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Isuma launches publishing business

Coming soon to a classroom near you: "An Inuit cultural universe in a box"

SARA MINOGUE

About Inuit and by Inuit: The Isuma Inuit Studies Reader (Isuma Publishing, 240 pages, $18.95) was unveiled at the 2004 Nunavut Trade Show in Iqaluit this past week. (PHOTO COURTESY OF IGLOOLIK ISUMA PRODUCTIONS)

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The production company that won international acclaim for the award-winning film Atanarjuat is applying its media savvy to the publishing business.

With little or no marketing, Igloolik Isuma Productions has had "at least a dozen" independent pre-orders for the Isuma Inuit Culture Kit, which came hot off the presses last week.

The kit includes an eight-video box set of films about Inuit life, including eight programs from the Unikaatuatiit (Storytellers) collection and 13 half-hour programs from the Nunavut (Our Land) documentary series.

Also included are a DVD of Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner along with the companion book and soundtrack, five copies of the new Inuit Studies Reader, and a Teacher's Resource Guide. The combined value of the materials is $650.

Isuma has been selling box sets of their video library through their web site for some time now. Universities and schools across Canada and the U.S. expressed interest in more materials.

"We eventually decided it would be great to have a package," says Isuma Productions' Katarina Soukup. "It would be like an Inuit cultural universe in a box."

Education Nunavut has already ordered 50 copies of the kit.

Isuma plans to launch a major marketing campaign this spring by sending detailed fliers outlining the materials to Canadian schools, libraries, and universities with a native or Inuit studies component.

The Isuma Inuit Studies Reader, edited by Gillian Robinson, may reach an even wider audience. The 240-page paperback reads like a greatest hits compilation of articles, essays and stories written by and about the Inuit of the Igloolik area, and is likely to receive critical acclaim itself.

Readers will find exciting tales about hunting caribou and seal alongside detailed descriptions of the Eskimo life encountered by European explorers and anthropologists in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Elders describe life before the qallunaat, while Inuit baby boomers talk about coming in off the land to go to school in the 1950s and 1960s.

At the beginning of the book are interviews with Inuit who recently participated in the making of some of the Isuma documentaries. All agree that making the videos was a learning experience that could teach others more about Inuit culture.

Photos, film stills, maps and illustrations contribute to the easy-to-read style of the book. A complete bibliography points to further reading materials.

"We wanted to compile a book that gave a more true picture of Inuit culture," Soukup says, "whether it was through explorers who really appreciated Inuit culture and tried to understand it rather than condemn and judge it, or through oral histories told by Inuit."

There are no plans yet for getting traditional distribution for the book, but it was printed with that possibility in mind. Meanwhile, the Inuit Studies Reader can be purchased alone from Isuma's online store.

Sales figures from the online store were not available, but right now, www.atanarjuat.com can get up to 10,000 hits a day.

Isuma Productions hopes to increase that traffic soon when they unveil their new Sila web site in the next year. The site will house digital versions of all the materials in the cultural kit as well as interactive educational activities and further interactive tools for teachers using the Culture Kit.

"Atanarjuat proved that people have this great interest and curiosity about Inuit culture all over the world," Soukup says. "Our goal is to give them information about this great culture from an Inuit point of view."

Isuma's forthcoming film The Journals of Knud Rasmussen is scheduled to start shooting in Igloolik at this time next year. Rasmussen was a Greenlandic explorer and anthropologist who wintered in the Igloolik area in the 1920s.

• For further details or online shopping, visit www.isuma.ca.
  

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