Arctic Dreams and Nightmares

 Click photo to enlarge

Another highlight of the touring exhibition Alootook Ipellie: Walking Both Sides of an Invisible Border is the inclusion of seven drawings from Ipellie’s seminal publication Arctic Dreams and Nightmares. Exhibition curators Sandra Dyck, Heather Igloliorte and Christine Lalonde provide context for this important volume:

The first book of collected short fiction by an Inuk writer published in Canada, Arctic Dreams and Nightmares (1993) is one of Alootook Ipellie’s most significant achievements. The drawings came first, the stories later. He wrote a story to accompany each of the twenty drawings in the book over an intense three-month period. “They were pretty much writing themselves,” he later recalled. The stories were inspired by his own dreams and nightmares, his daily life and his “ancestors’ extraordinary gift for inventing myths, stories and legends.”

The book is narrated by an Inuk shaman who has been dead for a thousand years and now looks back on his life “through the eyes of his living soul.” Freed from the constraints of the body, time and space, the shaman roams everyday and otherworldly realms. His adventures are recounted by Ipellie in fantastical (and often sexual) tales that intermingle pop culture, Christianity, current events, and Inuit and Western stories. Shakespeare, Sattaanassee, Brigitte Bardot, Sedna and Super Stud all make appearances. There’s no book like it. 

While much of Ipellie’s early work was geared primarily to an Inuit audience, Arctic Dreams and Nightmares was created with both Inuit and Qallunaat readers and viewers in mind. The book opens with an autobiographical essay that introduces the circumstances into which Ipellie was born, grew up and proceeded into his career as a writer and artist. Through his introduction, Ipellie is forthright about the devastating impacts that colonization has had on him and his people.

The stories and drawings also draw attention to and, importantly, subvert these impacts. In an interview with Michael Kennedy, for example, Ipellie explains how his drawing and story “After Brigitte Bardot” speak back to the negative effect that anti-seal hunting protests made by non-Indigenous celebrities had on Inuit: “I wanted to tell her what we thought about what she did to our people.”

Click photo to enlarge

The drawing on the book’s cover, Self-Portrait: Inverse Ten Commandments, is one of many in the volume that critiques the introduction of Christianity to Inuit by overturning its concepts, symbols and narratives. Kimberley McMahon-Coleman notes that since Ipellie’s stories are based on dreams and written from the point of view of a shaman, they represent traditional Inuit ways of knowing. She asserts that his incorporation of Christian tropes into his collection “emphasizes the possibility of co-existence between the two belief systems, albeit with Christianity in the minor role.” Ipellie, further, explained to Kennedy that he comes from a family of shamans on his mother’s side:

I think it was that sense of having had the family heredity of shamanism that I wanted to have the shaman in the book. Having heard stories about shamans from my own family, from the community in Iqaluit, it is a very large passion for me and I tried to keep that passion when I was writing the book to keep that spirit alive.

Click photo to enlarge

In  the story "Self-Portrait: Inverse Ten Commandments", the shaman narrator confronts a vision of his own devilish face (which indeed looks a lot like Ipellie’s) and hands that are alive with tiny screaming faces on each of his fingertips. He realizes that he has arrived at Hell’s Garden of Nede (anagram of Eden) and that the tiny faces represent the inverse ten commandments, shouting “Thou Shalt” instead of “Thou Shalt Not.” As the vision welcomes and then grabs hold of him, the tiny faces slurp his hands with their razor-sharp tongues. He recalls that the Church’s teachings – namely, that if one maintained a “good-humoured personality to all mankind,” one would be guaranteed a place in Christian heaven – are untrue. He decides that the only way to break free is to knee the Satanic vision in the groin. The image disappears and all returns to normal. He then concludes that his soul had successfully travelled through the cosmos by visiting and then ridding himself of his dark side. As McMahon-Coleman notes, the shaman narrator “has saved himself without the agency of the Church or its ministry.” In doing so, he has proven himself a powerful shaman.

Click photo to enlarge

A second story in Arctic Dreams and Nightmares Indigenizes Christianity’s main narrative. In I, Crucified the shaman travels through time and space to find himself bound to a whalebone cross and pinned in place by arrows and a harpoon as tundra wolves snarl at his feet. He discovers that his crucifixion is due to the jealousy of other shamans who are unable to successfully compete against him. They trap him using his own ego and desire for additional power as bait. He is then forced to wait a thousand years until he is reborn as the contemporary narrator of Ipellie’s stories. McMahon-Coleman notes that through I, Crucified, Ipellie “implies that Christ was one of many shamans the world has seen, and that the article of belief central to Christianity – that of Christ’s resurrection – can be explained through the traditional Inuit belief in reincarnation.” In this way, the writer “critiques the efforts of missionaries to eradicate traditional beliefs in favour of their own.”

Post author: Jennifer Gibson

Sources:

Sandra Dyck, Heather Igloliorte and Christine Lalonde, Walking Both Sides of an Invisible Border, exhibition section panel, 2018.

Alootook Ipellie, Arctic Dreams and Nightmares (Penticton, BC: Theytus Books, 1993).

Michael P. J. Kennedy, “Alootook Ipellie: The Voice of an Inuk Artist,” Studies in Canadian Literature (Volume 21, Number 2), 1996. Accessed March 21, 2020.

Michael P. J. Kennedy, “Southern Exposure: Belated Recognition of a Significant Inuk Writer-Artist,” Canadian Journal of Native Studies, Volume 15, Number 2 (1995). Accessed March 21, 2020.

Kimberley McMahon-Coleman, "Dreaming An Identity between Two Cultures: The Works of Alootook Ipellie," Kunapipi (Volume 28, Issue 1, Article 12), 2006.

Images: Alootook Ipellie, Cover of Arctic Dreams and Nightmares, published by Theytus Books, 1993, photo by Justin Wonnacott, courtesy Carleton University Art Gallery; Alootook Ipellie: Walking Both Sides of an Invisible Border, partial installation views showing Self-Portrait: Inverse Ten Commandments (1993), ink on illustration board, private collection, photos by Karen Asher; Alootook Ipellie, I, Crucified (1993), ink on illustration board, courtesy Ad Astra Comix.