Life Among the Qallunaat (First Voices, First Texts, 3) - Softcover

Freeman, Mini Aodla

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0887557759 ISBN 13: 9780887557750

Publisher: University of Manitoba Press, 2015

Synopsis

Life Among the Qallunaat is the story of Mini Aodla Freeman’s experiences growing up in the Inuit communities of James Bay and her journey in the 1950s from her home to the strange land and stranger customs of the Qallunaat, those living south of the Arctic. Her extraordinary story, sometimes humourous and sometimes heartbreaking, illustrates an Inuit woman’s movement between worlds and ways of understanding. It also provides a clear-eyed record of the changes that swept through Inuit communities in the 1940s and 1950s.

Mini Aodla Freeman was born in 1936 on Cape Hope Island in James Bay. At the age of sixteen, she began nurse's training at Ste. Therese School in Fort George, Quebec, and in 1957 she moved to Ottawa to work as a translator for the then Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources. Her memoir, Life Among the Qallunaat, was published in 1978 and has been translated into French, German, and Greenlandic.

Life Among the Qallunaat is the third book in the First Voices, First Texts series, which publishes lost or under appreciated texts by Indigenous writers. This reissue of Mini Aodla Freeman’s path-breaking work includes new material, an interview with the author, and an afterword by Keavy Martin and Julie Rak, with Norma Dunning.

About this title

About the Author:

Mini Aodla Freeman was born in 1936 on Cape Hope Island in James Bay. At the age of sixteen, she began nurse's training at Ste. Therese School in Fort George, Quebec, and in 1957 she moved to Ottawa to work as a translator for the then Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources. Her memoir, Life Among the Qallunaat, was published in 1978 and has been translated into French, German, and Greenlandic.

Review:

“Life Among the Qallunnat is an extraordinary work of memoir.... it brings back a neglected masterwork of Indigenous literature, it provides useful context for contemporary readers, and it makes significant efforts to remove previous editorial interventions so that the author’s original intentions and cultural contexts are more faithfully transmitted to the reader.” (Warren Cariou University of Manitoba)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0887557759
• ISBN 13: 9780887557750
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304
• Editor: Martin Keavy, Rak Julie