A man that was married to a goose
My name is Sakkariasi Tukkiapik and my disk number is E8-719. March 28, 1968, I started writing the following stories. I deeply appreciate the fact that I have been receiving notebooks to write my stories. My problem is that I have forgotten parts of the stories I know, but I will attempt to write them to the best of my knowledge.
This is a story of a man who was married to a goose. One summer day, a man was walking along the shoreline of a lake, and happened to see numerous geese in human form. They were swimming in the lake, and their feathered skins were drying on the shore. The man stalked the geese and without been seen, took a female’s skin and its gosling’s.
The geese in human form noticed that they were being watched, and were startled. They dashed for their skins, grabbed them, transformed, scattered and flew hastily away. The female goose could not transform because the man had taken her feathered skin. She wept and begged for her skin. The man replied “Only if you become my wife…” Since she could not transform back into a goose, she became the man’s wife. Her gosling was in the same situation.
As time went by, the goose woman gave birth to a child by her husband. She also had a mother-in-law. The goose woman cooked food, but when she was cooking, she mixed some grass into the food because deep inside, she was still a goose, even though she was not allowed to have her skin back. Her mother-in-law grew fed up eating food with a grassy taste. So she said : ” I wish I ate food that did not have a grassy taste for a change.”
Her daughter-in-law, the goose woman, now have two children. She ordered her children to look for feathers along the shore and gather them. After the children gather the feathers, the goose woman stuck the feathers into the bases of their fingers to make wings. They transformed back into goose form and flew away. The goose woman was fed up with being criticized for adding grass to the food she was cooking. She left her husband behind because he was a human and could not fly like the geese do. [...]
Source :
Sakkariasi Tukkiapik, 1995, « A man that was married to a goose », Tumivut, The Cultural magazine of the Nunavik Inuit, no 6, pp. 17-18.
