"Sanaaq "is the intimate story of an Inuit family negotiating the changes brought into their community by the coming of the "qallunaat," the white people, in the mid-nineteenth century. Sanaaq, a strong and outspoken young widow, and her daughter, Qumac, hunt seal, repair their kayak, and gather mussels under blue sea ice before the tide comes in. Theirs is a semi-nomadic life on the edge of the ice where marriages are made and unmade, children are born, and violence appears in the form of a fearful husband or a hungry polar bear. Here the spirit world is alive and relations with non-humans are never taken lightly. And under it all, the growing intrusion of the "qallunaat "and the battle for souls between the Catholic and Anglican missionaries threatens to forever change Sanaaq's way of life.
Due in part to the perseverance of French anthropologist Bernard Saladin d'Anglure, "Sanaaq "was first published in syllabic Inuttitut in 1987. His French translation appeared in 2002. This English translation now brings this cornerstone of Inuit literature to Anglophone readers and scholars.

The small island of Igloolik lies between the Melville Peninsula and Baffin Island at the northern end of Hudson Bay north of the Arctic Circle. It has fascinated many in the Western world since 1824, when a London publisher printed the narratives by William Parry and his second-in-command, George Lyon, about their two years spent looking for the mythical Northwest Passage. Nearly a hundred and fifty years later, Bernard Saladin d'Anglure arrived in Igloolik, hoping to complete the study he had been conducting for nearly six months in Arctic Quebec (present-day Nunavik). He was supposed to spend a month on Igloolik, but on his first morning there, Saladin d'Anglure met the elders Ujarak and Iqallijuq. He learned that they had been informants for Knud Rasmussen in 1922. Moreover, they had spent most of their lives in the camps and fully remembered the pre-Christian period. Ujarak and Iqallijuq soon became Saladin d'Anglure's friends and initiated him into the symbolism, myths, beliefs, and ancestral rules of the local Inuit. With them and their families, Saladin d'Anglure would work for thirty years, gathering the oral traditions of their people. First published in French in 2006, Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth contains an in-depth, paragraph-by-paragraph analysis of stories on womb memories, birth, namesaking, and reincarnation. This new English edition introduces this material to a broader audience and contains a new afterword by Saladin d'Anglure.

Ujarak, Iqallijuq, and Kupaaq were elders from the Inuit community on Igloolik Island in Nunavut. The three elders, among others, shared with Bernard Saladin d'Anglure the narratives which make up the heart of Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth. Through their words, and historical sources recorded by Franz Boas and Knud Rasmussen, Saladin d'Anglure examines the Inuit notion of personhood and its relationship to cosmology and mythology. Central to these stories are womb memories, narratives of birth and reincarnation, and the concept of the third sex-an intermediate identity between male and female. As explained through first-person accounts and traditional legends, myths, and folk tales, the presence of transgender individuals informs Inuit relationships to one another and to the world at large, transcending the dualities of male and female, human and animal, human and spirit.This new English edition includes the 2006 preface by Claude Levi-Strauss and an afterword by Bernard Saladin d'Anglure.