Lamech Kadloo’s seal-skin pants glint in the half-light as he watches the bullies at work. They grip their young captive by the shoulders of his parka, chuckling as they spin the child in tight circles until he collapses.
“Taima,” Kadloo shouts, thrusting his arms forward in a shamanic push.
Without being touched, the bullies tumble sideways and out of sight.
The bit of magic could belong in Star Wars, but this story likely predates the birth of Christ. In Iqaluit, where snowmobiles roar along city streets and ravens hover over a slushy, slowly freezing Frobisher Bay, filmmakers this week have just wrapped up the shooting of Kiviuq, a huge, sprawling epic passed down by Inuit over millennia.
It’s a story that was nearly lost. Until recently, some elders who knew the tale had not told it for an entire lifetime – a legacy of missionaries who warned that Inuit traditions were devil worship.
“We should have had all those stories as a kid,” says Quentin Crockatt, 21, who plays one of the bullies. Like most Inuit his age, he had never heard the story until he became a part of it. “We’re filming part of our history,” he says.
Filmmaker John Houston, who, as the son of Inuit art popularizer James Houston, passed his early childhood in Cape Dorset, spent this September interviewing some 50 elders around the vast territory, finding new fragments at each stop. Some elders, such as Samson Quinangnaq from Baker Lake, spoke for as much as seven hours while telling the story.
Midway in the tale, Houston says, Quinangnaq, 81, stared at him and asked, “You know what this story is about, don’t you?” Houston shook his head.
“He said, ‘It’s the secret bible of the Inuit. Kiviuq was a prophet, and these stories are parables.’ “
“Others said, ‘That’s exactly what we’ve been thinking.’ “
Put another way, Houston says it’s a foundational tale of Inuit culture, an example of how people should live that’s almost forgotten.
Houston also says that Kiviuq is on par with Western epics like Homer’s Odyssey, making it of interest to audiences outside Nunavut. “It has that kind of substance and depth and reach.
“We have a story, as Canadians, sitting right here under our noses that has that power.”
As a hero, Kiviuq is so attuned to his environment he can hear the far-off cries of a lemming drowning in a puddle and is sympathetic enough to rush to its rescue. He lives at the dawn of creation, in a world where nothing happens without reason, advancing from one problem to the next by virtue of his generosity and perseverance.
Kadloo, who plays the part of the hero, remembers being told the tale when he was about 8. Now 41, the Pond Inlet resident says the story demonstrates not only how the Inuit overcame the challenges of living in the Arctic, but how they came to enjoy it.
“If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t be happy today,” he said.
And with the number of challenges currently facing the residents of Nunavut, where hopelessness drives one of the highest suicide rates in North America, Kadloo says they can always use role models.
Kadloo has worked on five films with Houston since 1987, most recently as an actor playing the shaman in the documentary Diet of Souls, which was nominated for two Gemini Awards this year. To prepare for the part of Kiviuq, he spent the last few years growing his hair long. Kadloo also had to learn old Inuktitut words from a dialect no longer spoken – a testament to the story’s age.
While the full epic has enough explicit sex and gruesome violence to warrant a restricted warning, Houston’s 90-minute production will leave out the tale’s maggots, snot-licking and dismembered body parts. But it does include the essentials, including Kiviuq’s two true loves, the fox woman and the goose woman.
The production could also be the first time Inuit elders appear in film as actors, rather than just storytellers. It was a natural step, Houston said, given their flair for dramatic delivery. “They don’t just tell the story. They perform the story.”
The three elders in the film will be the real stars, Houston said.
“This will be an homage or tribute to the Inuit oral tradition.”
The $990,000 production, expected to be completed by next fall, is to be broadcast on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) with English subtitles. Houston says a book is also in the works.