Note: I accessed digital review copies of this book through Edelweiss and NetGalley. ( )

As a young Inuit girl named Ukpik struggles to come up with a name for her new puppy, she also confronts a more far-reaching change in her life when "the Captain" arrives on his yearly visit to her remote village. Ukpik's father, who had long been interested in the unusual eating utensils - a knife, fork and spoon - he had seen the Captain using, arranges for a trade, and Ukpik herself, having figured out how these items work, begins to show the other children. But when one of her peers questions why they would need these things, she becomes unsure of their desirability, asking her anaanatsiaq (grandmother) whether they will always have to use them...

I am familiar with Inuit folk singer and songwriter Susan Aglukark, not so much through her music (although this book has reminded me to try to track some of her songs down!), but because she translated David Bouchard's An Aboriginal Carol (a picture-book adaptation of The Huron Carol) into Inuktitut, and provided the narration and musical performance that accompanied that book. Una Huna?: What Is This? marks her debut as an author, and I found it quite moving. Much has been written and said about the negative impact of European settlers on the indigenous peoples of the North America, and rightly so. In Aglukark's home country of Canada, there have been a number of children's books published recently that have grappled with the harm done by the residential school system that was forced upon Native peoples. These include such picture-books as Stolen Words by Melanie Florence and Shi-shi-etko and Shin-chi's Canoe by Nicola I. Campbell, and memoirs like Fatty Legs: A True Story by Christy Jordan-Fenton and and Margaret Pokiak-Fenton and My Name is Seepeetza by Shirley Sterling.

Una Huna? is the first book I have seen that attempts to examine the meeting between indigenous and settler peoples in a more positive light, and to think about it as a cultural exchange, one in which the indigenous people (the Inuit, in this case) learned new things, but also retained many essential aspects of their culture. I appreciate that aspect of the story, and I think it makes this an important book. It is a hopeful book, one which acknowledges that cultural changes have happened to the Inuit, but which argues that those changes, even when embraced, don't have to mean that those embracing them are giving up everything that is traditional. I think it's important that we learn and talk about the negative aspects of North American history, and would highly recommend those books mentioned above. But I also think it's important to think about the cultural exchanges that occurred as a result of that history in a positive light, where appropriate.

I see that Aglukark's book has gained some negative reviews from readers who feel that it is somehow denying or hiding the more painful aspects of indigenous North American history. I find this somewhat puzzling, as the preponderance of current children's titles addressing that history do nothing of the sort. In fact, they focus quite a bit on those painful legacies. Are we meant to understand from these critiques that there is simply no room for this other narrative? Are we meant to believe that every aspect of every interaction, in every case, between Euro-Canadians/Americans and Native Nations was harmful? I find that hard to accept, or to reconcile with reality. More importantly, who am I (or these readers) to tell an Inuit woman how to understand that history? She has told me how she understands it, through this book, and that's good enough for me. ( )