

Mitiarjuk never went to school. She nevertheless earned a PhD from McGill University in June 2000 for helping advance the teaching of Nunavik’s Inuit language and culture. Her school was the world of her mother and related female elders, who taught the many tasks of women’s traditional work. Less traditionally, her father taught her the secrets of hunting and other male tasks, having no sons and she being his oldest daughter. He was in poor health and often had to let her hunt wild game alone. Culturally and socially, she belonged to a “third sex”2 (or gender), neither male nor female, which gradually made her a mediator between the men and women of her people and between different generations. Perhaps this explains her renowned creativity, as evidenced by the stone carvings that have earned her prestigious awards.

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