CBC4KIDS Book Lists
This Morning Book Panel, November
24, 2001 show: Fall Childrens' Books, 10 years and up.
Click on the audio icons to hear what the panel has to say.
http://cbc4kids.ca/general/words/book-panel/1999-11/
Toronto Star, Sunday December 17,2000
By Michele Landsberg
"Finally, a fresh look at the Inuit experience"
The $10,000 Norma Fleck Award for Canadian children's non-fiction is the richest prize in the nation for children's authors. Simon Tookoome, an Inuit nomad, artist and traditional hunter, and Winnipeg author Sheldon Oberman, who worked together for 10 years to write The Shaman's Nephew: A Life in the Far North (Stoddart Kids), will share the prize, which was announced last week.
Tookoome's memoir is so startlingly fresh, original, and immediate that you surface from its pages almost dazzled with strangeness - an experience that mingles miraculous beauty and the sharp sadness of loss.
The unusual collaboration was almost accidental. Oberman was on a book tour of the Northwest Territories in 1989 and asked to be billeted with a traditional Inuit family. To his enormous good fortune he was put up in the home of Tookoome, one of the last Inuit to remain stubbornly on the land, feeding and clothing his large family by hunting caribou and seal.
Tookoome chose Oberman to be his biographer. Many translators, as well as Tookoome's daughter, worked with the pair as they pierced through layers and layers of difference to get at the heart of Tookoome's amazing narrative and make it accessible to us "kabloona," or non-Inuit.
The book is in picture book form, illustrated with Tookoome's eerie and captivating drawings, in which animals and people intertwine. Each brief chapter of the memoir is only a page or two of text, as mesmerizing for readers as young as 7 or 8 as it is for adults.
Tookoome, the wise and gifted nephew of a shaman, speaks matter of factly about the Northern Lights that might follow someone on a dog-sled, and how he, Tookoome, knew the way to make them back off by certain whispering noises or by rubbing his fingernails together. He talks of llving in an igloo - “It is warm inside. It is like living in a big balloon under the snow with no light” – of striking down caribou with his 40-foot whip, seeing a shaman flying overhead "at the height of a low-flying airplane."
The window into otherness opens even wider when Tookoome meets white "civilization". Tookoome, who had a pet wolf and was at ease with polar bears, was terrified by a domestic cat, its tiny size and enormous eyes.
The hot, hard brightness of houses shocks him. His discomfort with the clatter of footsteps and cutlery makes the reader feel the hush of Tookoome’s lost wilderness. The family now must keep its caribou boots in the fridge to protect them from the unaccustomed warmth. Sadly, Tookoome says, because of the walls in houses, separating parents and children, the family talk ceases, the old stories are no longer told.
The amazing thing for me about The Shaman’s Nephew is how nearly I missed its quality. If it weren't for the fact that I served on the jury that chose the Fleck Award winner, I would almost certainly have gone right past The Shaman’s Nephew on the book-store shelves, assuming it was one more of those flat emotionless and curiously sparse Indian and Inuit re-tellings, with mysterious pictures that usually leave me baffled.
We need to hear Aboriginal tales, but we're tone deaf to them. They come from another context and a tradition so different that we need interpreters as well as translators. Reading this volume, I understood, and was moved by, the spirit of the Inuit paintings and stories, almost for the first time.
Children's Book News
Winter 2000
"I remember being
born..." So begins the first of artist Simon Tookoome's stories describing
the traditional nomadic life of the Inuit. It's a life that will soon be
completely gone (Tookoome is in his sixties), but he has found a way to
record it with the help of Sheldon Oberman.
When the two met on Oberman's
1989 book tour, they recognized each other as storytellers and "the shaman's
nephew" asked Oberman to write down his stories. This was a long process
as Oberman heard and reheard the stories, at different times and with different
interpreters (Tookoome speaks no English).
Tookoome's drawings are
internationally known (one has appeared on a Canadian stamp) and many of
them are arranged throughout this book. Tookoome and Oberman picked the
book's title, because Tookoome's uncle was a shaman and wanted his nephew
to follow him. The way of the shaman has come to an end, hut as an artist,
Tookoome found a new way to take on his uncle's role - "to become a transformer,
a seer and a healer."
The prose is straightforward
and economical but the descriptions of life and the recollections of dramatic
events (the 1957 starvation, the abduction of his child by the educational
authorities) are striking in the details. Who would have thought that one
of the odd things about white people's floors was how noisy they were compared
to the soft floors of an igloo?
Stoddart Kids
is to be commended for publishing this book that crosses the boundaries,
it's an intriguing and accessible book for children but has a sophistication
that will appeal to any adult interested in Inuit art and the Inuit world.
Gillian O'Reilly
Globe and Mail
Kids' Picks
Susan Perren
for example, a sensitive
collaboration by Simon Tookoome and Sheldon Oberman, tells us far more
about a particular history than fact books. Though Tookoome is only in
his rnld-60s, the drastic changes in his life span centuries. Born a nomad,
whose family lived in igloos and tents, following the wild animals of the
eastern Arctic, Tookoome now lives in a house, which be heartily dislikes.
Its rooms keep people apart, its doors and floors are noisy, and the floors
aren't even cold enough to keep meat fresh. He was one of the last to move
to a government settlement, a move forced because it was the only way to
rescue his son from a residential school in Baker Lake, N.W.T.
Oberman, a well-established
writer - of The Always Prayer shawl among other books - is from the legendary
Jewish cultural centre in the north End of Winnipeg. He spent more than
10 years talking to Tookoome through translators, and spending time in
the Arctic so Tookoome could tell of his life with shamans and visions;
about living side by side with wildlife and reading snow banks for directions.
Tookoome illustrates each chapter with vibrant paintings. Looking up from
the engrossing text, right into the eye of some of his works, such as Happy
People or creation, can be startling, almost dizzying. It's not just because
of the intensity of his visual reflections, but also because of the huge
gaps between the way Tookoome thinks and the way we do. He laments that,
with children growing up in towns and sitting in class and with everyone
living in different rooms, sleeping away from their parents, no one will
be there to hear what elders say, to hear the stories, to learn their own
history. Perhaps now that the eastern Arctic has become Nunavut, its leaders
will create conditions in which people can live with the land, not against
it. Perhaps.
National Post Dec 24, 1999
First impressions are important,
and just a glance at The Shaman's Nephew rewards readers of any age with
Simon Tookoome's stunningly beautiful paintings. The text is equally enthralling.
Tookoome, aside from being an important Inuit artist, is a storyteller
nonpareil, a shaman's nephew who resisted the call to shamanism and was
one of the last Inuit to leave the land and a traditional way of life for
government housing at Baker Lake. Over 10 years, and using a number of
translators, Sheldon Oberman took down Tookoome's story, a simply told
but powerful story of change, of moving from a nomadic, as-old-as-time
existence of great integrity, to one that seems rife with all that the
late 20th century has to offer, for good or ill.
MacLean's
November 22, 1999
Sheldon Oberman, a Winnipeg Jew and a teacher, and artist Simon Tookoome, one of the last Inuit to lead a nomadic life in the Arctic, ostensibly have nothing in common. But love of a good story brought them together, and the result of their collaboration, The Shaman's Nephew: A Life in the Far North (Stoddart, $23.95) is a deeply moving tale aimed at pre-teen readers, which weaves together Tookoome's life story and traditional lore. The renowned Inuit artist provided the magical drawings, while Oberman crafted Tookoome's vignettes into English.