LES CAHIERS DU CIÉRA HORS -SÉRIE /SUPPLEMENTARY ISSUE OCTOBER /OCTOBRE 2012 LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS IN THE ARCTIC ESSAYS IN MEMORY OF SUSAN SAMMONS Edited by Louis-Jacques Dorais and Frédéric Laugrand Les Cahiers du CIÉRA Direction Martin Hébert, Director, CIÉRA Acknowledgements The publication of this issue of Les Cahiers du CIÉRA has been made possible thanks to the financial support of the following Community- University Research Alliance (CURA) projects, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC): Inuit Leadership and Governance in Nunavut and Nunavik Yawenda – Revitalisation de la langue Huronne-Wendat We also wish to express our gratitude toward the director of the Cahiers , Professor Martin Hébert, who has accepted with enthusiasm to host this special issue. Many thanks also to Noel McDermott, who edited the Introduction, to Virginie Gilbert, who graciously provided the illustration on the cover, as well as to all the authors who accepted to share their memories and ideas in remembrance of Susan Sammons. Cover illustration Reproduction of the painting Mer de glaces (Sea of Ice), by Virginie Gilbert (2010). All rights belong to the artist. To contact us Editorial Committee, Cahiers du CIÉRA Centre interuniversitaire d’études et de recherches autochtones Pavillon De Koninck – Local 0450 1030, avenue des sciences humaines Université Laval Québec, QC Canada G1V 0A6 Tel.: (+1) 418-656-7596 Fax: (+1) 418-656-3023 [email protected] www.ciera.ulaval.ca © Éditions du CIÉRA 2012 ISSN 1919-6474 CONTENTS Introduction 3 Louis-Jacques Dorais and Frédéric Laugrand Thanks to Susan Sammons 7 Aaju Peter The Academic Legacy of Susan Sammons 9 Louis McComber The Iqaluit/Paris/Iqaluit Annual Student Exchange 15 Michèle Therrien Elders, Oral Traditions and Shamanism 19 Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich G. Oosten A Little Note in Honour of Susan 35 Anna Berge Linguistic Markets and Minority Languages: Some Inuit Examples 39 Louis-Jacques Dorais Reading and Writing the Inuit Language in Iqaluit and Igloolik: Conclusions of a Qualitative Research Project 49 Aurélie Hot Canadian Inuit Bilingualism: A Legacy of Skills rather than Languages 57 Michelle Daveluy Strengthening the Bench: Improving Existing Language Skills in Nunatsiavut 63 Alana Johns and Marina Sherkina-Lieber 1 Impacts of Non-Formal, Culturally-Based Learning Programs in Nunavut 75 Shelley Tulloch, Quluaq Pilakapsi, Gloria Uluqsi, Adriana Kusugak, Cayla Chenier, Anna Ziegler and Kim Crockatt Beyond Thule: Where Inuit and Aristotle Meet Thoughts on isuma , inungmariit and phronimoi , in memory of Susan Sammons 85 Willem C.E. Rasing Orpingalik: the Wordsworth of the North 97 Noel McDermott The Metamorphoses of an Old Canadian Inuit Oral Story in Greenland Navaranaaq in Greenlandic oral tradition and modern cultural expression 103 Karen Langgård Angakkuit Inunnut , Shamans to Inuit Today 119 Lisa Koperqualuk Amarualik’s Letter: A Syllabic Letter from 1923 135 Kenn Harper Iglulingmiut and the Royal Navy: Narratives and their Aftermath 143 John MacDonald 2 INTRODUCTION Louis-Jacques Dorais Frédéric Laugrand A Life of Encounters Susan Sammons’s life (1953-2011), brutally interrupted at a relatively early age, may be understood as a series of encounters. Susan was born in Winnipeg, in western Canada, to a Protestant mother whose family had migrated from Northern Ireland, and a father of Southern Irish Catholic ancestry. Hence, perhaps, her apparent unconcern for ethnic categories and her openness to the world (as an adult, she travelled extensively to many places beyond Canada). Her mixed family background did not allow her to fit easily into an Irish Canadian community often divided along antagonistic religious and political lines. Paradoxically, however, Susan once confided to one of us that during her adolescence, because she considered herself just a “plain anglophone,” devoid of any interesting cultural and linguistic background, she envied her ethnically different schoolmates who attended Ukrainian dance and music workshops during weekends, or frequented Winnipeg’s Centre culturel franco-manitobain. This may have prompted her to organize her first encounters with what would become some of her significant others. Having acquired a good knowledge of French in high school, she once boarded a bus to the Centre culturel, to ask them if she could take part in their francophone social and cultural activities. Unfortunately, she was told that even if her French was fluent enough, she should have at least one francophone parent to qualify for membership in the Centre. After she obtained her B.A. from the University of Winnipeg (1976), this desire for encountering other people led Susan Sammons, to move to Montreal, in eastern, French- speaking