"The Spirits Write the Story"
Smaro Kamboureli in Conversation with Norma Dunning
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14288/canlit.vi262.200349Keywords:
Norma Dunning, Inuit writers, Indigenous writers, Indigenous literature, Inuit literature, decolonization, writing process, Inuit women, blood memoryAbstract
Padlei Inuk author and professor Norma Dunning’s recent book, Kinauvit? What’s Your Name? The Eskimo Disc System and a Daughter’s Search for Her Grandmother, is a formally hybrid text that shows how Dunning’s search for her cultural roots is inextricably interwoven with the colonial forces, including the disc identification system, that disrupted the lives of Inuit in Canada. In her conversation with Smaro Kamboureli, Dunning talks about how she came to write Kinauvit?, especially her process of discovering her Inuit identity; being an Inuk growing up and living “outside the tundra”; the recurring concerns in her short fiction and poetry, in particular the dismantling of Inuit stereotypes and the construction of specific characters; her academic research and pedagogy; and her writing process. We don’t know “what decolonization is,” she says, because “many of us don’t recognize colonization. . . . [C]olonization is alive and well and walking among us.”
