by Norma Dunning
DOUGLAS & McINTYRE
2022/$26.95/184 pp.
Norma Dunning’s Kinauvit? What’s Your Name? is very much a product of our moment. Questions around Indigenous identity in settler colonial Canada, with individuals “faking” or lying about being a member of a First Nation, or more borderline cases where individuals use a distant ancestor to buttress a claim of Indigenous identity when they grew up a part of the mainstream suburban landscape, or non-Indigenous scholars and the courts trying to define who is Métis or non-status Indian, are all part of the current national cultural conversation. To my knowledge we have not seen as much of this phenomenon among Inuit.
When the UK transferred the Arctic islands to Canada back in 1880, Inuit came under Canadian jurisdiction—but with an ambiguous status. No Inuit Act was ever passed, and Inuit were only briefly included in the Indian Act (though in 1939 a court decision determined that Inuit were a federal responsibility, like First Nations). Confused about Inuit names (traditionally an Inuk did not have first and last names though a person could have several distinct names), which were hard for Qallunaat (whites) to pronounce, the government took to issuing numbers on discs—E-numbers—to Inuit in order to better monitor or surveil them. That system lasted into the 1960s; the government eventually started a “project surname” to give Inuit last names and slowly dropped the E-number system.
Dunning’s book is a short and readable account that focuses on the human dimensions of the Eskimo Disc System. Dunning herself grew up in the south, of mixed ancestry and little privilege. In an attempt to become a beneficiary of the Nunavut Land Claim Agreement (for herself and her children) she fills out an application but finds, through the process, that there is no E-number for her mother. This puts her on a quest to find out about E-numbers. The book weaves her personal story with a broad history of the system and with interviews that show how other Inuit recall their E-numbers and the discs they were engraved on. Her chapter titles, like the book title, deploy Inuit concepts from Inuktitut (the Inuit language) in an engaging and thoughtful way.
The interviews lend welcome texture, though sometimes they lean away from the points Dunning is trying to make. Some Inuit want to distance themselves from their individual E-numbers, while others exhibit nostalgia for them. Of the latter, Dunning writes: “I have had [Inuit] tell me in person how they have an affection for their number and that it is a part of who they feel they are. For me, as someone who never had a disc number or had to manage my life with one, when I hear that kind of talk, I think of how that is all it takes. All it ever takes for any government or corporation to walk away from their responsibility for any harm they may have extended to Inuit Canadians is to have one Inuk say ‘it didn’t bother me’ and that is what they run with.”
In my view, the broad history aspects of this book are the weakest parts; Dunning wants to foreground the harm done by E-numbers as key to the entire settler colonial project. Arguably, project surname was even more damaging as it actually changed people’s names and naming practices, introducing patriarchal last names. Colonial nominalism, a process of imposing names on lands and peoples, was a far-reaching process in the Arctic. Given the damage done by relocations of Inuit communities, the imposition of an “administered life” by a heavy-handed set of medical, educational, policing and social welfare professionals and the imposition of the residential school system, the use of E-numbers must be seen as one element of a colonial system and not as its underlying root. While the book tends to overstate its case, it is still a useful introduction to the E-number system.
Peter Kulchyski is a professor in the department of Indigenous Studies at the University of Manitoba.
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