Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women

Nancy Wachowich, Apphia Agalakti, Rhoda Kaukjak Katsak

McGill-Queens

The pho­tographs in Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women (McGill-Queens), are plen­ti­ful but wretchedly printed, which is a sad­ness because this book of sto­ries is so good that you want to return to the pho­tographs again and again to see what the peo­ple telling the sto­ries look like and what the place looks like and what their rel­a­tives look like. Most “oral his­tory” suf­fers from bad or nonex­is­tent edit­ing and the result is often an unread­able tran­scrip­tion of peo­ple talk­ing out loud; this book, on the other hand, is truly a liv­ing text, the result of care­ful edi­to­r­ial work by Nancy Wachowich, who is a south­erner, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Apphia Agalakti of Melville Peninsula and Baffin Island, her daugh­ter Rhoda Kaukjak Katsak and her grand­daugh­ter Sandra Pikujak Katsak. These three life sto­ries embrace a tremen­dous sweep of his­tory, begin­ning with life on the land (at age five, Apphia par­tic­i­pates in the acci­den­tal shoot­ing death of her baby brother), the great tran­si­tion of the 1960s to set­tle­ment life and now, in these days, the life of young peo­ple caught up in the “global cul­ture” of Iqaluit: a hun­dred and more fas­ci­nat­ing tales accom­pa­nied by clear maps, a good glos­sary, a chronol­ogy and an overview of Inuit his­tory, and those dan­ged pho­tographs (note to pub­lisher: before you reprint, get some­one — any­one — to Photoshop those pictures!).