Inuit father not “domineering”

I have just read Patricia D’Souza’s report of an interview she did with me in November about my life and work with the Utkukiksalingmiut of Chantry Inlet and Gjoa Haven (“The book of Gjoa,” Nov. 22).

The report is well-written, and I was interested in some of the interpretations and elaborations that Ms. D’Souza made of what I said. However, I would like to correct two mistakes that she made and apologize for one that I made.

Her first mistake was to call my adopted father Kigeak a “domineering man.” Kigeak was not a domineering man, and I never thought or said that he was. He did sometimes tell me to make tea, but that was his right as an Inuit father. And if I didn’t always like being told what to do, that was because I wasn’t used to it, and also because his requests sometimes interrupted other work that I was doing, which I thought was important. Very occasionally we had other disagreements too, but that was because I didn’t understand Inuit ways and he didn’t understand qallunaat ways. And again, he had a perfect right as a father to behave as he did and to refuse requests that he thought were silly.

Ms. D’Souza also misunderstood what I said about the name of one of the children in my family. I was trying to explain why personal names are important to Inuit — more important than they are to qallunaat — and I talked about that child as an example. What I was trying to tell her was that Priscilla and her grandfather behaved the same way in some respects because they had the same name.

I am very sorry now that I talked about Priscilla by name because it might embarrass both Priscilla and other members of my family. That was my mistake. I was careless and I apologize.

Jean L. Briggs
St. John’s, Newfoundland

Editor’s note: Jean Briggs wrote in great detail about Kigeak’s warmth in her book Never in Anger — and also his “haughty and harsh” demeanour. “The predominant impression was of a harsh, vigorous, dominant man, highly self-dramatizing; a personality set off almost as sharply as that of a kapluna against the backdrop of his self-effacing fellows,” she wrote. In describing her characterization of him — and his granddaughter’s similarity to him — we meant no disrespect to either Briggs, Kigeak or Priscilla.