Iqaluit’s island of literacy

Arctic Ventures’ book department features a fine selection of children’s books in English, French and Inuktitut. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

The Arctic Sky, writer, linguist and businessman Kenn Harper stands inside the Arctic Ventures store, home to Nunavut’s only bookstore.”/>
Thumbing his favourite book, The Arctic Sky, writer, linguist and businessman Kenn Harper stands inside the Arctic Ventures store, home to Nunavut’s only bookstore. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

Recently-published Inuit language books like these are now on display at the Arctic Ventures book department. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

If you ask Kenn Harper, businessman, linguist, author and Nunatsiaq News columnist, about his favourite book on sale at his Arctic Ventures’ bookstore , he’s quick to point to the one that he wrote himself: Give Me My Father’s Body: The Story of Minik.

Copies of Give Me My Father’s Body: The Story of Minik, about Minik Wallace, an Inughuit taken in by Robert Peary from northwest Greenland to New York in 1897, are on display in some of the nine languages — including Japanese, Spanish, German, French and Danish — it’s been published in since 1986.

But Minik is only one of many hundreds of northern books in stock at the Arctic Ventures’ bookstore, which Harper started back in 1985.

Apart from his own book, Harper’s favourite is The Arctic Sky by John MacDonald.

Written when MacDonald managed the Igloolik Research Centre, The Arctic Sky combines knowledge from contemporary Inuit sources with references from the works of explorers and anthropologists like Knud Rasmussen and Diamond Jenness.

“The result is a clear and dispassionate survey of the myth and practical knowledge associated with each of the known heavenly bodies and other environmental phenomena, such as aurora borealis, rainbows, sun dogs, snowdrifts and eclipses, ” said the Nunatsiaq News in its 1998 review of the book.

Harper says The Arctic Sky remains one of the bookstore’s bestsellers.

The store began modestly with a couple of coffee-table books, Arctic Whalers by Gil Ross, and Seasons of the Eskimo by Fred Bruemmer.

The good sales of these books surprised Harper, who started to slowly expand his book department, to a point where they now occupy about a third of his Iqaluit store’s second floor.

And the focus of the bookstore remains on northern books, reflecting Harper’s “self-imposed mandate” to seek out and sell a wide variety of Arctic books.

There’s a section on adventure, exploration and history, Inuit culture, northern issues, art, novels, “our land,” and shelves stocked with Inuktitut language textbooks, children’s books and new releases.

The books draw a varied clientele, including gift-buyers, tourists, educators and regular northerners, Harper says.

Harper’s highly-recommended books also include A Kayak Full of Ghosts, by Laurence Millman, and Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, a Saami-inspired mystery.

While there are few Inuktitut books to choose from, Harper says, there are titles, like Unipkaaqtuat Arvianiit or Inuit by Greenland’s Aqqaluk Lynge, as well as an extensive selection of Inuktitut dictionaries, learning materials and phrasebooks.

The sales from the book department hold their own and “contribute to the success of the store,” Harper says.

But Arctic Ventures doesn’t fill mail orders for books, because postage are too high. And there’s no website that lists a catalogue of books in stock, so if you want to peruse the selection, you have to come in person.

“I suspect it wouldn’t succeed as a free-standing store,” Harper admits. “It works as a department in a general store and it definitely pays its way.”

Yet, despite warnings about the demise of printed books, there has been no let-up in the quality or quantity of northern books that are available.

Harper says “not everyone wants to read a Kindle,” referring to the well-known digital tablet from Amazon that’s capable of downloading books from the internet.