Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women

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!).