Life Among the Qallunaat

by Mini Aodla Freeman, Keavy Martin (Editor), Julie Rak (Editor)

Overview

Life Among the Qallunaat is the story of Mini Aodla Freeman’s experiences growing up in the Inuit communities of James Bay and her journey in the 1950s from her home to the strange land and stranger customs of the Qallunaat, those living south of the Arctic. Her extraordinary story, sometimes humourous and sometimes heartbreaking, illustrates an Inuit woman’s movement between worlds and ways of understanding. It also provides a clear-eyed record of the changes that swept through Inuit communities in the 1940s and 1950s.

Mini Aodla Freeman was born in 1936 on Cape Hope Island in James Bay. At the age of sixteen, she began nurse's training at Ste. Therese School in Fort George, Quebec, and in 1957 she moved to Ottawa to work as a translator for the then Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources. Her memoir, Life Among the Qallunaat, was published in 1978 and has been translated into French, German, and Greenlandic.

Life Among the Qallunaat is the third book in the First Voices, First Texts series, which publishes lost or under appreciated texts by Indigenous writers. This reissue of Mini Aodla Freeman’s path-breaking work includes new material, an interview with the author, and an afterword by Keavy Martin and Julie Rak, with Norma Dunning.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780887557750
Publisher:	University of Manitoba Press
Publication date:	04/10/2015
Series:	ISSN , #3
Edition description:	1
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	747,963
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Mini Aodla Freeman was born in 1936 on Cape Hope Island in James Bay. At the age of sixteen, she began nurse's training at Ste. Therese School in Fort George, Quebec, and in 1957 she moved to Ottawa to work as a translator for the then Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources. Her memoir, Life Among the Qallunaat, was published in 1978 and has been translated into French, German, and Greenlandic.

Table of Contents

“One day, somebody is going to forget”: A Conversation with the Author Life Among the Qallunaat Afterword: Life After Life Among the Qallunaat

What People are Saying About This

Warren Cariou

“Life Among the Qallunnat is an extraordinary work of memoir.… it brings back a neglected masterwork of Indigenous literature, it provides useful context for contemporary readers, and it makes significant efforts to remove previous editorial interventions so that the author’s original intentions and cultural contexts are more faithfully transmitted to the reader.”

Editorial Reviews

Aodla is critical of the system that thrust Inuit into southern sanatoriums without providing any communications with families in the north, and of the annual visits her band received from ‘big qallunaat who came to count how many of us were left.’ In 1960 her own band was relocated and her people lost their occupations. Aodla does not try to explain or simplify this tragic transitional era for northern Canadians. Her book is the story of a very personal journey, and it is a page-turner.

Winnipeg Free Press - Faith Johnston

This revised edition of Life Among the Qallunaat make an important contribution to the canon of Indigenous autobiography, particularly as it consciously seeks to restore the author’s agency and original intents—with her permission and input.”

Studies in American Indian Literatures - Laura M. Furlan

From out of the basement and into the hands of readers, Life Among the Qallunaat is funny, engaging, and honest.”

The Malahat Review - Carleigh Baker

Her stories are intelligent and curious and her history is a small piece of the large and complex history of Inuit relocation and assimilation. Her use of memoir allows these stories to become personal, and gives the reader a sense of friendship with Mini herself.

Inuit Art Quarterly - Nancy Campbell

Life Among the Qallunaat is a book about Mini Aodla Freeman’s journey from her small hometown to a big city for a job. The cultural transition from traditional Inuit lifestyle to modernized cities was interesting, humorous, difficult and downright honest. Her perspectives on city culture and lifestyle offers a glimpse into where humans have devolved and progressed through the eyes of an Inuk that knows a supernatural way of living. She tells her story with gentleness, honesty, humour and a love common to all people.”

Tanya Roach

The interview with Freeman that opens this edition is a valuable addition. The interview provides insight into the author’s original experiences of writing and publishing as an Indigenous former Canadian government employee of the Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources, and is enlightening in terms of the 1960s–1970s environment in which aspiring Indigenous writers operated. This was an era in which contemporary Indigenous voices were first really acknowledged in the mainstream Canadian publishing world. But as Freeman explains, a significant proportion of her original text was cut or heavily edited. This new edition revisits parts of the original manuscript that previously never made it to print.

B.F.R. Edwards

"More than a candid look at our culture, the book is a vivid account of [Mini Aodla Freeman’s] childhood and adolescence, of Inuit customs, of the rules which ensure their physical and emotional survival."

Globe and Mail - Carole Corbeil