Detail from the cover of Amaruq: The Wolf, art by Germaine Arnattaujuq.

Louise Flaherty first encountered Amaruq: The Wolf as a teacher trainee in the Eastern Arctic Teacher Education program. 

Run by the Baffin Divisional Board of Education, the program was established in 1979 to train teachers who were bilingual in English and Inuktitut to meet the needs of the students in the Eastern Arctic, now called Nunavut.

Among the courses on offer was a writing workshop. In one such workshop held in the summer of 1997, Uvinik Qamaniq, one of the participants, wrote Amaruq: The Wolf over three weeks. One of the first novels written in Inkutitut, the work features a story within a story: Pittaaluk, a modern-day Inuit teenager, asks his grandfather to tell him, over the course of several days, the story of Amaruq, an ordinary boy who discovers he has the powers of a shaman through his spirit helper, the wolf of the book’s title. After first growing aware of his special skills on an important seal hunt as a teenager, Amaruq heads off on a quest to learn more about his powers and how to control them with the encouragement of an elder in his camp.

Flaherty, co-founder and a managing partner of Inhabit Media, calls Amaruq “one of the best little novels of our time.” The novel was published by the Baffin Divisional Board of Education in 1998. It was required reading for students in schools in the region as well as for teacher trainees in the Eastern Arctic Teacher Education program, Flaherty says. 

After the territory of Nunavut was established in 1999, the Baffin Divisional Board of Education was dissolved and the book fell out of print, leaving Qamaniq’s story, which Flaherty points out “marries both modern and traditional storytelling very well,” undiscoverable for new generations. 

Flaherty and Inhabit co-founder Neil Christopher had talked for years about republishing Amaruq: The Wolf in a bilingual Inuktitut-English edition that would expand the book’s readership. 

But taking on the project included more than simply asking Qamaniq’s permission to republish the work and translate it into English. Inhabit scanned an original hard copy of the book into digital files. But since the fonts that are used for Inuktitut syllabics have changed over time, the digital files became symbols, boxes, and undecipherable text. Flaherty had to transcribe the work in its entirety into Inuktitut using the current font, editing the original as she went. Translator Jaypeetee Arnakak then translated the story into English. The translation was approved by Qamaniq, who subsequently shared with Flaherty that she thought Arnakak “had done a very good job of translating it into English.”

The resulting bilingual edition will be published by Inhabit Media later this summer. 

Flaherty hopes that by publishing this book in English, it will reach more readers, including young people who may not be fluent in Inuktitut, or able to read syllabics, or as familiar with traditional Inuit beliefs as previous generations. 

“Right now, our youth and children are not as exposed to our traditional stories, but they are drawn to what’s available out on the world wide web,” Flaherty says. “This is great exposure to our belief system.”

Flaherty also hopes that reading this novel, which she likens to a Harry Potter-type story told from an Inuit perspective, will inspire the next generation of Inuit storytellers to create their own tales. 

“There are amazing youth and children who are natural storytellers,” Flaherty says. “My hope for them is to be able to write perspectives coming from their culture but also from their experiences.”