Norma Dunning’s latest short story collection, Tainna (The Unseen Ones), continues the powerful work she began with Annie Muktuk and Other Stories, for which she won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award in 2018. The same year she won the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Howard O’Hagan Award for the short story “Elipsee,” and was a finalist for the City of Edmonton Book Award.
- Tainna
- Norma Dunning
- Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.
- $19.95 Paperback, 160 pages
- ISBN: 978-17-71622-71-4
In 2020, she published a collection of poetry entitled Eskimo Pie: A Poetics of Inuit Identity.
“I write about Inuit that I see and some that I know in the south and how they struggle, not because they are incapable, but because there is a lack of acceptance from other Inuit and from the public overall. Inuit remain exotic oddities in Canada, when in truth we are mostly regular people who get up and go to work and school and live normal lives,” Dunning says.
Dunning likes to play with the expectations of others. “Inuit identity that is out of context according to mainstream, meaning that Inuit are not supposed to live in the southern areas of Canada, is something I love to trouble,” she says.
“Forty-eight per cent of Inuit Canadians live outside of their land claim areas. Inuit live in places all around the world, but if we are not in the North then – well, there has to be something wrong with us.”
Dunning revisits Annie Muktuk in “These Old Bones.”
“I knew I was not finished with Annie after the first collection,” she says. “I knew she would come back to me because a character like Annie is not going to live happily-ever-after with a Pentecostal preacher in the North of Canada. What I had to think about was, what would have become of her and how is she as a woman heading off into what some people think of as ‘twilight years’?”
In “Eskimo Heaven,” Ittura sets himself the task of teaching Father Peter some understanding of the flock he is shepherding. But when Dunning is asked if it is possible for two such different cultures to completely understand each other, she is forceful in her reply: “No, and I hope not. If we understood each other through and through, then we become the pan-Indigenous or the multicultural mosaic that Canada likes to say it already is. To me it’s not about gaining a full understanding; it’s about having respect for one another.”
Stories like “Tainna (The Unseen Ones)” and “Kunak” are raw and emotive, with some haunting images, such as the one in “Tainna” where a groundskeeper on a golf course comes across 60 geese sitting in a “bison” circle, with their heads pointing outwards. The guardian geese were there for a reason, and that reason was a tragic one.
Does her intense writing take a lot out of Dunning?
“To me as a writer, if you don’t feel it, then don’t write it,” she says. “A great deal of what I write is very difficult to put down, but I think it’s worth exposing that rawness and reality out and into the world. I don’t write for shock value. I write what I hold to be true.”
