The most recommended books about the Inuit

I first saw this book about an Inuit newborn on a list of LGBTQ-friendly books because it welcomes a baby into the world without focusing on their gender. This is just one of many things I love about this bedtime poem. Kulu is a term of endearment for babies and young children in Inuktitut and the poem introduces Baby Kulu to the arctic summer. The animals and land share gifts such as love, patience, respect for animals, gentleness, and kindness. The beautiful illustrations in soft hues, convey the same gentle tone as the words, and lead the reader to feel embraced, adored, comforted, and ready to dream. The book is available in English, French, and Inuktitut. 

I found this real-life story of a man from Togo, who becomes obsessed with Greenland as a child and spends years working his way up through Africa and Europe to get there, fascinating.

Not only does it dig deeply into the everyday lives of native Greenlanders – dog-sledding, seal shooting, ice fishing, and a surprisingly open attitude towards sex – but we get a double dose of insight because we get to explore the Inuit way of life from an African’s perspective.

It’s a well-written and amusing account of an amazing and rare adventure; I enjoyed it immensely and would recommend to anyone who enjoys travel.

In our fast-paced world of today one has to really trust an author to make a big commitment of time to surrender oneself as a reader to the enormity of a novel such as this of nearly six hundred pages. But it pays to persevere as one is sucked into its narrative as young Danish priest Morten Falck, with a fondness for Rousseau, sets out for Greenland in 1787 to attempt to convert the Inuit to the Danish church.

Vividly translated by Martin Aitken, Leine’s descriptions are brilliant and insightful as Falck undergoes a crisis of faith and draws us into the visceral world of Eternal Fjord. It is a great, original novel with a rich polyphony of memorable places and events and resonating characters. A work that will endure.

I tracked down a 1973 hardback edition of this book because I fell in love with it. The publication date, the year of my birth, was an added bonus. I borrowed Lowenstein’s translation of material collected by Knud Rasmussen, the famous polar explorer, from the library. As soon as I read the preface, I knew I had to own it. It’s an owning kind of book. Inuit poems are raw like the environment they are birthed in – the words and the people. Some might call the poems simplistic, but having lived in the Arctic, I know that even the simplest things can be challenging, and often life-threatening. The poems in this book capture another world that is so very far removed from our own and yet startlingly vibrant and important. 

I wrote my own book inspired by this charming little encyclopedia of emotions.

Smith has collected 156 emotion words in English and other languages, along with delightful discussions of them. Stuff like David Foster Wallace’s ambiguphobia: “feeling uncomfortable about leaving things open to interpretation,” and l’appel du vide, French for “the call of the void,” that unnerving impulse to leap when perched on a high steep cliff. I love the Inuit word, iktsuarpok: the fidgety and restless feeling we get right before guests arrive.

Smith thinks that instead of trying to come up with a reductive list of basic and universal emotions, we should be looking for more–more words in more languages to get at the textures of what we can feel.

I appreciate the genuine Inuit voice of this story of creation, so I researched the author.

Rumolt is active in the Inuit community and teaches elementary school there, but her education was started by her grandmother’s traditional tales. The book is in spare text in the tradition of the storyteller. The art is primarily black and white with touches of color, all the more welcome as a surprise.

In the end the story is about compromise and friendship and a beautiful introduction to a unit or theme of creation, seasons, or mythology. 

Perseverance, and an unwitting courage against all odds; that’s the essence of Farley Mowat’s People of the Deer.

Mowat’s book immortalizes a small band of Inuit as they traverse the barrens of Canada’s eastern Arctic, enduring starvation, punishing winter conditions, and a sociopolitical system bent on eradicating their five-thousand-year-old culture. This book shattered my perception about how I see myself as a Canadian, and injustices inflicted on indigenous peoples.

Written over seventy years ago, People of the Deer is testament to Mowat’s insight into a travesty that continues to this today, and tells me we still have a long way to go. 

This is an unusual crime story set in Copenhagen, Denmark. It caused a sensation when it was published in 1992. The main character Smilla Jaspersen is a half Inuit scientist from Greenland, lonely and homesick in the big city. The death of an Inuit boy pulls her into a complex web of crime exposing Denmark’s complicated relationship with its protectorate Greenland. The title refers to the Inuit people’s understanding of their wintry habitat, and is a reminder of the threat to traditional lifestyles of many indigenous people. A thriller, but so much more. 

Life Beside Itself is a startling book not only because of what it reveals about the history of settler-colonial government care imposed upon Arctic communities during the tuberculosis crisis (1940-60s) and the suicide crisis (1980s onwards) but for the raw emotional proximity that it provides to the individuals whose lives were changed by policies that, ironically, were derived from care itself.

It is a well-researched book that unnerved me with the haunting emotional intimacies its ethnographic and imagistic approach brought through the pages. The intractable longing of a young man waiting each year at the harbour for the ship, the C.D. Howe, that took his grandmother away to a southern hospital is just one of the things in this book that wounds its readers by recounting different forms of care.

This book has beautiful illustrations and completely covers the history of both European and native conceptions of the North Pole from the ancient times to the present day in just 254 pages.

People believed the most amazing things about the North Pole in the past, including that it was an ice-free fruitful paradise! Why?