The Little Folk

The inugarulliit, little folk, go out hunting one day, and an Inuk boy tags along on his first hunting trip with his adopted community. The boy is confused when the party tracks down a polar bear, but he only sees a lemming; and again when he is asked to go out [to the meat cache] and get some polar bear meat, but he can only find some duck and lemming meat in their meat cache. When he confesses that he can’t find any polar bear meat, an inugarulliq child turns the lemming meat into the size of a polar bear’s leg. The Inuk boy’s parents are very proud of their son’s first successful hunt of a polar bear.

There should be a long preamble at the beginning of this review about my awareness of cultural authenticity as an important and sensitive issue, and my lack of qualifications to judge a retelling of a traditional story from a culture not my own. Consider it said. This review will be a careful description of aspects I observe from an outsider’s perspective, bringing me to a conclusion about its value to readers within and without the depicted culture; which means the review will be lengthy.

To begin with, the illustrations are good. The palette is limited to mostly shades of blue and white for the snow and ice, and varying shades of grey to brown for skin, hair, eyes, clothes, equipment, and animals (dogs and, of course, the lemming/polar bear). At first glance, they seem like generic digitally created illustrations, with the flat texture and simple shapes without outlines that are common in that type. But, if you look more carefully, there is distance and substance in the pictures; through careful shading, instead of looking weightless, the parkas look thick and heavy, mountains rear convincingly far away, and a mitten resting on the ground is shaped just so, so that we can tell the wearer is leaning their weight on that hand. The shadows on snow, with a few stalks of plants poking out, have that exact blue of shadows cast by an afternoon sun in winter. The people in the story are all dressed in a similar manner and have few distinguishing features, yet their simplified expressions and movements are lively, and they do not feel interchangeable or look like dolls. I consider it a thoughtful portrayal because having little folk in a story can have the unfortunate effect of equating an Indigenous culture with toylike or childish qualities; these illustrations are not like that.

On top of that, the illustrations work well with the text. I’m going to credit the art directors with having the illustrations fill each spread so there is no white space throughout the book. In a book set in mostly the same colours all the way through, it makes a lot more sense visually to take away the white space and just have the text sit on the illustrations. The Little Folk is just slightly more text-heavy than I think is the trend in mainstream picture books, so you will see a block of text on most pages, but the design of the book is very well done, with text manipulated so there is space between the lines, or the text block falls into an empty space in the landscape, and the pages can breathe. I wouldn’t be surprised if the text was laid out first and the illustrations made around the blocks.

The use of language is also carefully considered: you will see from the excerpt that some basic grammar is demonstrated in a natural manner, with three different grammatical forms shown in “There once were inugarulliit” and “One inugarulliik couple”, then again with an Inuk child and an inugarulliq child. I don’t know whether it was intended or just happened with the story, but I felt it was a good repetition and would be useful for those learning Inuktitut (there is also a glossary and pronunciation guide at the end, aimed towards non-speakers of the language). I like how the words that point towards the little folk are italicized and non-capitalized while the word Inuk is capitalized but not italicized, because (perhaps) they should be considered differently: Inuit are not story people but real people who are present, with us, in the now.

After the first introduction, “One inugarulliik couple had adopted an Inuk boy. He was much bigger than his parents, and they loved him dearly”, the relationship words are always “parents”, “his father”, etc., with no terms used that might imply an assumed different set of real parents somewhere (such as “his adoptive parents” or “the inugarulliik couple”. I also want to point to “and they loved him dearly”, instead of “but”). This natural unapologetic stance continues into the description of hunting where both pictures and text describe the death of a lemming and the use of its meat in a matter-of-fact manner without feeling the need to justify anything. The hunters are going out for food; they find a food animal and kill it; it becomes food, and they eat its meat. The parents are proud of their son’s first hunt. Hunting is taken for granted, and things like meat caches need no explanation in this story. The meat cache, by the way, already contains duck meat and the lemming’s leg is all that is in the cache, details which quietly point to a prior hunt of a duck and to the village hunters’ dividing the lemming amongst the community.

There is no conflict in this narrative, and so it does not follow a mainstream storyline which is usually one of setting up and resolving an inner or external conflict, usually by learning something new. When the boy does not see the polar bear that his father mentions, he does not doubt his elders or himself; he simply asks for clarification. When the inugarulliq child makes a polar bear’s leg out of the lemming’s leg, the boy does not feel that he is different or does not belong in his community. The boy’s size is never mentioned past the first introduction. The magic is simply the explanation for how a lemming can become a polar bear and allows for the parents to be proud of their son’s catch of a polar bear even though the boy only feels that he stepped on a lemming. There is no negotiation of identity or worldview; everything just is and is accepted as such.

The Little Folk is a challenging read, and, by that, I don’t mean that it has problems or deals with heavy subject matter. I mean that, if you have only ever read North American mainstream picture books and only know European fairytales, you will find yourself noticing all the places where you made assumptions about how the story “should go”. The story pokes at all my ideas of what a picture book narrative “usually is”, but in the nicest and subtlest ways, and, through rereading I appreciate it more. I feel awkward being in the position of praising something for being “unapologetic” as that feels like a rude sort of position to take, but with my apologies for the presumption (and for the use of the term “mainstream” for lack of a better term for the generally familiar), it is remarkable how unaffected and natural this book is. It is as if it was unaware that there was any “mainstream” that it could be compared to, and that is a good thing for us readers. I would read The Little Folk with young friends early before they know that there’s such a thing as the hero’s journey or the rule of three.