Tales from the Inuits: Styles Brainstorm

Topic: My storybook will be based around stories from Knud Rasmussen's Eskimo Folk-Tales and any other sources I find. My goal will be to take four different tales from across the Inuit culture that deal with the animals that inhabit the vast amount of land that spans the Inuit culture. Two stories that I want to use are When the Ravens Could Speak and The Giant Dog. There is a trove of rich stories by Rasmussen to choose from for this project along with stories by Henry Rink and Waldemar Bogoras. My main criteria for choosing the stories will be to just make sure that the animals featured are all starkly different from one another. By that I mean I do not want to have a story about a dog and a story about a wolf. I want to try to get the most out of showing the difference between all of the animals and the moral of their stories.

Bibliography:

1. When the Ravens Could Speak, from Eskimo Folk-Tales, by Knud Rasmussen (1921).

2. The Giant Dog, from Eskimo Folk-Tales, by Knud Rasmussen (1921). There are a ton of great stories to choose from on sacred-texts.

Possible Styles:

Tall Tales of Rasmussen. After reading about Rasmussen's adventures finding these stories, I thought it would be a fun idea to spin the tales as if Rasmussen were a larger-than-life character that has interactions with the protagonists of the different stories that he recorded. Stories would be told around a local watering hole of his most heroic deeds as he tangoed with some of the biggest creatures in the north.

Tales from the tail trail. Since dog sledding was such an integral part of transportation to the culture, I was thinking of having a map of Greenland with a dog sled trail leading to points where different stories happened. I'll just allocate different animal stories to different regions of the country since that is where Rasmussen's tales are from. The storytelling would be done through different sled dogs at the different points of the map. 

Campfire stories. Another format I was thinking about using is having a bunch of different young animals sit around a campfire and swap stories about their Inuit culture. It will be like a competition for each of the youngsters to outdo one another with their stories, but it will also be a learning experience for all of them.

Summer with Grandparents. My last style approach would be to have an animal from another land, like North America, come to visit his grandparents in an Inuit rich area, like Greenland. The grandchild could come visit his grandparents for the first time with no knowledge of his cultures stories. His grandparents would be able to tell him fascinating stories about the rich culture that he came from. The grandchild could initially think that being up in the colder areas of the north is boring, but the grandparents could quickly change the perception of their grandchild and make become proud of his family's past.

(A hunter and a monster, source: Sacred-Texts)