The importance of dreams

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In his landmark 1993 publication, Arctic Dreams and Nightmares, Alootook Ipellie presents a collection of twenty pairs of drawings and short stories that blend traditional Inuit ways of knowing with aspects of Qallunaat culture. Ipellie’s stories are communicated to the reader by a shaman protagonist who has been dead a thousand years and looks back upon his life “through the eyes of his living soul." Our last blog post explored Ipellie’s re-appropriation of central tenets of the Christian faith as his shaman narrator successfully battled Satan in the Garden of Nede and was reborn after his own crucifixion at the hands of fellow shamans.

Today, we consider the book title’s drawing and story, “Arctic Dreams and Nightmares.” Here, Ipellie speaks to the negative impacts of colonization while at the same time asserting the continued importance and crucial role of traditional ways of knowing.

 As with other narratives in the collection, “Arctic Dreams and Nightmares” takes several twists and turns. At one point, the shaman narrates two tales. The first is a strange, but seemingly pleasant dream where he finds himself in a Northern paradise. Like a veritable Alice in Wonderland, he drinks water from a special lake that causes him to shrink to the size of an insect. He then wanders about a small patch of tundra in blissful solitude where Arctic bushes are now comparable to an Amazonian jungle filled with beautiful and delicious vegetation that appear to satisfy and sustain him. Here, he thinks, the Qallunaat animal rights activists who berate Inuit hunters won’t bother him.

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The second story is a nightmare where the shaman wakes up in great pain, with blood spurting across his body and face. It appears that an eagle is ripping out of his chest. Once free, the bird flies away as though nothing had happened. He ponders the meaning of this vision and concludes that the eagle had begun its existence in his body as a blood cell that became unhappy because it was only being fed alcohol by its host. “The cell was absolutely tired of being drunk and was now extremely afraid of becoming an alcoholic.” The shaman explains that it was a clever cell that convinced various other cells in his body to join together over two decades in order to become an eagle that could escape. Once these cells had escaped, his body was left to die. Ipellie uses this story to reflect upon the physical effects of drinking on himself and his people as a result of settler-colonialism’s attempts to destroy traditional Inuit culture and society.

While these two stories may seem disconnected, Kimberley McMahon-Coleman has surmised that the magical water the shaman ingested in the dream – which radically altered his perspective and disconnected him from other living beings and previous understandings – could symbolise the foreign (and negative) influences of settler colonialism. In the nightmare, his body seeks to be free from these forces which are again represented as an unfamiliar drink.

Ipellie advocates for the vital significance of dreams as key to Inuit culture and, essentially, to life itself.  He writes:

Dreaming in the Arctic world is not quite like dreaming in other parts of the world. And so it is with nightmares. Perhaps there is something to be said about the mindset of individual cultures. We do have a different outlook on life, don’t we? And this unique outlook has given us the experiences to dream unique dreams.

A world that encompasses no dreamers is a world of chaos. And so a human dreamer, as he dreams, lives a little more humanely. And had he not been able to dream, he would not be very different from a wild animal.

In their efforts to evangelize Inuit, however, Christian missionaries condemned traditional beliefs and practices, including the magnitude ascribed to dreams and the customs around their re-telling. Inuit were actively discouraged from thinking about or discussing their dreams with others, thus suppressing the sharing of traditional knowledge and understandings across generations. In his introduction to Arctic Dreams and Nightmares, Ipellie describes settler-colonialism’s attempts to destroy so many aspects of traditional Inuit ways of life as “cultural genocide.”  Yet, the publication of Ipellie’s book asserts that Inuit have not stopped dreaming and telling their stories, and that they will continue to do so.

Post author: Jennifer Gibson

Sources:

Guy Bordin, “Dream Narration among Eastern Arctic Canadian Inuit,” in B. Collignon & M. Therrien, Orality in the 21st century: Inuit discourse and practices. Proceedings of the 15th Inuit Studies Conference (Paris: INALCO, 2009). Accessed April 10, 2020.

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).

Kimberley McMahon-Coleman, "Dreaming An Identity between Two Cultures: The Works of Alootook Ipellie," Kunapipi (Volume 28, Issue 1, Article 12), 2006. Accessed March 21, 2020.

Kimberley, McMahon-Coleman, Indigenous diasporic literature: representations of the Shaman in the works of Sam Watson and Alootook Ipellie, PhD thesis, Faculty of Arts, University of Wollongong, 2009. Accessed April 5, 2020.

Images: Alootook Ipellie, Arctic Dreams and Nightmares (1993), ink on illustration board, collection of Charles R.J. Gardner, photo by Karen Asher.