Arctic Dreams and Nightmares

Arctic Dreams and Nightmares

 Alootook Ipellie

Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada, 2025

Inhabit Media, $19.75

Reviewed by Lawrence Millman

In 1951, Inuit artist-author Alootook Ipellie was born in a hunting camp on Baffin Island, but he didn’t grow up as a traditional Inuk.  Rather, he spent a large part of his life in the South during which time he became one of the best -known Inuit graphic artists and storytellers.  Among his many awards, he was inducted into the Canadian Cartoonists Hall of Fame in 2019.

 In 1987, I visited Ipellie in his studio apartment in Ottawa, and during our meeting, I told him that I’d recently published a book entitled A Kayak Full of Ghosts.  Right away he smacked vigorously on the back, saying that my collection of Inuit folktales was better than Stephen King.  He added that several of my translations had inspired him to (in his words) “look at my own culture with different eyes.”

“Humor,” Ipellie once wrote, “has always been a big part of my work.”  But humor is perhaps too genteel a word to describe his book Arctic Dreams and Nightmares, a collection of 20 stories with accompanying line drawings, all of which embody his own strange composite of satire and surrealism.  In its pages, you’ll encounter an Inuit shaman named Shakespeare, another who’s crucified for being a hermaphrodite, an Inuk who tries to get to heaven via extensive blanket tossing, and Brigitte Bardot as an Inuk’s anti-seal-hunting wife, among other singular characters.  

To continue with the satire-surrealism composite, many of the stories suggest a marriage of William S. Burroughs with Salvador Dali.  Consider “The Dog Team Family,” which depicts a traditional Inuit dog sledder encountering a somewhat unusual sight — a man using a woman in lieu of a sledge.  But I’ll let Ipellie continue: “A team of infant children were pulling their mother with their umbilical cords still attached to their belly buttons from their mother’s vagina…The whole team was totally naked in sub-zero temperature!”  Not surprisingly, Ipellie says these Dog People “are rarely seen by the human eye.”

I can’t help but the think the conjoining of “Arctic Dreams” with “Arctic Nightmares” in the title is an attempt to turn Barry Lopez’s overly-romanticized book Arctic Dreams topsy-turvy.  For Ipellie’s book parodies white man’s view of Inuit culture, among other things.  That Sedna is the victim of child abuse puts a whole new light on this marine goddess.  The book also depicts what southern values have done to Inuit culture and seems to suggest that the only suitable response to conniving by these values might be laughter.

 Arctic Dreams and Nightmares was originally published in 1993 by Theytus Books.  This new edition from Inhabit Media doesn’t change a single one of the earlier stories.  For  Ipellie’s family, who were perhaps aware that the book’s apparent political incorrectitude might be issue, had requested that there be no changes.  More power to them!  Indeed, it’s about time that the book be reprinted in its original form.