The Fast Runner

Website www.isuma.tv/atanarjuat is a website that gives the appropriate information to

relevant audiences about the film Atanarjuat. The website has links for watching the trilogy of

the Fast Runner and a list of awards that the film has won since its inception. The list also

includes the dates in which the awards were won. The website also gives some background

information about the Igloolik community of 1200 people that is located in a small Island in the

northern region of Baffin in the Canadian Arctic with archeological evidence of more than 4000

years of continuous habitation of the area. The website gives some specific information that the

culture of the nomadic Inuit was renewed without the use of any written language over the

millennia. The film Atanarjuat is part of the culture that was spread through the use of

storytelling. The oral history was carried forward into new millennia through the marriage of

new technology and the storytelling skills of the Inuit population. Atanarjuat is a film written,

acted, produced and directed by Inuit, and it is set in ancient Igloolik about a life-threatening

struggle between supernatural and powerful natural characters. The legend of Atanarjuat was

kept alive by elders to teach the younger generation about the dangers of setting personal desires

above the interests or needs of the group. These are relevant issues in the course of anthropology

in the sense that it shed some light on how cultural values are spread over generations and the

purpose of such dissemination of these values to other generations. It enables the audience to be

able to picture how the Igloolik people lived in the past and the impact of modernity on their

cultures. From an anthropological perspective, it sheds some light and gives an authentic view of

Inuit culture as well as oral tradition than before through Inuit eyes and from an insider's

perspective. The main objective of the film was to show how the Inuit communities have thrived

and survived in the Arctic region and also to introduce a new medium of storytelling using film
to assist the communities survive and their cultures to be propagated into the technological

future. The film itself seems to be propagating aspects of oral traditions to tell the same story that

has been told for years on end.

The movie captures some simple political and social organisations as well as economic

activities such as hunting and gathering. The Inuit legend is told of a small community of

nomadic people whose lives are disrupted when a Shaman, who is unknown, creates some

rivalries between families. The very existence of family implies a social organisation with

families as a considerable social and political unit to the extent that they could be pitted against

each other based on prevailing issues at any given time as the Shaman managed to achieve. The

close-knit communities are dependent on one another for their survival and are surrounded by a

landscape of snow and ice. Here people make a living in an environment that looks like barren

wasteland. There is fishing and hunting as economic activities. There is a scene showing hunters

preparing a kill and scraping their skins to make clothes. Some tend to the lamps of oil that give

light to their igloos and others harvest the wild crops that grow briefly in summer time.

In one of the scenes, the men of Igloolik sit outside on the ice hunting seals and Sauri is

stabbed in the stomach by Oki. This is representative if the hunting aspect of social life of the

Igloolik. Qulitalik was also chewing on a walrus-skin bag to bring forth the spirits. This was in a

community gathering that evening and it implied that someone had hunted down and slaughtered

a walrus. The evil shaman also appears while blowing and grunting with the echo of a polar bear.

The Qulitalik also has a curved pair of tusks in this mouth. The interchanging use of the animals

in the story represents the hunting culture of the community where they seemed to hunt

everything and anything.

The film also portrays a number of marriages, kinship and political systems that were
heavily dependent on elders. The elders provided counsel to the heads of the families that

represents some form of hierarchical order of the social structure. These structures are also

shown when during the section of the movie where Sauri is brought to Igloolik on a sled. While

people mourn and cry, the walrus tooth necklace which was a representation of leadership is

removed from his body and placed around Oki. This shows that there was some form of political

structure and structure of leadership that was identifiable through the use of trinkets such as

necklaces.

An oral tradition refers to oral folklore and cultural materials and traditions that are

transmitted orally from one generation to the next for further transmission to other generations.

The cultural and historic traditions of a community are usually passed down using word of

mouth from one generation to the next without written instructions. The importance of oral

traditions are that they sustain a culture in a more personal and specific sense due to the way they

are handed down to younger generations either through folklores and storytelling and in other

cases serious teaching in traditional ceremonies. In oral traditions, testimonies and messages are

verbally transmitted in song and in speech and take form of various elements such as saying,

chants, ballads, songs and folk tales. This way members of a given society are able to transit oral

literature, law and history as well as knowledge across different generations without having to

use any writing systems. Oral traditions relate to the fast runner in the sense that the traditions

and cultural practices of the community are handed down from one generation to the next orally.

The fast runner is an audio-visual account of the traditions and cultures as well and falls under

the category of oral traditions in a figurative sense. The film also transcends the barriers set years

ago and where not yet overcome until the film was eventually produced and published. It is a

movie that supports the indigenous activities because it has the ability to preserve a heritage that
has been held down and oppressed by stereotypes for centuries. The director of the movie

explores oral traditions as stores and lectures and especially with a reference on how life should

be lived. The film is essentially the retelling of an Inuit legend that was passed down through

centuries through the use of oral traditions. The legend of Atanarjuat is used by the elders to

teach the subsequent generations the moral about why they should place the needs of the

community or for others above their own personal desires.