Kinauvit?

Norma Dunning, winner of the 2021 Governor General's Award for literature, examines a little-known piece of Canadian history: the Eskimo Identification Tag System, often called the E-number system. Her starting point was personal. In 2001 she applied to the Nunavut Beneficiary program to formally confirm her standing as an Inuk woman. The application confronted her with a question she could not answer, one that led back to a colonial system that had been retired decades earlier: "What was your disc number?"

Years later, the question still troubled her, and Dunning set out to speak with Inuit who had lived under the tag system firsthand. Their accounts add perspective and nuance to the scant records that survive, which history books have largely overlooked. The book traces a bureaucracy the Canadian government maintained for more than thirty years, and it shows the system's lasting effects through intimate interviews with the people it affected.

No Canadian government has taken responsibility for the E-number system or apologized for it to date. Dunning presents the system as a symbol of the dehumanizing treatment of the smallest Indigenous population in Canada.

Kinauvit? brings together years of Dunning's research, interviews and personal stories. It serves as both a record of and a response to this chapter of Canadian history, and it is written by a prominent figure in Canadian literature.