Anthropologist Bernard Saladin d’Anglure dies at 88

French anthropologist and ethnolinguist Bernard Saladin d’Anglure, known for his extensive work studying Inuit culture and spirituality in Nunavik and Nunavut, died Feb. 12 in Toulouse, France.

He was 88.

D’Anglure came to Canada for the first time at 19 years of age with the help of a bursary and grand ambitions to discover Inuit culture, according to a biography from the University of Quebec in Montreal, where he earned a master’s degree in anthropology in 1964.

After arriving in Schefferville, Que., by train, he jumped on a plane and visited many Nunavik villages, starting with Quaqtaq.

Lisa Koperqualuk, now president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, was once a student at University of Laval’s anthropology department. D’Anglure had interviewed her grandfather in her home community of Puvirnituq, she said, and he was thrilled that she would enrol in anthropology.

“It was pretty amazing how he entered the Inuit world and how much incredible respect he showed,” Koperqualuk said.

“It manifested in the way he interacted with us as individual Inuit, always asking who our parents are, what our name is, and always showing us that strength and that positive aspect of being Inuit.”

She said she remembers how he would leave notebooks for Inuit knowledge holders to write what they knew and send back to him. He quickly learned to speak fluently through these connections, she said.

“He has done incredible knowledge gathering in Nunavik, and in Igloolik as well” where he researched his book, Koperqualuk said.

Most of these recordings and notebooks from over the years are kept now at the Avataq Cultural Institute in Montreal.

“He had an incredible memory, he would remember every story that Inuit told him,” Koperqualuk said of d’Anglure, adding he would even remember every Inuit name.

Lisa Koperqualuk, left, talks with Bernard Saladin d’Anglure when she last saw him at his Paris home in 2023. (Photo courtesy of Lisa Koperqualuk)

During her own studies in anthropology, she found herself reading d’Anglure’s work over and over again, about Inuit spirituality, shamanism, gender norms and the fact that many Inuit remembered being in the uterus before their birth.

“It was a fascinating look into our spiritual world, and our way of understanding,” she said.

D’Anglure’s book, Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth: Gender, Shamanism and the Third Sex, “was very influential in not just for us as Inuit, but also to the outside world in his sharing of our understanding,” she said.

Koperqualuk and d’Anglure sometimes met for discussions that would often evolve into him reciting tales of his adventures.

“He had so much to tell, we could listen and listen without getting bored because of all the incredible details he could remember,” she said.

In 1974, d’Anglure launched the Inuksiutiit Katimajiit Association, a non-profit organization with the goal to return documentation, data and research about the Inuit, to the Inuit.

In 1977, he launched a scientific publication called Études Inuit Studies, which is still published twice a year.

D’Anglure also helped Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk translate the first Inuktitut-language novel ever published, called Sanaaq.