Unikkaaqtuat: An Introduction to Inuit Myths and Legends

UNIKKAAQTUAT:

An Introduction to Inuit Myths and Legends

Edited by Neill Christopher, Noel McDermott, and Louise Flaherty

Iqaluit, Nunavut: Inhabit Media, 2025

$28.99CAN

Reviewed by Lawrence Millman

Unikkaaqtuat is a typically elongated Inuktitut word that means “traditional Inuit stories.”  The book itself is a collection of myths and legends originally collected by ethnographers such as Franz Boas, Heinrich Rink, and Knud Rasmussen.  It consists of a Foreword, an Introduction, several dozen stories, illustrations, a Glossary, and References.  That it hasn’t been reviewed thus far in any Inuit publication like Etudes/Inuit is perhaps not surprising.

Consider the stories from Franz Boas, most of which were told to him by a whaler named William Muter, who heard the stories from Baffin Island Inuit.  Boas customized them for his books, and then the editors of this book further customized them.  Thus what might have initially been accurate, not to mention idiomatic stories ended up being more or less  summarizations.  Would a traditional Inuk use a phrase like shape-shifter (as the editors do several times in this book) to describe a standard animal-human composite? I suspect not.

To continue the language of these retellings does not suggest direct contact with Inuit oral tradition.  For example, anaq, a commonly used word in Inuit storytelling, means shit, but neither that word or an equivalent  word appear in this book.  Indeed, there is hardly anything indecent in any of these stories despite the fact that many traditional Inuit stories deserve an R rating.  Also, the reader is told to be on the lookout for stories about “the correct treatment of children” even though such treatment consists traditionally of laughter, lest the child take misfortune too seriously.

As a complement to Unikkaaqtuat, I might suggest a book entitled A Kayak Full of Ghosts.  Pardon my narcissism, but that book’s author is yours truly.  In its pages are stories I collected directly from Inuit elders in the 1980s.  In retelling those stories, I tried to make them seem as oral as possible so that the reader would feel like he or she was seated next to the elder in question.  Thus there was no bowdlerizing in order to make the stories appropriate for strictly raised kids.  Nor was there any effort to restrict humor, a common ingredient both in Inuit lore and Inuit life.

Unikkaaqtuat does have certain virtues, however.  The Introduction provides a very good overview of Inuit mythology.  Stories from different parts of the Arctic are included in, appropriately, different versions. The illustrations by Inuit artist Germaine Arnattaujuq are excellent.  And some of the stories have rarely appeared in print.  An example: “Dialogue Between Two Ravens.”  If you want to learn what those ravens might have been saying to each other, I suggest you procure a copy of this book.