Inuit Literary History

Inuit Literary History

Introduction

In 1977, Inuit representatives from Alaska, Arctic Canada, and Greenland gathered in Barrow, Alaska, for the inaugural meeting of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC). In order to create a unified position from which to deal with southern administrations, they drafted a resolution that declared the oneness of their culture, environment and land, and the wholeness of the homeland. This assertion echoes earlier ethnographic accounts of Inuit intellectual culture, which likewise celebrate consistencies in storytelling traditions across the vastness of the Inuit homeland. Drawing on the recent theoretical work of the Indigenous literary nationalists, people argue that articulations of people hood are a central feature of classic and contemporary Inuit literature. Although nationalist literary history projects risk downplaying the diversity internal to the group and its literature, they also function strategically to draw attention to the presence, significance, and rhetorical sovereignty of under-recognized literary traditions. Specifically, this article considers stories of the now extinct Tuniit, or Sivullirmiut ('First People'), a prominent feature of the Inuit oral tradition of the Central and Eastern Arctic. It places Rachel Qitsualik's contemporary fictional account in dialogue with a sampling of classic stories in order to reveal the way in which such texts delineate a sense of Inuit nationhood, and, open the door for an Inuit literary history. Therefore, all issues having relation to the literature will be discussed in detail.

Student's Thesis Statement

The main objective is to assess the value of the community known as Inuit and the amount of information that has been included about them in the literature.

Author's Thesis Statement

The major objective of the author is to analyze the several aspects related to Inuit community at various times of the year.

Discussion

In Canada, literary nationalism has towering presence in Aboriginal literary circles. Indeed, its growing influence on critical discussions was recently highlighted by the re launched Canadian Journal of Native Studies, which dedicated its first new issue to Indigenous literatures, with a special emphasis on nation-specific and nationalist readings of those literatures. Whether writers would consider themselves literary nationals or cosmopolitanisms, or otherwise define themselves and their work. The second factor is that whether they actively engage these texts or not, the discussions that have opened up as a result of these debates have made room for a range of approaches that go beyond simplistic identity politics.

For example, in her unusual Travelling Knowledge's: Positioning the Immigrant Reader of Aboriginal Literatures in Canada (2005), Renate Eigenbrod explores the complex relationships between settler readers, Indigenous texts, and Indigenous writers and communities, highlighting the importance of the readers' self-conscious positioning while maintaining focus on the Indigenous texts/contexts themselves. It is a challenging study from a non-Native scholar who has given her career in service to the access of Aboriginal voices and literatures to respectful representation in Canadian academia and culture at large, yet she does not assume that hers is either the first or the last word on Aboriginal literatures or their study. With increasing urgency, Aboriginal writers and scholars point toward ...