An early Christmas present

A small group of children sit rapt in the storytelling area of Iqaluit’s library. The sunlight beams in through the windows onto the youngsters, some tucked in the arms or on the laps of their parents. Others sit by themselves, elbows on knees, heads on hands, listening to the grey-haired man in front of them.

Children’s author Michael Kusugak knows how to hold a young person’s attention. Kusugak is in Iqaluit to shoot footage for a Christmas special based on one of his books, but on this Saturday afternoon, his purpose is to simply tell stories.

He begins to read from his book Baseball Bats For Christmas, then pauses.

“I don’t like to read from these books so well,” he says with a smile.

Kusugak admits he much prefers to tell stories off the cuff rather than read them from a book.

“I think it’s so much better if you tell the story,” he says in an interview later on. “You know you can go home and read this, but it’s nice if you can get somebody to tell it to you. You have to interact with the kids when you tell a story.”

He says the audience reacts differently too. If he’d just sat there and read from the book the whole time, he says, they would just get bored.

“Traditionally [storytelling] was a way for our elders to teach us morals by which to live. It’s too bad that it’s dying, I’m trying to keep it alive,” he says.

Kusugak, who grew up in Repulse Bay and now lives in Rankin Inlet, has written half a dozen children’s books, two of which have been developed into CD-ROMs.

He says some of the most wonderful characters are found in Inuit storytelling, like Kiviq — a character whose exploits he entertained the children at the library with.

“When I was a little boy the most famous person in the whole world was a man called Kiviq. Kiviq was born a long, long time ago, so long ago that he was the very first person on Earth,” he says with wide eyes and hand gestures.

His tales, sometimes aided visually by a piece of string used to create pictures of the characters, mesmerize people from all latitudes.

“A lot of them are traditional Inuit legends that I translate in English, but Inuktitut is such a wonderful storytelling language. It makes stories really come to life,” he says, explaining why he intermingles the two languages when he spins his yarns.

Kusugak’s popularity can be seen not only in the numbers he brings out for readings across the country, but also by the fact that Baseball Bats for Christmas will be seen on TV by a national audience.

Kusugak has brought his nine-year-old niece, Terrie Kusugak, to Iqaluit to play a role in the production.

“We’re doing the soundtrack, the narration, tomorrow, and on Monday we’re doing some acting,” he says. “I’m going to be out with Terrie and then there’ll be something that reminds me of these trees that arrived in Repulse Bay and then the action will start.”

But it’s Kusugak’s storytelling abilities alone that wowed the group at the library.

Lori Idlout brought three children, aged 10, five and two to the library to listen to Kusugak’s stories.

“Oh, they loved it,” she says. “They were really interested in it. Just the way he told the stories was great and the really old stories, he made them interesting and relevant for them.”