The Sense of a Better Ending: Legal Pluralism and Performative Jurisprudence inAtanarjuat the Fast Runner

Abstract

This article argues that Igloolik Isuma’s first feature length film, Atanarjuat the Fast Runner, performs a meaningful reading of traditional Inuit legal systems, and puts time-honoured notions of customary law and Inuit social governance into practice. The process of conflict resolution is carefully depicted in the film, which is attentive to the processes of jurisprudence and to a range of possible outcomes. The movement toward a communal justice is shown in an elaborate, carefully detailed, step-by-step process (that still remains unobtrusive, and can be “missed” by some viewers). The film is formal and deliberate, and proceeds at a pace that enables the clear articulation of a specifically Inuit legal culture; it shows Inuit legal practitioners operating in ways that reveal Inuit legal principles in action. In restaging and recontextualizing a well-known narrative from Inuit oral tradition, Atanarjuat makes these local traditions of jurisprudence visible and accessible by relating them in modern form. The film does not leave these traditions and performative systems intact and in the past, however, but updates them for a contemporary audience and in dialogical relation to broader systems of contemporary justice in Canada. In this way Atanarjuat demonstrates Inuit legal systems, in practice, as being flexible, adaptable, and capable of being updated; it shows them struggling to maintain order and continuity in the face of violence and dispossession. This article suggests that Atanarjuat the Fast Runner effectively models performative jurisprudence and the interpretive nature of dialogical governance, and provides one situated, appropriate, culturally sensitive resource and model for contemporary conflict resolution and community governance in Inuit communities today.