Canada, where she registered at McGill University. Besides facilitating contacts with francophones, this enabled her to experience another encounter, one that would bring a totally new and permanent direction to her life. It is not clear when, precisely, Susan first became interested in the North and its Aboriginal inhabitants, but in 1977, with a Diploma in Education from McGill in her bag, she left for Salluit (Nunavik), to live and teach in an Inuit community. Her stay in Arctic Quebec, at a time when the newly adopted Law 101–the goal of which was to ensure the preservation and predominance of the French language– provoked strong reaction among the Nunavik Inuit, caused her to reflect on the role of Inuktitut in the modern world, its inevitable clash with Canada’s official languages, and the part education should play in preserving indigenous languages and cultures. In order to investigate these themes, Susan Sammons decided to go back to school, registering as a postgraduate student at the University of Michigan, where she earned an M.A. (1980) and a Ph.D. (1985) in linguistics. Her dissertation, titled Inuktitut in Rankin Inlet , analyzed in a parallel fashion the grammatical and social elements that characterized language use in the administrative centre of the Kivalliq region of Nunavut. Susan had moved to Rankin Inlet in the early 1980s, where she married a bright and supportive young man, Peter Kusugak, who belonged to a prominent and well-known family from Kivalliq. She pursued her career in Inuit education, first as a consultant with the Kivalliq Board of Education and, after having moved to Iqaluit with her family in 3 1986, as instructor, senior instructor, and program director at Nunavut Arctic College, the territorial post-secondary teaching institution. Between 1986 and her untimely departure 25 years later, Susan Sammons’s passion for setting up encounters with various people and intellectual traditions, coupled with a tremendous talent for organization, brought her to put progressively into place a vast, though informal network of individuals and organizations which shared a common interest in Inuit culture, language, and education. This network included Inuit students, teachers and translators, as well as non-Aboriginal specialists from Nunavut, southern Canada, and other countries, all of them actively committed to the social and cultural development of the Inuit. Over the years, under Susan’s thoughtful supervision, the network’s individual and institutional members brought in much-needed intellectual and financial resources that enabled the Iqaluit campus of Nunavut Arctic College to become a world leader in Inuit studies. This leadership was exercised in three principal areas: teaching, research, and dissemination of knowledge. Under Susan’s direction, the College’s Interpreter and Translator training program gave birth–thanks to academic agreements with Canadian universities–to a fully-fledged Certificate in Inuit Studies. Innovative teaching methods allowed Nunavut elders to become full participants in the pedagogical process, thus contributing to the preservation of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (Inuit traditional knowledge) as well as to the enhancement of the cultural identity of the students. Teaching techniques and curricula were generally designed in collaboration with specialists from various Canadian and foreign universities, through research alliances that brought a more encompassing, theoretical and methodological dimension to Inuit Studies. The linguistic, anthropological, and pedagogical data generated by these research alliances were disseminated through several series of bilingual (Inuktitut-English) or even trilingual (with the addition of French) books, some of which were made available on the web. 1 As a result, over 20 years or so (1990-2010), Nunavut Arctic College’s Iqaluit campus was known as a crossroads of confirmed or future pedagogues, translators, linguists, anthropologists, historians, and others, all of them sharing a common passion for the preservation and development of a vibrant Inuit cultural and social tradition. In and around Susan Sammons’s office, one could meet with Inuit students and teachers, but also with renowned professors from France, the Netherlands, Greenland, Denmark, or southern Canada, as well as with M.A. or Ph.D. candidates from the United States, Poland, western Europe and, of course, Quebec and English Canada. The pan-Canadian and international links these contacts generated allowed several of Susan’s students and colleagues to spend some time abroad, as Inuktitut language instructors in Paris, France, consultants on Inuit culture in Leiden, the Netherlands, or students cum cultural consultants in Winnipeg, Halifax, or elsewhere.