In memoriam Susan Sammons (1953-2011)

Susan Sammons, who had just retired from Nunavut Arctic College, passed away in the early morning of May 29, 2011 during a stay at her summer cottage near Winnipeg (her original hometown). She had suffered health problems over the preceding months, but nobody expected her to leave so suddenly. She is survived by her husband Peter Kusugak and their children Nanauq and Kukik. I first met Susan in the fall of 1982 on the occasion of the 3rd Inuit Studies Conference in London, Ontario. She was completing a Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Michigan, and had driven from Ann Arbor with her thesis supervisor. I remember a small youngish blond-haired woman wearing a red beret and, I think, a red coat. She appeared to me to be a person highly determined to make her mark in the field of Inuit language and linguistics. I had no direct contacts with Susan for some time afterward, except for a phone call from her a couple of years later. She was asking technical questions about Inuktitut and told me she was now living in Rankin Inlet with her husband Peter. I also happened to read her Ph.D. dissertation on Inuktitut in Rankin Inlet (1985) during a sabbatical visit to the Alaska Native Language Center (University of Alaska Fairbanks). I found it interesting the way her thesis combined linguistic and sociolinguistic data in order to draw a complete picture of language use in Rankin Inlet. Then, in late 1988, I heard again from Susan. She was inviting me to teach a course on Inuit dialects at the Nunatta (Iqaluit) campus of Nunavut Artic College. She had moved there with her family some time before, and had been put in charge of administration and development of the college’s translator/interpreter training curriculum. Under her direction, this program would soon expand into a more encompassing one of Inuit language and culture. During the following decade, I went back to Iqaluit several times on teaching missions, and at Susan’s request I prepared a series of textbooks on Inuit dialectology, language history, sociolinguistics, and community organisation, published by Nunavut Arctic College. Over the years, this led to wider collaboration between the Inuit language and culture program and Université Laval. Between 1994 and 2006, Susan and I conducted three consecutive SSHRC-funded research projects on discourse and identity in the Baffin (Qikiqtani) region of Nunavut (see Dorais and Sammons 2000, 2002; Dorais 2006). At the same time, Susan developed a long-term collaborative venture with professors François Trudel and Frédéric Laugrand from Université Laval, and Jarich Oosten from Leiden University (The Netherlands). The projects they devised—some are still in operation after more than a dozen years—consisted first in inviting elders to the college’s classrooms, where, with the support of the local teaching staff and invited scholars (including famous names such as Jean Briggs, Bernard Saladin d’Anglure, and Michèle Therrien), they dialogued with college students on various topics pertaining to Inuit culture. These questions and answers were later published in book form, in Inuktitut, English and, occasionally, French. Classroom discussions were later expanded into culture camps held on the land, mostly in Kivalliq, which generated written as well as audiovisual documents. Other research projects were undertaken in collaboration with Susan Sammons to interview people who had played an important part in Inuit political development and the inception of Nunavut, in order to write and publish their biographies. These research activities did not prevent Susan from being involved full-time, seemingly 24 hours a day, in teaching, administrative, community, and family activities. On top of her regular course load (that extended into academic …