Sanaaq by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk

Qalingu, now in the thick of the blizzard, was fast losing hope. His face was encrusted with snow and he could not make out the slightest thing. Nonetheless, he plodded on into the wind. His cheeks were freezing and his entire body was feeling the cold. With night falling, he decided to take shelter on the side of the hill away from the wind, while there was still some daylight. Without even a snow knife, he began digging a hole for himself in the snow, all the while afraid of being smothered by the blizzard.

Sanaaq is billed not only as "An Inuit Novel" but "The First Inuit Novel," or at least, the first novel written in the language Inuktitut. Author Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk, it seems, was tasked by missionaries with helping to prepare educational materials in Inuktitut. But the project soon took on a creative bent, and Nappaaluk, seeking at first to show the use of the words in context, I suppose, wrote this novel, about the widow Sanaaq and her life among the nomadic people of far northern Quebec.

Above all else, Sanaaq is a portrait of what life was, or perhaps is, among the Inuit. Much of the novel is taken up by the ordinary tasks of life: sewing bags and mittens, building and deconstructing igloos, fishing and hunting--both of which, it seems, often must take place at a moment's notice, when the fish begun to run or the polar bear appears (or the fox, or the ptarmigan, or the seal, etc., etc.). But it's a life, too, that's close to death, and in Nappaaluk's simple prose, moments of intense disaster and loss take on tremendous meaning. I was really struck by one scene in which a character, splashed by boiling water, loses his eye, which is so melted it falls literally on the ground. Another scene, in which a hunter slips beneath a floe of pack ice and is lost forever, underscores just how fragile life must be at the top of the world, and how present the possibility of death and disaster. Among these moments of quotidian and not-so-quotidian life, Nappaaluk sketches a number of compelling characters: the headstrong widow and her impetuous daughter Qumaq among them.

One of the most interesting things about Sanaaq is that Naapaaluk captures the arrival and slow integration of Europeans into the life of the Inuit: the arrival of the first boat, the first airplane, the missionaries, the doctors and nurses. These watersheds are compacted in time, so that Sanaaq's life, simple as it is, seems to span centuries. At the beginning of the novel, Sanaaq and her family are terrified by the plane that roars for the first time overhead; by the end, Sanaaq's husband himself boards  a plane to join a work program for the Inuit. Disruption and change are inextricable from the arrival of Europeans and European-Canadians: at one point Sanaaq runs away with her injured daughter because she is afraid she will be taken from her to bring her to medical care. Sanaaq's husband reacts violently, and it is Sanaaq herself that ends up being sent away to the southern hospital, and the outside authorities, the priests and the police, visit her husband to reassert their authority. At the same time, it's clear that Sanaaq is the work of a pious Catholic; Sanaaq's own conversion--from Anglicanism!--is meant to serve as the novel's resolution. Sanaaq is an interesting artifact in that its attitude toward colonial presence is not quite what we would expect in the 21st century. Beyond that, it's a hell of a story.