Mini Aodla Freeman’s Life among the Qallunaat (1978; 2015) is the third book published in the University of Manitoba’s First Voices, First Texts series. It chronicles her experiences as an Inuit woman adjusting to life south of the Arctic in the 1950s, working as a translator for many years.

Mini means “gentle rain” in Inuktitut and this edition preserves her abundant use of subheadings to arrange her thoughts and memories. Another mystery about the first edition was what happened to 4200 of the 6254 copies originally printed; they were directed to the basement of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada and remained there for years, until someone determined that the book didn’t reflect badly on the Department.

So, not many people read Mini’s book then; now it can, at least, find a proper audience. It’s a down-to-earth account of her first experiences with southern, urban life (e.g. restaurants, escalators, shopping, laundry, telephone) and her observations about language (Cree and Inuk and other Inuit dialects new to her) and relationships (eventually she marries).

Readers hear what it was like for her growing up and how difficult it was to return (she was considered “lazy and too spoiled, that I was like an icicle which would break if I was given orders”) and travel between such different cultures.

“I keep telling myself that I had been born twice, once to grow and learn my own culture, and secondly, to learn qallunaat culture.”

Originally, I thought this might be a book better suited as a text than a good read—maybe I would read the introduction and sample, I thought—but her voice won me over immediately and I read to the end.

Eden Robinson’s Return of the Trickster (2021) is the third and final book in her trilogy. (First, Second) On one hand, Jared’s life is very ordinary. He inhabits a “my couch is your couch” kind of world (that’s something his cousin says, actually), where people eat KD and weiners, watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy after supper.

But Jared’s world is also the world the author inhabited when she was a girl, hearing the stories told in her culture, about Wee’git, the trickster raven, and other creatures: “The transforming raven, the ogress, the otters, the ghosts and the spirits are pulled from stories I heard growing up that are within the Haisla public domain.”

It’s a world that requires a definition for ‘extirpation’, with zipties, and organs on the wrong side of skin. Jared’s worry that he “had always been defective, an exploding airbag that, instead of protecting you from accidents, broke your face and sent shrapnel through your heart” hints at the visceral fears and realities that haunt our protagonist.

This is a dark and troubled scene which provokes questions like “What are nihilists?” but it’s also Eden Robinson’s scene, so the response includes “You need to read more” and this retort “You need to kidnap less”.

“The benefit of being eaten alive and torn apart so many times and surviving was that a part of him had been rendered cold.” It’s super human with regret “like knives” and grief “sour and metallic”: it’s a human story.

Favourite line: “The very basics of magic: everything you meet, you’ll meet again.”