‘Challenging language:’ Edmonton academic studies versions of 1st Inuit novel
EDMONTON — The story reaches out of an Arctic past stretching back to long before Europeans came, a world when a hunter’s fate was determined by snow and ice, claws and courage.
An academic is dusting off a text considered the first Inuit novel in an effort to understand the travels and many translations of an almost-forgotten Canadian classic: “Harpoon of the Hunter.”
“I’m interested in the journeys texts take,” said Valerie Henitiuk of MacEwan University in Edmonton.
“Harpoon of the Hunter,” first published in 1970, is the story of an Inuit boy coming of age as a hunter and a man. Its journey begins in the preliterate past.