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By Shari Narine
Windspeaker.com Contributor
EDMONTON
Academics better hope that Norma Dunning doesn’t read their work after 7 p.m. and take exception to what they have to say.
The University of Alberta doctoral student says she tries not to do her academic reading in the evening. She wants to ensure she’s fully engaged.
But as chance had it, a late evening read of work by British anthropologist Hugh Brody spurred Dunning, an Inuk scholar and researcher, to write her own book.
Annie Muktuk and Other Stories will be launched at Audreys Books in Edmonton on Wednesday. The titular short story and 15 others expound on Inuit women empowerment.
It wasn’t intentional, admits Dunning. It just happened. But it’s no surprise as Brody’s work was a commentary on a party in an Arctic community in which “Inuit women were being handed off.”
Brody serves as Canadian Research Chair in Aboriginal Studies and is at the University of the Fraser Valley.
“I read (Brody’s work) and I thought, ‘This is a white man, who has a lot of influence and … people will take what he has to say without a lot of thought into it. Is he really speaking the truth?’ and I started to think, ‘Why are Inuit women being portrayed like this?’ It’s something thematic that I’ve read in other books. And I started to think, ‘Why aren’t Aboriginal women in charge of their own sexuality? Did anybody ever think in the opposite way?’” said Dunning.
She was driven to put her own words on paper. The collection is about two years’ worth of work, written during the latter part of Dunning earning her bachelor degree and at the start of her master degree.
“It was more like a necessity,” she said. “Those stories stay with me for a very long time before I write them and when you feel something, like it’s hovering, and you have to get that done. It was wonderful actually.”
The stories came quickly and she didn’t consciously decide on the theme of women taking control of their lives. Those are the stories that emerged. Stories, she says, that aren’t hers, but belong to her ancestors. And that is what she says in her book’s dedication: “for my ancestors, past, present and future. I wrote your words with my heart.”
While she may have written the words of her ancestors, her accomplishment is one she also shares with other present day Inuit writers. She says she has received many, many “beautiful” unpublished works by Inuit writers from the Arctic and hopes her publication will inspire them to reach a larger audience.
“I think we’re all afraid to approach publishers. We have that, regardless of if you’re Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal, it’s because of how our work will be handled. That’s what we worry about, the recolonization of our words,” she said.
Dunning admits she had the same concerns with her work. But publisher University of Alberta Press paired her with acquisitions editor Peter Midgley. Dunning says she was surprised to find out that as worried as she was about the editing process, so was Midgley.
“He talked about how he worried about losing the integrity of the stories and that kind of stuff…. We had a very good working relationship. He took time to really talk about and think about each story,” she said. “I think an editor like him is rare.”
For non-Indigenous readers, Dunning wants them to get the funny in her stories.
“I hope they laugh because there is some humour in there and it was fun to write,” she said. But she wants more than that from other Canadians.
“I want Canada to understand Inuit people do live in the south as well. We are present day, modern people.”
But even with that expectation, Dunning admits that the majority of her stories are “set in the days of yore.”
Edmonton is home to the largest urban Inuit population, according to the 2011 National Household Survey. Close to 16,000 of the country’s approximately 60,000 Inuit live in urban centres, with 1,115 calling Edmonton home.
Dunning is a fourth year doctoral student in Indigenous Peoples Education at UAlberta. She is also a mother and a grandmother.
She is “pretty excited” about her book launch and says there are more stories in her.
“There are always other stories. You never give away the whole candy store,” she said. She has some short stories she did not submit for her collection and others she has written since Annie Muktuk and Other Stories began the publishing process.
Dunning’s book launch is at Audreys Books on Jasper Avenue in downtown Edmonton at 7 p.m. on Sept. 13.
Norma Dunning