Inuk author awarded $2,500 finalist prize for political writing
Norma Dunning 1 of 4 runners-up, top Shaughnessy Cohen Prize goes to Chris Turner
Author Norma Dunning’s “Kinauvit? What’s Your Name? The Eskimo Disc System and a Daughter’s Search for her Grandmother,” has received a $2,500 award after being a finalist for the 2023 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. (Photos courtesy of Douglas & McIntyre/Harbour Publishing)
Norma Dunning has been awarded a $2,500 political writing prize for her book about the 20th century Inuit disc system.
Kinauvit? What’s Your Name? The Eskimo Disc System and a Daughter’s Search for her Grandmother, was given a finalist award at the 2023 Politics and the Pen gala in Ottawa on Wednesday.
The top $25,000 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing went to Chris Turner for his book How to be a Climate Optimist: Blueprints for a Better World.
Established in honour of the late MP from Windsor, Ont., the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize is given annually to an exceptional book of literary non-fiction that captures a political subject of relevance to Canadian readers.
Dunning’s 2022 book compiled years of archival research and interviews to shed light on the Eskimo Identification Tag System, a little-known identification system for Inuit that began in 1941 as a way for the federal government to keep track of Inuit in the North through digits on physical discs.
Part history book and part memoir, Dunning also weaved her own story of growing up with a complicated sense of cultural identity into the book, which initially took shape as her master’s thesis.
The other writers who received finalist prizes were Dale Eisler for From Left to Right: Saskatchewan’s Political and Economic Transformation, Josh O’Kane for Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy and Andrew Stobo Sniderman and Douglas Sanderson (Amo Binashii) for Valley of the Birdtail: An Indian Reserve, a White Town, and the Road to Reconciliation.
SIN numbers?
God forbid the federal government figure out a way to deliver welfare and other services without imposing Western naming systems on Inuit and also was a “document” format that was compatible with the traditional Inuit lifestyle.
They should have 1) withheld services, 2) forced the adoption of Western naming systems, and 3) used a document format that would quickly disintegrate in the elements.
Do you wear your SIN on a metal disc around your neck? When you interact with government officials, do they refer to you only by your SIN and not your name? Shake your head.
Did Inuit carry wallets back then, or did they live a nomadic lifestyle where a piece of paper would get destroyed or lost before the government official had even left the community? People still had their names, and they still used them, just like today. But yes, the number does matter, it’s what keeps us separate, and for things like medical and vaccination records, it’s really important.
Our mom kept ours in a safe container that was never opened. We knew our ID numbers by heart (our siblings including our parents). I remember even many of my classmates memorized each other’s ID numbers. Inuktitut names were hard for Qallunaat to pronounce, let alone remember. Our names were barely standardized too and so they would constantly be macerated by the administrators or teachers. We used our ID numbers only in public service places or official documents, not at home or everyday life. When we met ‘strangers’ – other Inuit, they only asked us who our parents or grandparents were. However, it did start to feel awkward as we became older in school before we were assigned last names.
It’s funny how people complain about the tag system and ID numbers, but don’t suggest a workable alternative that is obvious and should have been used instead. We know that little pieces of paper wouldn’t have worked in a hunter-gatherer nomadic culture with no wallets or plastic bags.
What do people suggest instead? Inuit had no surnames, most at the time didn’t know their birthdates, and people changed their names often (some still do to this day!) Tell us activists, what should those knuckle-draggers who thought up the E-numbers (and W-numbers I think in the western arctic?) should have used instead to keep track of who was who?
It’s not like using numbers was a special evil reserved just for the Inuit. Populations everywhere were getting so large and society so complex that ID numbers were coming into use. If they hadn’t used numbers to keep individuals distinct from each other, there would be cries of racism today for how inuit weren’t seen as individuals.
You just can’t win with activists. Whatever you do or don’t do, it’s wrong, and they have no workable solutions for what should have been done instead, and they sure don’t have the ability or motivation to do it themselves, either. Constant grievance and critique is their only skill.
Great questions.
There is status to be found in connections made to the suffering of ourselves or our ancestors, real and imagined. Which is to say, there is an incentive structure to ‘draw out’ those connections (again, both where they do and do not exist). The larger, meta-narratives around ‘oppression,’ for example, that have become amplified in our public discourse with the rise of social media have shown us that invoking a magic word here or there provides a low friction pathway to status of this form.
In 2014 I had to get a new birth certificate in order to renew my driver’s license my latest birth certificate shows baby boy eloomigayok E2-958
Eskimo dog tag# age 53