Inuit Stories/Legendes Inuit: Povungnituk

by Zebedee Nungak, Eugene Arima

This book includes 48 stories from the village of Povungnituk, one of the main centers for contemporary Inuit carving in Canada. Striking photographs of 72 soapstone carvings are accompanied by vivid myths and legends as told by the sculptors themselves

Genres: Mythology

160 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1995

Reviews

[W.B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I (slowly) collect Inuit carvings and I love fantastic folklore, so this book was a double-whammy of creepy goodness. Tales of evil giants, evil little people, shape-shifters, assorted monsters, an account of a serial killer of the far north (which I think is based in reality) and much more. These are all twice-told tales, related once in transcribed oral accounts and once in sculpture. Each story is the folk tale or actual occurrence behind the carving as related by the artist. The translations into English are sometimes stilted or confusing. If you read French, sometimes those parallel texts help sort out some of that confusion. You come away with respect for the survival skills people had to possess to live in such an unforgiving climate. Kurt Vonnegut in one of his funny lectures talks about how aboriginal stories are flatliners when it comes to plotting them as narrative diagrams. That's true of some of these stories, but not all by a long stretch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOGru...

[Ian Carpenter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting to read something this old, soaked in the government attitudes of the time. I hadn't heard about the governments number and disc system. I was shocked by it. The stories are great, many found in the other books I've read. The carvings were also great.