Kinauvit?: What's Your Name? The Eskimo Disc System and a Daughter's Search for her Grandmother

“‘Mom, what are we?’ a question asked by Inuit scholar and writer Norma Dunning, which remains like a floating specter over the course of this highly original and devastating book, vividly recalling the disembodying process of colonization. Much more than this, however, this highly personal, evocative and robustly researched amalgam of wrenching memories, historical records, and testimony, Kinauvit? What’s Your Name?, is a multi-dimensional life’s work that demonstrates the power and will of Indigenous peoples’ reclamation of self.”

Brendan Hokowhitu, Professor of Indigenous Research, The University of Queensland

“Norma Dunning’s compelling book painstakingly investigates and uncovers a shameful state secret hidden in the open banality of colonial violence—the Eskimo Identification Canada number-disc system used by the Government of Canada circa 1941 and 1971 in destroying Inuit traditions of naming, relocating Inuit communities, enforcing colonial domination and national sovereignty in Inuit territory. Kinauvit? What’s Your Name? also serves as an eloquent introduction to the historical specificity of the Canadian nation-state’s colonization of the Inuit during the Cold War, deepening our understanding of the Canadian nation-state’s imperial participation in a global system of multiple colonialisms just as new Cold Wars and their strategic resource extraction imperatives loom again. But Dunning’s book is not only a breakthrough of original scholarly research, it is also really an Inuit song undoing the colonizer’s model of the word through the Inuit voices it brings us, through its dramatic and engaging prose deftly weaving together the jagged edges of accumulated violence with which biography becomes history. It is a must read for Canadians if we are to come to terms with the founding injustices of our collective belonging. Through the gift Dunning offers us—tukitaaqtuq—we need to take this book to heart.”

Sourayan Mookerjea, Co-director, Feminist Energy Futures: Powershift and Environmental Social Justice University of Alberta

“To read Kinauvit? is to enjoy an enthralling visit with a gifted storyteller. Norma Dunning brilliantly conveys the story of her quest to reconnect with her culture, language and people. Dunning recounts how oppressive colonial powers brutally disrupted and upended the lives of her family, community, and the Inuit in Canada in general—including the implantation of a degrading disc system of personal identification.”

Darrel J McLeod, author of Mamaskatch: A Cree Coming of Age and Peyakow: Reclaiming Cree Dignity