Inuit Quotes

“The Vikings could have been saved if they had borrowed survival strategies from the Inuit, but the only record we have of contact between the two peoples is the remark from a Viking settler that the Inuit bleed a lot when stabbed - an observation that hardly indicates a willingness to learn from their northern neighbors.”
― Johnjoe McFadden, Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

“She would follow him there. And she would die there -- and die soon. Of misery and of strangeness and of all the vicious, petty, alien, and unbridled thoughts that would pour into her like the poison from the Goldner tins poured into Fitzjames -- unseen, vile, deadly.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“The Polar Intuit of northwest Greenland, the northernmost people, call February ‘seqinniaq’, “the month when the sun appears.”
― Fred Bruemmer

“Like you, I am woman and more than woman. I have felt a woman's pain, but I have hunted like a man. Who else has lived both lives?”
― Jordanna Max Brodsky, The Wolf in the Whale

“Just as I was man and woman, just as the fanged aarluk was wolf and whale, my people could not be contained in a single god.”
― Jordanna Max Brodsky, The Wolf in the Whale

“We have a weakness of not learning from the natives, but rather teaching them.”
― Vilhjálmur Stefánsson

“A few years later, in Inukjuak, I learned that SFU is the Inuit texting acronym for "snowmobile fucked up," and that POOS is the acronym for "passed out on snowmobile.”
― Lawrence Millman, At the End of the World: A True Story of Murder in the Arctic

“Why would I continue life as a man trapped in a girl’s body when I could just as easily fly into the heavens or run with the wolves?”
― Jordanna Max Brodsky, The Wolf in the Whale

“The wolf is not bound to its shape. It can change form at will, transforming to a whale when it must swim in the sea. Seeing the whale, no one would ever suspect it had once been a wolf.”
― Jordanna Max Brodsky, Olympus Bound

“Show respect to the land and the people who have kept it pristine for your adventures.”
― Gayle Kabloona

“colonialism benefits from dispossessing indigenous people of their land and writing us out of history”
― Gayle Uyagaqi Kabloona

“Martie was large, at least by Inuit standards, with skin the colour of an heirloom suitcase and a voice like a cartoon train wreck.”
― McGrath M. J.

“Meg, you have to go. I can't.”
― R.J. Harlick, Arctic Blue Death

“She heard the man calling, "Keep to the left, if you want to get home and see your father and mother." But she kept running along the smooth road, and just then she looks back, and she is out of the sea and into the air; and as she looks back the trail behind her fades away...
- Ada Blackjack, "The Lady in the Moon”
― Jennifer Niven, Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic

“Inuit are tired of white people coming to our lands, calling it desolate and unforgiving and continuing the narrative of 'triumph over the elements.' We all have history here. A generation ago, people were born in tents and spent their lives traversing the Arctic. We have respect for the land for supporting us and the generations who came before us.”
― Gayle Kabloona

“We go and do the things that you're calling exploring and adventuring ... and [for us] it's just regular life.”
― Gayle Kabloona

“The danger is going back with this colonial attitude and disseminating information like the Inuit don't have history there.”
― Gayle Kabloona