| Summary: |
As a shy Inuit child, Minnie Aodla quickly caught the attention of her residential school tutors. A natural curiosity, a sense of responsibility beyond her years, and a mind eager for challenge won her opportunities which ultimately separated her from a close-knit family and a traditional Inuit culture. By the age of twenty, she was a translator with the federal government, newly arrived in Ottawa, and grappling with a white - qallunaat - world that was hundreds of miles and seemingly hundreds of years distant from her James Bay home. Her extraordinary story opens with this plunge into qallunaat society. With the unblinking eye of a foreign traveller, she sees the white, urban world in all its absurdity, suffers its loneliness and insensitivity most acutely, and cannot fail to compare its facets, favourably or unfavourably, with her own culture. That culture is revealed as never before in a series of episodes that describe her life from earliest childhood. The solidarity of a community lead by the wisdom and instincts of a single man, the domination of her immediate family by an all-knowing grandmother, a life directed by a seasonal round of hunting and trading, a society bound by rules and customs that found their justification in simple survival, all are vividly recalled in the author's voice of an Inuit - and a woman - addressing the qallunaat at last. |
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