Inuit, Inuit -- Canada -- Biography, Inuit -- Biography, Minnie Aodla Freeman 

"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 humorous 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, Ontario, 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. 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."--WorldCat.org. 

217 pages ; 23 cm. 

Content:
"One day, somebody is going to forget" a conversation with Mini Aodla Freeman --
Elevator --
First day at work --
Lost --
Alikatu --
Loneliness had many reasons --
I knew him and yet not --
The screen had to do with it --
My clothes were valuable --
So close together and yet so far apart --
Exhibition --
Exciting for a Qallunaat girl --
It's a terrible dream --
To please a friend --
They are out of the box --
I did not hear him arrive --
Grandmother's qullik was very bright --
It and her --
Almost lost an arm for a stamp --
Grandmother's helpers --
Grandmother's elegance came in handy --
Artificial river --
I would like to see to whom I am talking --
Something familiar? --
Meeting a grand lady --
Dog meat in the south? --
They too have their own way of writing --
I hate water --
My most silly moment --
My first square dance in the south --
Twenty-one, but one year old in the South --
I thought I was a queen --
Caught between two lives --
A house in the air --
He wrote only few words --
My feelings were hurt --
Visiting a mint --
We were nomads --
The fish liked to be dressed up for --
Hospital visits --
Newspaper office --
Buttons count a lot --
My frustration --
Feeling crushed --
Just close your eyes and eat --
Goose pimples all over --
He read backwards --
Life or death --
So many and so quiet --
I have seen many deaths --
I am in the middle --
"Life-or-death" had a reason --
I am crazy about it --
Language was pulling --
Silly cry --
Second look --
Inuit in the south --
The situation was familiar --
Weetaltuk died and they became weak --
My Inuk way that I was born into --
I remember --
It was a strange winter --
I will never know another summer like that --
Trading was a chore but necessary --
They came bearing gifts --
The world war in the Qallunaat world rubbed on us too --
Did they really pamper their eyebrows? --
Other fears emerged --
It was a time of joy and a time to learn --
To learn is sometimes painful --
James Bay robbers --
It was peaceful --
No more baby hammocks --
The doll lasted much longer on the wall --
Nature can be mean sometimes --
Giant berries --
Grandmother sometimes needed help --
Grandparents seemed to have made it for me --
I was dumped --
My feet were smelly but they were warm --
I think I was kidnapped --
They came to get me but they had no ransom --
So much had happened while I was away --
School is not the only place of education --
Pain, pain and more pain --
Getting used to it is part of survival --
Bad pains have good rewards? --
A mourning trip --
Desperate chance --
We almost had an Indian mother --
Father knew how to hold our tongues --
How Grandmother got flat fingers --
Common to natives, but not to doctors --
She had cold hands, but the least painful --
One could tell that they were warriors --
Growing pains --
Mighty, fantastic and mysterious --
Only beaver pelt collectors --
Nobody told me that I had to grow strange --
Certainly it was a time of joy --
To become a woman is even stranger --
One drains blood to grow up --
Adults get disappointed too --
Bad times are sometimes good luck --
Innocent woman --
Brother was growing too --
Novelty creates smells --
The sick gave me strength --
What I needed was physical strength --
We were shipped like cargo --
We kept our homes at the back of our minds --
Nightingale kept calling me --
Home was just meant to be a memory --
House work is a lonely affair --
I still knew how to be happy --
Father, please take me home --
Father had his own reasons --
Harmony is not forever --
Did the drink drive me crazy? --
Grandmother was always right --
Machines are cold --
They were strangers more than I --
The agent was still after me --
How do I like the weather? Portrait photographs reproduced in plates (transcriptions taken from photo captions): Mini's paternal grandmother, Emily Aodla (nee Crow), at Old Factory, c. 1950 --
Mini's paternal grandfather, Symma (Simon) Aodla, at Cape Hope Island, c. 1949 --
Mini's maternal grandfather, George Weetaltuk, in his house in Cape Hope in 1954 / photo by Fred Bruemmer --
Mini's father, Thomas Aodla, in Iqaluit, 1978 --
Mini at home for the holidays at her father's summer house at Old Factory, 1959 --
Mini at age 16 in Hamilton, where she was interpreting at the hospital and training as a nurse / photo by Mini's cousin, Annie Weetaltuk --
Mini in 1958 in Moose Factory, where she was working as a nanny / photo by Kathleen Carston --
This photograph taken of Mini in Ottawa, c. 1959, was used to suggest that Inuit were now buying Canada savings bonds --
Mini and her husband, Milton Freeman, in Ottawa, 1972.