ABSTRACT Currently, there are very few literary publications on Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth 1 , and the few that exist attribute it to magical realism which is not an Indigenous genre. Additionally, few literary scholars use linguistics to analyse internal speech in fictionalised memoirs. In this paper, I approach Split Tooth as a form of wonderworks, using the theory of linguistic relativity to analyse how the narrator’s emergence into her heritage language, Inuktitut, affects her ontology and provides a path to survivance. The narrator in Split Tooth represents the collective perspectives of abused young Indigenous people who use the powerful wonders of their natural surroundings to make sense of and protect the whole of Nuna (the land in relation to its inhabitants) from the horrors of settler-colonialism. Without the collectivist ontology of the Inuktitut language, the narrator does not survive the horrors of settler-colonialism, but with Inuktitut she is able to represent the resilience of an entire culture.
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