Inuit Women and Men

Their Powerful Sprint In a Century of Change

“Out on the land” the Inuit cycle of life moved from season to season across the frigid tundra, fringed by hazardous floe ice and punctuated by majestic but forbidding mountains. This was home to “the people” for thousands of years. After resettlement from tiny camps scattered across the land into small hamlets during the 1960s, the Inuit became a marginalized and culturally destabilized people, almost totally reliant on government policies and support. The status and role of women drastically changed during the Resettlement Period, and the rates of domestic violence and abuse skyrocketed.

Janet Mancini Billson and Kyra Mancini Reis faithfully report the monumental changes seen by the Inuit during the last few decades, as told by Inuit men and women themselves. These include shifts in Inuit family structure and parent?child relationships; rising levels of education--especially among women; growing diversity of occupations; and disconcerting rates of alcoholism, suicide, drug abuse, and unemployment.

Using data from intensive focus group and individual interviews, as well as participant observation in the Baffin Island community of Pangnirtung, the authors trace women’s roles and power from the contradictions of traditional times to the complexities of contemporary settlement life.

INUIT WOMEN AND MEN documents the effects of rapid social and political change on gender roles in a hunting-gathering culture. Probably nowhere in the world has such rapidity of socially-supported change occurred as with the Inuit in Canada, in part because of Canada’s modern character and its welfare state policies.

The people whose voices echo through these pages speak sadly, sometimes bitterly, about “loss of culture”—and hopefully about the dignity and self-determination they expect to find in the 21st century with the creation of the new Canadian territory, Nunavut.